What is damned annoying is that 'Gatekeeper' can be turned off; but as of 10.10, it will turn itself back on after a period of time. iOSX seems likely in the near future.
I can only comment on SRPs as they currently exist; but as of now the only real pain is vendors who don't sign anything. Self-signed or untrusted roots throw up scary warning by default; but you can add those to the trusted list if you wish. Legacy software is a giant pain in the ass, since most of it predates the custom of signing much of anything by default; but newer stuff generally isn't so bad. If necessary, you bless the vendor's cert and that takes care of it. You can also (again, with the present implementation of SRPs) bless binaries by hash, rather than by signature, which is frequently easier if you need to do once-offs.
TFA is a little vague; but if it is implemented the way that Software Restriction Policies currently are; I'd be all for it(and I say that as a smirking, linux using, tinfoil-hatted paranoiac.)
Cryptographic verification and whitelisting are enormously powerful techniques, and (aside from being able to take advantage of them), they are simply too useful to forbid successfully. What matters, and makes the difference between a fortress and a prison, is who gets to put something on the whitelist.
If you can whitelist something(either by signing it yourself, adding the cert of the person who signed it to the trusted list or both), it's a fortress. If the whitelist is what the vendor says it is, it's a prison. Same deal with 'secure boot'. If I can re-key it, it's a valuable tool. If I can't, it's a device that I'll never be more than a peon on.
Unfortunately, the general lack of DRM(wouldn't even have to be effective DRM, just going through the motions) is pretty much the only thing that keeps a DVD-like arrangment from enjoying force of law anywhere with a DMCA-style law on the books.
Copyright tends to be a little awkward around computers; because there is so much copying that has to occur internally just to display something; but the analogy between running adblock and taking scissors to a magazine is a pretty easy one, and the right of the end user to mangle up an article, even a copyrighted one, however it amuses them is pretty well established.
If, though, even the most pitiful DRM were on the table, you'd be right were DVDs are: you need an illegal circumvention device to watch them without an authorized CSS decryptor; but you can only get an authorized one by agreeing to certain conditions, which include enforcing the unskippable flags, region codes, etc.
Doesn't google maps do stuff when you zoom in close enough to trigger 'street view' that was only ever implemented in Flash on the desktop, and would need either Flash or some fairly aggressive WebGL to do without fairly brutal strain on the limited resources of a mobile device(sure, in theory, a canvas element and javascript can manage any graphical task; but Not Very Fast, for 3d type tasks).
I'd be the first to agree that using javascript and canvas as the world's least efficient framebuffer is dumb as hell; and that there are viable use cases for 'apps'; but the pox of 'apps' that are little more than skins around websites must be put to the flame. Mobile browsers don't exactly clutter up the edges of the screen with a lot of cruft, so you have the same amount of screen space either way. You'd better have a very good reason for having a separate app for the purpose...
'Mobile' as in 'WAP' or whatever is as dead as dead can be; but there are definitely styles that look better on teeny little(but frequently high resolution) screens, and other styles that are effectively unreadable.
Oddly, wikipedia is dinged in TFS as not having a mobile-friendly version; but I've found theirs to be among the more tasteful entries in the genre....
I have two words for you(well, one word and a symbol): 'Google +'
Google has some very sharp people, this much is undeniable; but enough hubris will fuck up the best of us; and they've succumbed to that from time to time.
It's also probable(though not assured) that a fair chunk of games are carefully designed to avoid IOPS-heavy demands because they are supposed to run from an optical disk in a console, a situation that makes an unremarkable HDD look positively random access. The PC version will still have more trouble with other processes butting in, but anyone whose game or game engine imposes load that craters an HDD is not going to have a pleasant time in the console market.
The PCIe devices are faster; but (since they also tend to be either substantially similar to SATA devices; but packaged for the convenience of OEMs who want to go all M.2 on certain designs and clean up the mini-PCIe/SATA-using-mini-PCIe's-pinout-for-some-horrible-reason/mini-SATA/SATA mess that crops up in laptops and very small form factor systems; or tend to be markedly more expensive enterprise oriented devices that focus on IOPS) it isn't clear why you'd expect much improvement on application loading workloads.
SSDs are at their best, and the difference between good and merely adequate SSDs most noticeable, under brutal random I/O loads, the heavier the better. Those are what make mechanical disks entirely obsolete, cheap SSD controllers start to drop the ball, and more expensive ones really shine. Since application makers generally still have to assume that many of their customers are running HDDs(plus the console ports that may only be able to assume an optical disk and a tiny amount of RAM, and the mobile apps that need to work with cheap and mediocre eMMC flash), they would do well to avoid that sort of load.
HDD vs. SSD was a pretty dramatic jump because even the best HDDs absolutely crater if forced to seek(whether by fragmentation or by two or more programs both trying to access the same disk); but there aren't a whole lot of desktop workloads where 'excellent at obnoxiously seeky workloads' vs. 'damned heroic at obnoxiously seeky workloads' makes a terribly noticeable difference. Plus, a lot of desktop workloads still involve fairly small amounts of data, so a decent chunk of RAM is both helpful and economically viable. Part of the appeal of crazy-fast SSDs is that the cost rather less per GB than RAM does, while not being too much worse, which allows you to attack problems large enough that the RAM you really want is either heroically expensive or just not for sale. On the desktop, a fair few programs in common use are still 32 bit, and much less demanding.
You might be able to solve the problem(at the expense of a great deal of additional workload) by larding the caseload with samples specifically constructed to be non-matches; but then blinded and packaged the same as any other sample, to identify people who just lean positive; but that would probably require a lot of additional work to do in enough quantity to counteract the obvious pressure.
In their capacity as (ostensibly) trustworthy, neutral, expert testimony, they both victimize the defendant and betray the public's trust in the criminal justice system and the duties of their office.
Punishment-on-parity seems like the absolute bare minimum, with no acknowledgement of the aggravating circumstances of abuse of authority, the corrosive effects on rule of law and public trust in the existence of rule of law, and so on. I am sympathetic to arguments that mounting their heads on spikes outside the courthouse might constitute a public nuisance, because of the smell of decay; but that would bring the requisite gravity to the situation.
Is there any reason, aside from the reflexive deference to allegedly legitimate authority figures, why they use the phrases 'gave flawed testimony' and 'overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors' rather than the more honest 'committed a fuckton of perjury'?
I don't know why anyone bothers, given that DJ spew is one of the most insufferable aspects of radio, without even the crass-but-compelling monetary justification of ads; but odds are good, on many channels, that there isn't even necessarily a DJ specific to that station. Once you can their obnoxious chatter, you can programmatically sprinkle it into the playlists of multiple stations in different markets. You only really need to be more specialized if the chatter is supposed to have some 'local' flavor, in which case you do need recordings matched to the appropriate market.
If you want to be pedantic about acceptable variations choosing something with such a long history and such wide use in various disciplines is a terrible plan.
"Percent" is probably the most common flavor currently; but 'per cent', 'per cent.', 'pct', 'pc', and likely others are still within the realm of accepted use. Hell, the '%' sign isn't even entirely settled, unicode has something like four defined variants. And that doesn't count the archaic, but historically used and still recognizable, specimens that cropped up between Latin and the present day.
I take it that you were exposed to basic literacy and only basic literacy, none of that messy intermediate stuff.
The trouble is usually that the broadcasters just hear 'extra channels!' and zone out. You can have higher quality and redundancy; but using those bits to squeeze in a bunch of extra channels and then pretend that the results are acceptable has a tendency to win out.
It also doesn't help that digital transitions are when broadcasters usually give in to the temptation to squeeze in a bunch of extra channels. When they get really greedy, the results are so bandwidth starved that they sound like horribly compressed crap(because they are) even under ideal circumstances. Even if they don't push it that hard, they haven't typically been very conservative about building in a lot of margin for degradation.
This probably has something to do with the fact that 'HD Radio' is a proprietary non-standard that is whatever iBiquity Digital Corporation say it is, and costs whatever they say it does. They obviously want it to be adopted, because they get nothing if it dies; but that's pretty much the only incentive encouraging them to cooperate on licensing or keep prices reasonable.
There is a pitiful veneer of 'standardization', courtesy of the NRSC; but 'NRSC-5c' is more or less a very lightly de-branded generic descriptions fleshed out by the incorporation-by-reference of the iBiquity documentation.
It makes the various MPEG standards and dealing with the MPEG-LA look like some kind of FOSS hippie commune by comparison.
While this sometimes pays off, when circumstances line up correctly, it is vital to keep the limitations in mind:
Lower cost has made it much more likely that random bystanders have some level of video recording, rather than none; but entities with ample resources also take advantage of reduced costs, which is why, say, nontrivial areas of the developed world are effectively saturated with automated LPR systems. There is a win for those cases where it previously would have been the word of someone who counts vs. the word of some nobody; but elsewhere reduced costs and improve capabilities make having a big budget and legal power even more useful.
Improved surveillance only changes the game at the 'evidence' stage. If legal, public, or both, standards aren't sufficiently in your favor, improved evidence is anywhere from irrelevant to actively harmful. You can have all the evidence you want; but if the DA refuses to indict, or the 'viral' pile-on targets the victim rather than the aggressor, it doesn't help you much. Had McHenry's tirade been a bit cleverer, or her target a shade more unsympathetic, odds are good that the attendant in question would be being hounded as we speak.
I'm pretty sure that letting the contractors bilk NASA is the point of the exercise at this stage. The SLS isn't referred to as the Senate Launch System for nothing.
The article does not mention where the cost of this error is going to fall. This seems like an important detail. On a sufficently complex project, one of the bevy of subcontractors fucking something up isn't a huge surprise; but I would be very, very, disappointed if NASA wasn't able to contract sufficiently vigorously to make the vendor eat the cost of delivering the goods as specified, rather than paying them for their effort no matter how well or badly they do.
It's like the beloved classic '42.zip'; but can be delivered directly over the minecraft server protocol and will be naively parsed by the server, no social engineering required... Never trust the client.
Alas, the only known emergent sentience is the one that exists in the neuron colony inside each of our skulls; but there are some pretty damn cool sub-sentient emergent behaviors even in quite limited organisms. Bacteria in biofilms do some very impressive things, as do slime molds when they form masses.
It's too bad that (to the best of my knowledge, and I've hunted a bit), no organisms have evolved to exploit RF signalling. It's not inconceivable, loads of organisms use electrical signalling internally, a fair number have magnetic sensory structures, and a variety of common metals are amenable to biological chemistry if you need a better antenna; but that's the sort of thing that would make linking multiple nervous systems with reasonable speed and without direct contact possible.
I would hope that, should any impropriety be found in the contracting process, that the superintendent and any collaborators are dealt with as harshly as possible.
As for Apple, I'd be curious to know how much terminating the deal would involve for them. Obviously they'd rather have the sales than not; but there is a big difference between 'not making sales we had previously expected to make' and 'large piles of used inventory being returned and/or inventory prepared for this specific contract now without a destination.'
Particularly if it is only the former, Apple might well cave(not for honor's sake; but because an 'iPads in Education Program a Giant Clusterfuck; Lawsuits Fly!' is not a headline that Apple PR wants running any longer than necessary); if it's the latter they might be harder to convince.
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What is damned annoying is that 'Gatekeeper' can be turned off; but as of 10.10, it will turn itself back on after a period of time. iOSX seems likely in the near future.
I can only comment on SRPs as they currently exist; but as of now the only real pain is vendors who don't sign anything. Self-signed or untrusted roots throw up scary warning by default; but you can add those to the trusted list if you wish. Legacy software is a giant pain in the ass, since most of it predates the custom of signing much of anything by default; but newer stuff generally isn't so bad. If necessary, you bless the vendor's cert and that takes care of it. You can also (again, with the present implementation of SRPs) bless binaries by hash, rather than by signature, which is frequently easier if you need to do once-offs.
TFA is a little vague; but if it is implemented the way that Software Restriction Policies currently are; I'd be all for it(and I say that as a smirking, linux using, tinfoil-hatted paranoiac.)
Cryptographic verification and whitelisting are enormously powerful techniques, and (aside from being able to take advantage of them), they are simply too useful to forbid successfully. What matters, and makes the difference between a fortress and a prison, is who gets to put something on the whitelist.
If you can whitelist something(either by signing it yourself, adding the cert of the person who signed it to the trusted list or both), it's a fortress. If the whitelist is what the vendor says it is, it's a prison. Same deal with 'secure boot'. If I can re-key it, it's a valuable tool. If I can't, it's a device that I'll never be more than a peon on.
Unfortunately, the general lack of DRM(wouldn't even have to be effective DRM, just going through the motions) is pretty much the only thing that keeps a DVD-like arrangment from enjoying force of law anywhere with a DMCA-style law on the books.
Copyright tends to be a little awkward around computers; because there is so much copying that has to occur internally just to display something; but the analogy between running adblock and taking scissors to a magazine is a pretty easy one, and the right of the end user to mangle up an article, even a copyrighted one, however it amuses them is pretty well established.
If, though, even the most pitiful DRM were on the table, you'd be right were DVDs are: you need an illegal circumvention device to watch them without an authorized CSS decryptor; but you can only get an authorized one by agreeing to certain conditions, which include enforcing the unskippable flags, region codes, etc.
Does this not count?
Doesn't google maps do stuff when you zoom in close enough to trigger 'street view' that was only ever implemented in Flash on the desktop, and would need either Flash or some fairly aggressive WebGL to do without fairly brutal strain on the limited resources of a mobile device(sure, in theory, a canvas element and javascript can manage any graphical task; but Not Very Fast, for 3d type tasks).
EXTERMINATE!!!
I'd be the first to agree that using javascript and canvas as the world's least efficient framebuffer is dumb as hell; and that there are viable use cases for 'apps'; but the pox of 'apps' that are little more than skins around websites must be put to the flame. Mobile browsers don't exactly clutter up the edges of the screen with a lot of cruft, so you have the same amount of screen space either way. You'd better have a very good reason for having a separate app for the purpose...
'Mobile' as in 'WAP' or whatever is as dead as dead can be; but there are definitely styles that look better on teeny little(but frequently high resolution) screens, and other styles that are effectively unreadable.
Oddly, wikipedia is dinged in TFS as not having a mobile-friendly version; but I've found theirs to be among the more tasteful entries in the genre....
I have two words for you(well, one word and a symbol): 'Google +'
Google has some very sharp people, this much is undeniable; but enough hubris will fuck up the best of us; and they've succumbed to that from time to time.
It's also probable(though not assured) that a fair chunk of games are carefully designed to avoid IOPS-heavy demands because they are supposed to run from an optical disk in a console, a situation that makes an unremarkable HDD look positively random access. The PC version will still have more trouble with other processes butting in, but anyone whose game or game engine imposes load that craters an HDD is not going to have a pleasant time in the console market.
The PCIe devices are faster; but (since they also tend to be either substantially similar to SATA devices; but packaged for the convenience of OEMs who want to go all M.2 on certain designs and clean up the mini-PCIe/SATA-using-mini-PCIe's-pinout-for-some-horrible-reason/mini-SATA/SATA mess that crops up in laptops and very small form factor systems; or tend to be markedly more expensive enterprise oriented devices that focus on IOPS) it isn't clear why you'd expect much improvement on application loading workloads.
SSDs are at their best, and the difference between good and merely adequate SSDs most noticeable, under brutal random I/O loads, the heavier the better. Those are what make mechanical disks entirely obsolete, cheap SSD controllers start to drop the ball, and more expensive ones really shine. Since application makers generally still have to assume that many of their customers are running HDDs(plus the console ports that may only be able to assume an optical disk and a tiny amount of RAM, and the mobile apps that need to work with cheap and mediocre eMMC flash), they would do well to avoid that sort of load.
HDD vs. SSD was a pretty dramatic jump because even the best HDDs absolutely crater if forced to seek(whether by fragmentation or by two or more programs both trying to access the same disk); but there aren't a whole lot of desktop workloads where 'excellent at obnoxiously seeky workloads' vs. 'damned heroic at obnoxiously seeky workloads' makes a terribly noticeable difference. Plus, a lot of desktop workloads still involve fairly small amounts of data, so a decent chunk of RAM is both helpful and economically viable. Part of the appeal of crazy-fast SSDs is that the cost rather less per GB than RAM does, while not being too much worse, which allows you to attack problems large enough that the RAM you really want is either heroically expensive or just not for sale. On the desktop, a fair few programs in common use are still 32 bit, and much less demanding.
You might be able to solve the problem(at the expense of a great deal of additional workload) by larding the caseload with samples specifically constructed to be non-matches; but then blinded and packaged the same as any other sample, to identify people who just lean positive; but that would probably require a lot of additional work to do in enough quantity to counteract the obvious pressure.
Why on parity?
In their capacity as (ostensibly) trustworthy, neutral, expert testimony, they both victimize the defendant and betray the public's trust in the criminal justice system and the duties of their office.
Punishment-on-parity seems like the absolute bare minimum, with no acknowledgement of the aggravating circumstances of abuse of authority, the corrosive effects on rule of law and public trust in the existence of rule of law, and so on. I am sympathetic to arguments that mounting their heads on spikes outside the courthouse might constitute a public nuisance, because of the smell of decay; but that would bring the requisite gravity to the situation.
Is there any reason, aside from the reflexive deference to allegedly legitimate authority figures, why they use the phrases 'gave flawed testimony' and 'overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors' rather than the more honest 'committed a fuckton of perjury'?
I don't know why anyone bothers, given that DJ spew is one of the most insufferable aspects of radio, without even the crass-but-compelling monetary justification of ads; but odds are good, on many channels, that there isn't even necessarily a DJ specific to that station. Once you can their obnoxious chatter, you can programmatically sprinkle it into the playlists of multiple stations in different markets. You only really need to be more specialized if the chatter is supposed to have some 'local' flavor, in which case you do need recordings matched to the appropriate market.
If you want to be pedantic about acceptable variations choosing something with such a long history and such wide use in various disciplines is a terrible plan.
"Percent" is probably the most common flavor currently; but 'per cent', 'per cent.', 'pct', 'pc', and likely others are still within the realm of accepted use. Hell, the '%' sign isn't even entirely settled, unicode has something like four defined variants. And that doesn't count the archaic, but historically used and still recognizable, specimens that cropped up between Latin and the present day.
I take it that you were exposed to basic literacy and only basic literacy, none of that messy intermediate stuff.
The trouble is usually that the broadcasters just hear 'extra channels!' and zone out. You can have higher quality and redundancy; but using those bits to squeeze in a bunch of extra channels and then pretend that the results are acceptable has a tendency to win out.
It also doesn't help that digital transitions are when broadcasters usually give in to the temptation to squeeze in a bunch of extra channels. When they get really greedy, the results are so bandwidth starved that they sound like horribly compressed crap(because they are) even under ideal circumstances. Even if they don't push it that hard, they haven't typically been very conservative about building in a lot of margin for degradation.
This probably has something to do with the fact that 'HD Radio' is a proprietary non-standard that is whatever iBiquity Digital Corporation say it is, and costs whatever they say it does. They obviously want it to be adopted, because they get nothing if it dies; but that's pretty much the only incentive encouraging them to cooperate on licensing or keep prices reasonable.
There is a pitiful veneer of 'standardization', courtesy of the NRSC; but 'NRSC-5c' is more or less a very lightly de-branded generic descriptions fleshed out by the incorporation-by-reference of the iBiquity documentation.
It makes the various MPEG standards and dealing with the MPEG-LA look like some kind of FOSS hippie commune by comparison.
While this sometimes pays off, when circumstances line up correctly, it is vital to keep the limitations in mind:
Lower cost has made it much more likely that random bystanders have some level of video recording, rather than none; but entities with ample resources also take advantage of reduced costs, which is why, say, nontrivial areas of the developed world are effectively saturated with automated LPR systems. There is a win for those cases where it previously would have been the word of someone who counts vs. the word of some nobody; but elsewhere reduced costs and improve capabilities make having a big budget and legal power even more useful.
Improved surveillance only changes the game at the 'evidence' stage. If legal, public, or both, standards aren't sufficiently in your favor, improved evidence is anywhere from irrelevant to actively harmful. You can have all the evidence you want; but if the DA refuses to indict, or the 'viral' pile-on targets the victim rather than the aggressor, it doesn't help you much. Had McHenry's tirade been a bit cleverer, or her target a shade more unsympathetic, odds are good that the attendant in question would be being hounded as we speak.
I'm pretty sure that letting the contractors bilk NASA is the point of the exercise at this stage. The SLS isn't referred to as the Senate Launch System for nothing.
The article does not mention where the cost of this error is going to fall. This seems like an important detail. On a sufficently complex project, one of the bevy of subcontractors fucking something up isn't a huge surprise; but I would be very, very, disappointed if NASA wasn't able to contract sufficiently vigorously to make the vendor eat the cost of delivering the goods as specified, rather than paying them for their effort no matter how well or badly they do.
It's like the beloved classic '42.zip'; but can be delivered directly over the minecraft server protocol and will be naively parsed by the server, no social engineering required... Never trust the client.
Alas, the only known emergent sentience is the one that exists in the neuron colony inside each of our skulls; but there are some pretty damn cool sub-sentient emergent behaviors even in quite limited organisms. Bacteria in biofilms do some very impressive things, as do slime molds when they form masses.
It's too bad that (to the best of my knowledge, and I've hunted a bit), no organisms have evolved to exploit RF signalling. It's not inconceivable, loads of organisms use electrical signalling internally, a fair number have magnetic sensory structures, and a variety of common metals are amenable to biological chemistry if you need a better antenna; but that's the sort of thing that would make linking multiple nervous systems with reasonable speed and without direct contact possible.
I would hope that, should any impropriety be found in the contracting process, that the superintendent and any collaborators are dealt with as harshly as possible.
As for Apple, I'd be curious to know how much terminating the deal would involve for them. Obviously they'd rather have the sales than not; but there is a big difference between 'not making sales we had previously expected to make' and 'large piles of used inventory being returned and/or inventory prepared for this specific contract now without a destination.'
Particularly if it is only the former, Apple might well cave(not for honor's sake; but because an 'iPads in Education Program a Giant Clusterfuck; Lawsuits Fly!' is not a headline that Apple PR wants running any longer than necessary); if it's the latter they might be harder to convince.