Given the (lack of) alternative, it's certainly an improvement in this case. I was objecting to TFS's "More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them. We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons." blather.
Since there aren't enough donor organs, and those tend to have their own problems, a deeply imperfect artificial apparatus beats the alternative; but characterizing its defects as 'numerous other advantages' is just idiotic. It makes about as much sense as describing an insulin pump as an 'improvement' because you can arduously fiddle with delivery profiles, rather than using lame, old-school, feedback systems.
When the alternative is death, many imperfect substitutes are good ideas; but that is very different from their being 'improvements' except in the strictly local case of patients in markedly worse than normal shape.
There's also the fact that having a control interface isn't really 'cool' as much as it is 'we couldn't duplicate the sensory and feedback systems that made the old one adjust itself automatically, so here's a dial to futz with!'
Compared to out-of-control, control is nice; but compared to 'just fucking works' it's a thankless chore and a good opportunity to make mistakes.
Flattering; but I suspect that he would have actually done the math, at least to the level of plausible approximation, rather than handwaving that part in favor of some dreadful puns.
That said, if anyone with a knowledge of railguns wants to calculate(or test, be sure to record) exactly how lousy a salmon would be as ammunition, I'd read the hell out of it.
Alpha Centuri had the ability to raise/lower terrain with terra former units... It also had a weather model good enough that this effected rainfall and thus nutrient production. It wasn't usually an efficient use of resources; but building 'moisture walls' and then watching your hapless opponent's population starve sure was sweet...
I cannot independently confirm the truth of this; but I was told, in all apparent seriousness, by someone I know well and who I know to have a long association with the hydroelectric generation business, that the term for what happens to a fish that fails to avoid the turbine intakes is "turbine induced stress". As one might imagine, this 'stress' tends toward the lethal end of the spectrum.
What about a rail gun salmon launcher? After they mate they are completely spent and become zombie fish. Hardly edible.
The engineering considerations surrounding such a device seem formidable indeed. Most of the data available are for humans(who, shockingly enough, have most of the medical budget dedicated to measuring delicate electrical signals through their muscle tissue); but if we assume that salmon tissue is approximately similar to human muscle, at least for the purposes of the currents and voltages a railgun implies, we can conclude that (A) the math is obnoxious. (B) fish are shitty conductors (C) fish have other obnoxious properties like 'capacitance' and non-homogenous conductivity.
Given the substantial resistance of our pisciform projectile, and the railgun's need for heroically high peak currents, supply voltage will have to be quite high, introducing additional insulation challenges, risks of air-gap breakdown between the rails, damaging arcs in other areas of the apparatus, and so on. Further issues may arise because of the projectile's non-uniform conductivity and substantial fluid content: with current flow, and resistive heating, highest along the most conductive regions, the projectile may exhibit substantial internal deformation, or even catastrophic loss of structural integrity, during acceleration or at a very early stage of flight. While it may have valuable specialty applications, this so-called 'frangible fish' effect markedly reduces effective range and almost entirely precludes survival of the projectile.
It is conceivable that advances in Aquatic-Preservation Discarding Sabot technology will allow a suitably packaged salmon to successfully traverse the accelerator rails while retaining the buoyancy necessary for continued survival by discarding the conductive jacket before entry into the target body of water. However, such developments are presently theoretical and cannot form the basis of a viable ecological dominance capability in the near term.
Shareholder Value, obviously. Inefficient state-owned propagandists can only maintain their activities through continued forcible appropriation of wealth. Our innovative private sector propagandists can spin the truth and turn a profit at the same time!
Journalists practically worship 'access'. This behavior is adaptive, since it's hard to get stories written without information; but it comes with the nontrivial downside that the people the stories are about are in the best position to provide information. The competent ones have learned to take advantage of this by cultivating a relationship with the press: any really juicy story has a comparatively safe penumbra of tidbits, unattributed statements, unofficially sanctioned leaks, and so on. If a journalist is a nice, cooperative, team player, (like the quisling in TFA), they'll be well placed for a steady supply of such things.
By contrast, the uncooperative journalist might, on occasion, get a really nice scoop on where the bodies are buried(sometimes literally); but whenever that isn't available he'll be regurgitating press releases and stale news.
I suspect they protested at S. Lake Union because that is very close to downtown Seattle and an extremely visible location. Microsoft Campus in Redmond is in the in a much more suburban atmosphere, it would be much less of a visible protest there.
There's also the fact that the campus is likely mostly private land, while downtown areas tend to have public ways near them.
Depending on the local PD, your right to peaceable assembly may or may not be treated as adorably fictitious and/or a good chance to break out the cool 1033 program toys and play soldier; but you don't even have a theoretical one if you can just be rounded up for trespassing before things even start.
Trying to protest on MS's campus would just make it a question for PR of whether the visibility is lower for ignoring you and keeping the cameras away, or having you hauled off for trespassing before you make too much noise.
Given that it's both free, and free as in Apache 2.0, it's arguably a question that will sort itself out(though this doesn't make discussion and conjecture on the matter illegitimate or anything). Aside from the trademarks, there's nothing stopping anyone from striking out and having their own docker-in-all-but-name. So long as Docker, Inc. appears to be handling the benevolent dictatorship thing competently there isn't much incentive, though, unless you just adore maintaining a fork for the sake of it. If they upset people enough, without actually losing to another technology, we get an x11/Xorg style move; and if something displaces them, they just sink into the murky depths never to be heard from again...
It doesn't solve any of the annoying questions of making people with disparate objectives and potential personality flaws play nicely with one another; but a liberal software license does lower the stakes: If the controlling entity exerts very substantial power, it really matters how that entity is constituted. If they don't, it just doesn't matter as much because their ability to mal-administer is lower and the potential that everyone will just wander away rather than having to go down with the ship is there.
It looks like I was thinking of something quite different from the 'Authenticator' app and got confused: Recent Android versions include the 'keymaster' HAL component, which uses a software-based set of cryptographic capabilities by default, or can interact with a device-specific hardware module(mostly on Nexus devices, not sure about any third party implementations, usually based on 'trustzone' rather than TPM, just because ARM SoCs do that already).
Looks like it addresses a different use case; but that's what I was thinking about when wondering whether the behavior varied between hardware and software backed platforms. Sorry about that, I get fuzzy sometimes.
If the weapon is sufficiently fiddly and delicate, and the attacker has limited time to subvert it, a variety of means might work (many of them already explored with nukes and/or SALT arms reduction verification stuff in the late cold war); but for simpler, more durable, gear, and hardware subject to prolonged attack, Not Happening.
In particular, nukes are (relatively) easy to secure because they include a fair amount of conventional explosive, improper detonation of which will produce a mess but a fairly worthless yield, which offers a nice failsafe option. With devices that aren't as intrinsically touchy, you don't have the same leverage.
Oh, believe me, I'd love to see some absolutely ruthless discovery through every last scrap of material that passed through Yelp's shakedown/ad sales division over the years. It'd be almost as good, and a lot more legal, than just locking their HQ and setting it on fire.
However, I just Don't Even Want To Think about how awful the internet would be without Section 230. Even by the somewhat unimpressive standards of the takedown-laden world of DMCA safe harbor, life without 230 would be a killing field.
Does the behavior of the 'authenticator' app differ depending on whether the device has a hardware-backed keystore or not?
Uptake on such hardware is rather patchy(more likely on newer gear; but hardly assured), so I assume that there is a software-based fallback that just obfuscates the keystore as nicely as possible; but if the application were talking to an actual hardware keystore device, Titanium backup(or equivalent) would have absolutely no effect); but updating the application(or even switching to an entirely new one, in some cases) should be doable without losing anything.
Android key handling is an area I really haven't poked at all, so I know little about it; but I'd be interested to know how it is supposed to work.
While the idea of having a well vetted testing system in place that would allow customers to choose software that had been so vetted seems like a good idea, I have to wonder if it's doomed to the fate of SSL, at least outside of a few niche applications that mostly demand high levels of verification anyway.
With SSL, we all wanted the security; but everyone wanted it to be cheap, and wanted to avoid a monopoly over certificate authorityship. So, what did we get? A mass of CAs, many painfully shoddy, who will issue you a fancy looking cert for peanuts. Then we got "EV" certs, which are supposed to actually do what the original certs were supposed to do, only more expensive.
Apple obviously wants iCloud and your ITMS credentials to be the iGateway to your life and all your devices and whatnot. They also emphasize security, elegance, and ease of use in their advertising, and cater to a relatively upmarket audience, for the most part.
Why, then, can you not even buy any serious security? Yes, they have 'two factor authentication', of the kind where you have a username, password, and they send you a temporary PIN to one of your devices; but money simply cannot buy a certificate authentication mechanism. Nor an RSA-fob or equivalent. Hell, your WoW character can be protected by a hardware auth fob; but your entire iLife can't?
In the end(while it may well be true) Apple's insistence that the hack was based on guessing/gaining user credentials, rather than attacking Apple code, just doesn't matter. User credentials are always fairly vulnerable. If they want people to put their life 'in the cloud', they are going to have to do better than that(especially if they want celebrity users, since that's a userbase that more or less automatically includes insane stalkers).
I'm sorry but when are password managers ever a good idea? Having 1 place with ALL your passwords ready to be stolen.
Password 'managers' make me nervous(unless based on proper crypto/key storage ICs with actual vetting by people who actually care, which is rare indeed, if it exists at all, since the people who care that much don't use passwords, just proper cryptographic authentication); but they do have the advantage of allowing those of us without eidetic memories to use passwords that might actually be strong enough to resist casual attack, and force the casual attacker to use the ultra-weak password reset process instead...
It's not that they are lemons, it's that amidst the vast sea of cheap and minimally known devices, you don't know which are or aren't lemons.
That's the lemon market effect: It doesn't mean that all devices are lemons(many aren't), it's that if you have no particularly good way of determining which are or aren't lemons, you are forced to be more cautious than would otherwise be good even of devices that are not lemons.
As much as I think Yelp are a bunch of abhuman bottom feeders who would do the world a favor if they caught fire, I am pleased by this one.
Section 230 is a vital defense against a truly hellish legal climate on the internet, and I'd hate to see it be chipped away during a fight against an unsympathetic defendant.
It's also a matter of diversification. Google has done well enough in online advertising that pushing much harder will just lead to an antitrust shitstorm.
Given that, they basically have three options:
1. Sit back, relax, and move as much profit as possible through the company until somebody eventually 'disrupts' them. This is pretty much risk free in the short term, and probably popular with some shareholders; but it's pretty fatalistic in the long term, and fatalism isn't a personality trait that Silicon Valley tends to cultivate.
2. Sit back, take profits from advertising business and invest them in a diversified portfolio and gradually morph into some sort of fund as amount invested grows and, sooner or later, advertising business suffers a setback and/or withers. Basically a variation on #1; but with the money remaining inside under management rather than being passed through. Similarly fatalistic and similarly culturally unlikely.
3. Take profits from core business, attempt to invent the future before somebody else does, and crushes you. Not necessarily a better strategy than #1 or #2 (it might be; but it is a high risk/high reward type of thing); but a far better cultural fit than just sitting back and stashing the profits and accepting that eventually things change.
I'm not certain what the category is called(there must be a term for it; but I don't move in linguistics circles); but 'book desert' is an example of a specific class of made up term, the one that is novel; but is an explicit extension of an earlier and better recognized term(the best known example I can think of is, at least in the US, the ability to add "-gate" to almost anything to imply that it is a scandal. The result is always a made up word; but it creates a direct connection to 'Watergate').
In this case, the 'root' is 'Food Desert', a term describing the areas (mostly poor urban neighborhoods, and likely some rural ones as well) where grocery stores are effectively nonexistent and the population subsists on a mixture of convenience store fare and fast food, with a variety of types of food either atypically expensive or simply unavailable. By extension, a '[something] desert' is a region where local conditions make some good that you might expect to be available based on the overall development level of a country scarce or unavailable.
Anyone know what this type of coinage is called? It isn't merely a neologism; but I don't know what the subcategory is called.
It's a real pity that the 'lemon market' effect is so strong on the dodgy end of the a variety of categories of electronic devices...
In terms of specs, such devices are obviously inferior to their more expensive counterparts; but you often don't need as much power as the expensive stuff offers. In terms of quality and niceties like warranty support, it can be iffy; but solid-state gear can be pretty durable once the infant mortality period is over, and if it costs little enough you can 'self insure' rather than depend on a warranty.
However, the software/firmware/localization is usually utterly dire, and the branding and details of the internal hardware are so volatile that it's hard to consistently get your hands on a given set of components reliably, and it's hard to build an OpenWRT-style 3rd-party community around them.
If the absurdly low cost of mystery-OEM pacific rim gear could be combined with the localization support and non-awfulness of 3rd-party firmware, you'd have some killer devices; but bringing the two together seems to be tricky.
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Given the (lack of) alternative, it's certainly an improvement in this case. I was objecting to TFS's "More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them. We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons." blather.
Since there aren't enough donor organs, and those tend to have their own problems, a deeply imperfect artificial apparatus beats the alternative; but characterizing its defects as 'numerous other advantages' is just idiotic. It makes about as much sense as describing an insulin pump as an 'improvement' because you can arduously fiddle with delivery profiles, rather than using lame, old-school, feedback systems.
When the alternative is death, many imperfect substitutes are good ideas; but that is very different from their being 'improvements' except in the strictly local case of patients in markedly worse than normal shape.
There's also the fact that having a control interface isn't really 'cool' as much as it is 'we couldn't duplicate the sensory and feedback systems that made the old one adjust itself automatically, so here's a dial to futz with!'
Compared to out-of-control, control is nice; but compared to 'just fucking works' it's a thankless chore and a good opportunity to make mistakes.
Flattering; but I suspect that he would have actually done the math, at least to the level of plausible approximation, rather than handwaving that part in favor of some dreadful puns.
That said, if anyone with a knowledge of railguns wants to calculate(or test, be sure to record) exactly how lousy a salmon would be as ammunition, I'd read the hell out of it.
Alpha Centuri had the ability to raise/lower terrain with terra former units... It also had a weather model good enough that this effected rainfall and thus nutrient production. It wasn't usually an efficient use of resources; but building 'moisture walls' and then watching your hapless opponent's population starve sure was sweet...
I cannot independently confirm the truth of this; but I was told, in all apparent seriousness, by someone I know well and who I know to have a long association with the hydroelectric generation business, that the term for what happens to a fish that fails to avoid the turbine intakes is "turbine induced stress". As one might imagine, this 'stress' tends toward the lethal end of the spectrum.
What about a rail gun salmon launcher? After they mate they are completely spent and become zombie fish. Hardly edible.
The engineering considerations surrounding such a device seem formidable indeed. Most of the data available are for humans(who, shockingly enough, have most of the medical budget dedicated to measuring delicate electrical signals through their muscle tissue); but if we assume that salmon tissue is approximately similar to human muscle, at least for the purposes of the currents and voltages a railgun implies, we can conclude that (A) the math is obnoxious. (B) fish are shitty conductors (C) fish have other obnoxious properties like 'capacitance' and non-homogenous conductivity.
Given the substantial resistance of our pisciform projectile, and the railgun's need for heroically high peak currents, supply voltage will have to be quite high, introducing additional insulation challenges, risks of air-gap breakdown between the rails, damaging arcs in other areas of the apparatus, and so on. Further issues may arise because of the projectile's non-uniform conductivity and substantial fluid content: with current flow, and resistive heating, highest along the most conductive regions, the projectile may exhibit substantial internal deformation, or even catastrophic loss of structural integrity, during acceleration or at a very early stage of flight. While it may have valuable specialty applications, this so-called 'frangible fish' effect markedly reduces effective range and almost entirely precludes survival of the projectile.
It is conceivable that advances in Aquatic-Preservation Discarding Sabot technology will allow a suitably packaged salmon to successfully traverse the accelerator rails while retaining the buoyancy necessary for continued survival by discarding the conductive jacket before entry into the target body of water. However, such developments are presently theoretical and cannot form the basis of a viable ecological dominance capability in the near term.
Shareholder Value, obviously. Inefficient state-owned propagandists can only maintain their activities through continued forcible appropriation of wealth. Our innovative private sector propagandists can spin the truth and turn a profit at the same time!
It's not just money(though that doesn't hurt).
Journalists practically worship 'access'. This behavior is adaptive, since it's hard to get stories written without information; but it comes with the nontrivial downside that the people the stories are about are in the best position to provide information. The competent ones have learned to take advantage of this by cultivating a relationship with the press: any really juicy story has a comparatively safe penumbra of tidbits, unattributed statements, unofficially sanctioned leaks, and so on. If a journalist is a nice, cooperative, team player, (like the quisling in TFA), they'll be well placed for a steady supply of such things.
By contrast, the uncooperative journalist might, on occasion, get a really nice scoop on where the bodies are buried(sometimes literally); but whenever that isn't available he'll be regurgitating press releases and stale news.
I suspect they protested at S. Lake Union because that is very close to downtown Seattle and an extremely visible location. Microsoft Campus in Redmond is in the in a much more suburban atmosphere, it would be much less of a visible protest there.
There's also the fact that the campus is likely mostly private land, while downtown areas tend to have public ways near them.
Depending on the local PD, your right to peaceable assembly may or may not be treated as adorably fictitious and/or a good chance to break out the cool 1033 program toys and play soldier; but you don't even have a theoretical one if you can just be rounded up for trespassing before things even start.
Trying to protest on MS's campus would just make it a question for PR of whether the visibility is lower for ignoring you and keeping the cameras away, or having you hauled off for trespassing before you make too much noise.
Are there any laws we shouldn't gut in order to be 'competitive'?
Given that it's both free, and free as in Apache 2.0, it's arguably a question that will sort itself out(though this doesn't make discussion and conjecture on the matter illegitimate or anything). Aside from the trademarks, there's nothing stopping anyone from striking out and having their own docker-in-all-but-name. So long as Docker, Inc. appears to be handling the benevolent dictatorship thing competently there isn't much incentive, though, unless you just adore maintaining a fork for the sake of it. If they upset people enough, without actually losing to another technology, we get an x11/Xorg style move; and if something displaces them, they just sink into the murky depths never to be heard from again...
It doesn't solve any of the annoying questions of making people with disparate objectives and potential personality flaws play nicely with one another; but a liberal software license does lower the stakes: If the controlling entity exerts very substantial power, it really matters how that entity is constituted. If they don't, it just doesn't matter as much because their ability to mal-administer is lower and the potential that everyone will just wander away rather than having to go down with the ship is there.
It looks like I was thinking of something quite different from the 'Authenticator' app and got confused: Recent Android versions include the 'keymaster' HAL component, which uses a software-based set of cryptographic capabilities by default, or can interact with a device-specific hardware module(mostly on Nexus devices, not sure about any third party implementations, usually based on 'trustzone' rather than TPM, just because ARM SoCs do that already).
Looks like it addresses a different use case; but that's what I was thinking about when wondering whether the behavior varied between hardware and software backed platforms. Sorry about that, I get fuzzy sometimes.
If the weapon is sufficiently fiddly and delicate, and the attacker has limited time to subvert it, a variety of means might work (many of them already explored with nukes and/or SALT arms reduction verification stuff in the late cold war); but for simpler, more durable, gear, and hardware subject to prolonged attack, Not Happening.
In particular, nukes are (relatively) easy to secure because they include a fair amount of conventional explosive, improper detonation of which will produce a mess but a fairly worthless yield, which offers a nice failsafe option. With devices that aren't as intrinsically touchy, you don't have the same leverage.
Oh, believe me, I'd love to see some absolutely ruthless discovery through every last scrap of material that passed through Yelp's shakedown/ad sales division over the years. It'd be almost as good, and a lot more legal, than just locking their HQ and setting it on fire.
However, I just Don't Even Want To Think about how awful the internet would be without Section 230. Even by the somewhat unimpressive standards of the takedown-laden world of DMCA safe harbor, life without 230 would be a killing field.
Do 'States' Rights' have any applications that aren't kind of embarrassing?
Does the behavior of the 'authenticator' app differ depending on whether the device has a hardware-backed keystore or not?
Uptake on such hardware is rather patchy(more likely on newer gear; but hardly assured), so I assume that there is a software-based fallback that just obfuscates the keystore as nicely as possible; but if the application were talking to an actual hardware keystore device, Titanium backup(or equivalent) would have absolutely no effect); but updating the application(or even switching to an entirely new one, in some cases) should be doable without losing anything.
Android key handling is an area I really haven't poked at all, so I know little about it; but I'd be interested to know how it is supposed to work.
While the idea of having a well vetted testing system in place that would allow customers to choose software that had been so vetted seems like a good idea, I have to wonder if it's doomed to the fate of SSL, at least outside of a few niche applications that mostly demand high levels of verification anyway.
With SSL, we all wanted the security; but everyone wanted it to be cheap, and wanted to avoid a monopoly over certificate authorityship. So, what did we get? A mass of CAs, many painfully shoddy, who will issue you a fancy looking cert for peanuts. Then we got "EV" certs, which are supposed to actually do what the original certs were supposed to do, only more expensive.
Apple obviously wants iCloud and your ITMS credentials to be the iGateway to your life and all your devices and whatnot. They also emphasize security, elegance, and ease of use in their advertising, and cater to a relatively upmarket audience, for the most part.
Why, then, can you not even buy any serious security? Yes, they have 'two factor authentication', of the kind where you have a username, password, and they send you a temporary PIN to one of your devices; but money simply cannot buy a certificate authentication mechanism. Nor an RSA-fob or equivalent. Hell, your WoW character can be protected by a hardware auth fob; but your entire iLife can't?
In the end(while it may well be true) Apple's insistence that the hack was based on guessing/gaining user credentials, rather than attacking Apple code, just doesn't matter. User credentials are always fairly vulnerable. If they want people to put their life 'in the cloud', they are going to have to do better than that(especially if they want celebrity users, since that's a userbase that more or less automatically includes insane stalkers).
I'm sorry but when are password managers ever a good idea? Having 1 place with ALL your passwords ready to be stolen.
Password 'managers' make me nervous(unless based on proper crypto/key storage ICs with actual vetting by people who actually care, which is rare indeed, if it exists at all, since the people who care that much don't use passwords, just proper cryptographic authentication); but they do have the advantage of allowing those of us without eidetic memories to use passwords that might actually be strong enough to resist casual attack, and force the casual attacker to use the ultra-weak password reset process instead...
It's not that they are lemons, it's that amidst the vast sea of cheap and minimally known devices, you don't know which are or aren't lemons.
That's the lemon market effect: It doesn't mean that all devices are lemons(many aren't), it's that if you have no particularly good way of determining which are or aren't lemons, you are forced to be more cautious than would otherwise be good even of devices that are not lemons.
As much as I think Yelp are a bunch of abhuman bottom feeders who would do the world a favor if they caught fire, I am pleased by this one.
Section 230 is a vital defense against a truly hellish legal climate on the internet, and I'd hate to see it be chipped away during a fight against an unsympathetic defendant.
It's also a matter of diversification. Google has done well enough in online advertising that pushing much harder will just lead to an antitrust shitstorm.
Given that, they basically have three options:
1. Sit back, relax, and move as much profit as possible through the company until somebody eventually 'disrupts' them. This is pretty much risk free in the short term, and probably popular with some shareholders; but it's pretty fatalistic in the long term, and fatalism isn't a personality trait that Silicon Valley tends to cultivate.
2. Sit back, take profits from advertising business and invest them in a diversified portfolio and gradually morph into some sort of fund as amount invested grows and, sooner or later, advertising business suffers a setback and/or withers. Basically a variation on #1; but with the money remaining inside under management rather than being passed through. Similarly fatalistic and similarly culturally unlikely.
3. Take profits from core business, attempt to invent the future before somebody else does, and crushes you. Not necessarily a better strategy than #1 or #2 (it might be; but it is a high risk/high reward type of thing); but a far better cultural fit than just sitting back and stashing the profits and accepting that eventually things change.
"Google Quantum AI Team" sounds less like a job title and more like a section of the datacenter with atypically touchy cooling needs...
I'm not certain what the category is called(there must be a term for it; but I don't move in linguistics circles); but 'book desert' is an example of a specific class of made up term, the one that is novel; but is an explicit extension of an earlier and better recognized term(the best known example I can think of is, at least in the US, the ability to add "-gate" to almost anything to imply that it is a scandal. The result is always a made up word; but it creates a direct connection to 'Watergate').
In this case, the 'root' is 'Food Desert', a term describing the areas (mostly poor urban neighborhoods, and likely some rural ones as well) where grocery stores are effectively nonexistent and the population subsists on a mixture of convenience store fare and fast food, with a variety of types of food either atypically expensive or simply unavailable. By extension, a '[something] desert' is a region where local conditions make some good that you might expect to be available based on the overall development level of a country scarce or unavailable.
Anyone know what this type of coinage is called? It isn't merely a neologism; but I don't know what the subcategory is called.
It's a real pity that the 'lemon market' effect is so strong on the dodgy end of the a variety of categories of electronic devices...
In terms of specs, such devices are obviously inferior to their more expensive counterparts; but you often don't need as much power as the expensive stuff offers. In terms of quality and niceties like warranty support, it can be iffy; but solid-state gear can be pretty durable once the infant mortality period is over, and if it costs little enough you can 'self insure' rather than depend on a warranty.
However, the software/firmware/localization is usually utterly dire, and the branding and details of the internal hardware are so volatile that it's hard to consistently get your hands on a given set of components reliably, and it's hard to build an OpenWRT-style 3rd-party community around them.
If the absurdly low cost of mystery-OEM pacific rim gear could be combined with the localization support and non-awfulness of 3rd-party firmware, you'd have some killer devices; but bringing the two together seems to be tricky.