Sounds like Microsoft has most to fear on their own campuses since I doubt that there are many other businesses with a high enough concentration of vulnerable phones who would be worth the risk.
I wonder if any government has *ever* had a good experience after signing a major contract with a supplier to implement one of these systems. A single time ever where a project was delivered on time, on budget and performed at or beyond the expectations set down in paper.
I thought these contracts were just an excuse by suppliers to wildly overcharge governments on the daily rates, software licences and support fees knowing that once the ink has dried on the contract they basically have them by the balls.
I wonder given the expense of these systems if governments wouldn't be better off to hire teams in-house to write this stuff.
Now how about 50-70 wps where the person has to go back over their typing to correct errors, fix punctuation, replace words that the retarded auto complete has inserted by default etc. I doubt they get 50-70 wps as they are slowly dragging their finger over a paragraph trying to drop the cursor between two letters to correct a typo.
Virtual keyboards suck. There is no sense as to where the hands are resting, no touch feed back to indicate a key press, no short cut accelerators bulk selecting, drag and dropping etc. And the screen real estate is half to draw a keyboard. Auto complete / predictive text makes them tolerable given their limitations for short notes but that's about it. I would absolutely hate to be writing a thesis or anything lengthy on them.
even if they're presented with quotes directly from the Bible that irrefutably demonstrate that they are most certainly not true believers in what it teaches.
By that definition, nobody is a true Christian (whatever that means) because the bible is filled with contradictory, cruel, ambiguous and nonsensical teachings. Literally hundreds of things which make little sense and which nobody however earnest could follow let alone interpret in the same way as the person sat next to them.
By that same token, we've all likely seen our share of "atheists" who quote Dawkins as if he were a prophet and will, without a hint of irony, use "because science says" as a full justification for something they claim, even if they're presented with valid scientific evidence that upsets their outdated beliefs regarding what is true. Both can and do engage in dogmatism, with replies oftentimes boiling down to "nah uh!" rather than being a rational discourse.
Except of course Dawkins has the facts and evidence on his side and qualifies remarks or opinion as appropriate, e.g. when uncertainty exists. And if you looked up the definition of dogma you would recognize how absurd it is to accuse him, or science of dogmatism. Science changes over time as ideas are tested. It's not inerrant. About the only thing that remotely approaches "dogma" in science are the natural laws of the universe, without are taken for granted simply because they're observable and testable.
In that light, some may refer to atheism as a religion since atheists do have to take it on faith that there is no supernatural being, given that it's impossible to prove a negative
It's also impossible to prove there isn't a monster sitting on my head, or that there is a spaceship in the middle of the moon or that my deceased Aunt Maude was psychic. So it's not a matter of faith to assume there is no supernatural being so much as the default position. There is no reason to suppose a supernatural being (let alone one claimed to be the creator of all things and to have handed down the one true set of religious teachings to a bronze age people).
Pointing out the mostly illusory security of Tor is not being "part of the problem". I just don't choose to bury my head in the sand and deny the insecurity of it.
The limitations of Tor have been spelt out quite succinctly in its own documentation and if people choose to conduct activity that makes them a target for attention (e.g. selling drugs, trading child porn) then it is hardly surprising that law enforcement might choose to exploit those limitations. It wouldn't surprise me if even before now if the majority of exit nodes, or at least a large proportion of them were actually run by government agencies or firms acting on their behalf.
Why? For the simple reason that it's easier to intercept traffic (just create exit nodes and watch the traffic as it passes through) and there are richer pickings and chances for detecting illegal activity.
And I agree that Tor isn't useless if you recognize its limits. If you use it for privacy reasons it's fine. If you use it to hit some paedo site, or to buy drugs, or launder money, or send death threats, or whatever then you're likely going to get caught sooner or later.
No, a "determined attacker" means anybody who breaks through the mostly illusory security that Tor provides. Basically Tor should be seen as a fallible but useful proxy that prevents a web site from determining who a visitor is. Beyond that, don't count on it to protect a damned thing about yourself. Any exit not can screw around with the content you receive and clearly the thought has occurred to legit and illegit agencies alike. And if you're dumb enough to throw settings on JS, plugins etc. then more fool you. Tor warns against this sort of thing so it's not like it didn't spell out the risks.
As for paedos, I expect every single law enforcement agency in the world would dearly love to swoop down and arrest these scumbags and I'm happy to see them do it. If that involves them exploiting the false security of a "anonymizing" service to detect visitors based on an injected ever cookie then so be it. I never assumed Tor to be secure and anyone who did and used it to conduct illegal activity is an idiot and deserves everything they get.
The flip side of that argument is that humans very rarely get in the water with wild orcas whereas contact with captive orcas is almost constant. Nor would humans be petting and nuzzling wild orcas or attempting to ride them etc. So the chances of contact and harm are that much less.
I suppose a comparison could be made with horses or dogs. Number of people killed by wild horses or dogs (or wolves) is probably a very small fraction of people killed by domesticated horses and dogs.
You might not but clearly the cops do and I support them. Tor gives anonymity from casual eavesdropping. It doesn't give anonymity from a determined attacker and if paedos thought it did then more fool them.
I seriously doubt many people have the skills, inclination or patience or the software to design parts. A trip to the scrapyard or some OEM dealer would probably yield the same part for less cash than the time required to design one. I also expect the chances of Nissan or another maker licencing the design or tolerating CAD models that print replacements to be somewhere close to zero.
3D printing of the Makerbot / Reprap kind is probably fine for utilitarian purposes (assuming you can model a part), but it looks absolutely hideous for anything decorative that people have a chance to examine up close. So curtain rings, yes, iPhone case probably no.
Since the paper is behind a paywall I have no idea what things they think could make the printer pay for itself in a year, but somehow I doubt these represent a typical purchase pattern of anybody anywhere.
No. I'm the kind of person who has heard the tired old argument that a poorly specced console might still be "fun". Sure they might and the argument might be valid if the console were cheap and cheerful, or rival consoles were somehow "not fun". But that is not the case.
The Wii U costs the same as the 360 and PS3, has comparable specs but a tiny fraction of the titles. Nintendo probably hoped people wouldn't notice its shortcomings. Clearly they do or we wouldn't discussing how badly the thing is selling at this moment.
Now I don't rule out the possibility that if Nintendo ship some more titles that people want (e.g. Monster Hunter seems a popular one), that it might stop the ship sinking. But at this point in time I see very little to recommend the platform. And clearly neither do 3rd parties who got badly burned with the Wii and don't feel like repeating the experience again. The likes of EA and Ubisoft have release statements basically saying their support for the Wii U will be minimal.
That's a pretty lame argument since it presupposes that the 360 and PS3 are somehow not "fun" or that the Wii U is imbued with more "fun". Which is clearly not the case.
Most car companies have a discount scheme for employees. I recall walking into a Ford dealer (in the UK) and he said that most of his low mileage second hand cars came from Ford employees since they got a discount so they could afford to buy a new car every few years and the old one would be sold off through the network. I assume they do it as a cheap perk for their employees which as a side effect increases car sales and second hand sale throughput.
Apple thieves just have to think different.
Perhaps when I turn up I show my iPhone in a shocking pink bumper to Mr Security Guard. When I leave I show the same phone in the same bumper and the guard waves it through. Except that I switched a broken 16GB iPhone 4 for an 64GB iPhone 5 during the day and walked out with that instead. And during the day I booked the iPhone 4 for minor repair for a confederate to pick up and sell later.
Or maybe I just palm off a device to a confederate. Or stuff a high price phone into a low price box that the confederate buys. Or switch devices while seeming to pick up and examine the confederate's device.
So many ways it could be done with the security theatre or not. Having said this I expect Apple isn't some dumb adversary. Perhaps the bag search is just the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn't put it past them to have hidden cameras all over the place, to do frequent random stock checks, to use RFID / NFC tech to figure out when devices are entering and leaving the store or display area and all the rest. Thieves should probably assume all of this and more.
Flinging projectiles at extremely high speeds sounds more useful for a rail-gun like weapon than for throwing stuff into space. I assume it would have to have extreme accuracy in either case.
Yes and before that in Sun. Basically they both love their precious language so much that they've ended up stifling it. Though in some sense perhaps the reason there are so many 3rd party libs and an increasing number of rival languages running over the JVM may be due to the way the language has been handled. So innovation has happened, just not in the one place where it would benefit the most people.
In the context of a story about hacking devices I really don't see the issue. XDA is a good source of alternative firmwares which work extremely well with these devices. Buy it, grab a good firmware, flash it and away you go. You can stick XBMC, Netflix and all the rest on it at that point.
I don't disagree, but this comment was made in the context of a story about hacking the chromecast, i.e. not the general public. If you want to hack on something, why not buy something for the same price which has more RAM, more flash memory, a better CPU and can perform in a similar role?
Can't really blame the kernel for the brain damaged PM that sat on top of it. In their infinite wisdom IBM made it such that there was a single message queue across all windows processes and if one of them got stuck while handling a message the entire UI locked up. You had to have a console based process monitor like Watchcat installed to call up in these situations to kill the offending process.
Anyway I didn't consider the OS/2 kernel to be anything special. The NT kernel actually had a Posix and OS/2 personality and was portable across hardware architectures so it was pretty sophisticated for its time.
The point I was alluding to is this stuff existed elsewhere a long time ago. It's great that Java is getting some stuff which approximates what other languages have offered but progress is just too damned slow. And stuff like mixins, DSLs still don't exist and there is still lots of language bloat which could be remedied that isn't, e.g. auto vars, type inference in generics etc.
It's like language development is stuck in a tarpit where stuff is bogged down in committees for years and then delayed (and potentially falls by the wayside) before a new version of Java turns up months or even years behind schedule. Look how long it took for Java 7 to appear and Java 8 is already delayed 6 months from its projected release. It wouldn't surprise me if some significant feature gets dumped between now and then.
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Sounds like Microsoft has most to fear on their own campuses since I doubt that there are many other businesses with a high enough concentration of vulnerable phones who would be worth the risk.
When hurtling through a tube at 600 mph, you are at the mercy of the odds and nothing else.
So the same as everything else you cite.
I thought these contracts were just an excuse by suppliers to wildly overcharge governments on the daily rates, software licences and support fees knowing that once the ink has dried on the contract they basically have them by the balls.
I wonder given the expense of these systems if governments wouldn't be better off to hire teams in-house to write this stuff.
Virtual keyboards suck. There is no sense as to where the hands are resting, no touch feed back to indicate a key press, no short cut accelerators bulk selecting, drag and dropping etc. And the screen real estate is half to draw a keyboard. Auto complete / predictive text makes them tolerable given their limitations for short notes but that's about it. I would absolutely hate to be writing a thesis or anything lengthy on them.
I have yet to see a virtual keyboard which is remotely as fast as a physical keyboard and I very much doubt you have either.
even if they're presented with quotes directly from the Bible that irrefutably demonstrate that they are most certainly not true believers in what it teaches.
By that definition, nobody is a true Christian (whatever that means) because the bible is filled with contradictory, cruel, ambiguous and nonsensical teachings. Literally hundreds of things which make little sense and which nobody however earnest could follow let alone interpret in the same way as the person sat next to them.
By that same token, we've all likely seen our share of "atheists" who quote Dawkins as if he were a prophet and will, without a hint of irony, use "because science says" as a full justification for something they claim, even if they're presented with valid scientific evidence that upsets their outdated beliefs regarding what is true. Both can and do engage in dogmatism, with replies oftentimes boiling down to "nah uh!" rather than being a rational discourse.
Except of course Dawkins has the facts and evidence on his side and qualifies remarks or opinion as appropriate, e.g. when uncertainty exists. And if you looked up the definition of dogma you would recognize how absurd it is to accuse him, or science of dogmatism. Science changes over time as ideas are tested. It's not inerrant. About the only thing that remotely approaches "dogma" in science are the natural laws of the universe, without are taken for granted simply because they're observable and testable.
In that light, some may refer to atheism as a religion since atheists do have to take it on faith that there is no supernatural being, given that it's impossible to prove a negative
It's also impossible to prove there isn't a monster sitting on my head, or that there is a spaceship in the middle of the moon or that my deceased Aunt Maude was psychic. So it's not a matter of faith to assume there is no supernatural being so much as the default position. There is no reason to suppose a supernatural being (let alone one claimed to be the creator of all things and to have handed down the one true set of religious teachings to a bronze age people).
The limitations of Tor have been spelt out quite succinctly in its own documentation and if people choose to conduct activity that makes them a target for attention (e.g. selling drugs, trading child porn) then it is hardly surprising that law enforcement might choose to exploit those limitations. It wouldn't surprise me if even before now if the majority of exit nodes, or at least a large proportion of them were actually run by government agencies or firms acting on their behalf.
Why? For the simple reason that it's easier to intercept traffic (just create exit nodes and watch the traffic as it passes through) and there are richer pickings and chances for detecting illegal activity.
And I agree that Tor isn't useless if you recognize its limits. If you use it for privacy reasons it's fine. If you use it to hit some paedo site, or to buy drugs, or launder money, or send death threats, or whatever then you're likely going to get caught sooner or later.
As for paedos, I expect every single law enforcement agency in the world would dearly love to swoop down and arrest these scumbags and I'm happy to see them do it. If that involves them exploiting the false security of a "anonymizing" service to detect visitors based on an injected ever cookie then so be it. I never assumed Tor to be secure and anyone who did and used it to conduct illegal activity is an idiot and deserves everything they get.
I suppose a comparison could be made with horses or dogs. Number of people killed by wild horses or dogs (or wolves) is probably a very small fraction of people killed by domesticated horses and dogs.
I don't care.
You might not but clearly the cops do and I support them. Tor gives anonymity from casual eavesdropping. It doesn't give anonymity from a determined attacker and if paedos thought it did then more fool them.
I seriously doubt many people have the skills, inclination or patience or the software to design parts. A trip to the scrapyard or some OEM dealer would probably yield the same part for less cash than the time required to design one. I also expect the chances of Nissan or another maker licencing the design or tolerating CAD models that print replacements to be somewhere close to zero.
Since the paper is behind a paywall I have no idea what things they think could make the printer pay for itself in a year, but somehow I doubt these represent a typical purchase pattern of anybody anywhere.
The Wii U costs the same as the 360 and PS3, has comparable specs but a tiny fraction of the titles. Nintendo probably hoped people wouldn't notice its shortcomings. Clearly they do or we wouldn't discussing how badly the thing is selling at this moment.
Now I don't rule out the possibility that if Nintendo ship some more titles that people want (e.g. Monster Hunter seems a popular one), that it might stop the ship sinking. But at this point in time I see very little to recommend the platform. And clearly neither do 3rd parties who got badly burned with the Wii and don't feel like repeating the experience again. The likes of EA and Ubisoft have release statements basically saying their support for the Wii U will be minimal.
That's a pretty lame argument since it presupposes that the 360 and PS3 are somehow not "fun" or that the Wii U is imbued with more "fun". Which is clearly not the case.
What hurts even more is shipping a new console which is no more powerful than the 6 year old consoles it's supposed to be competing against.
Most car companies have a discount scheme for employees. I recall walking into a Ford dealer (in the UK) and he said that most of his low mileage second hand cars came from Ford employees since they got a discount so they could afford to buy a new car every few years and the old one would be sold off through the network. I assume they do it as a cheap perk for their employees which as a side effect increases car sales and second hand sale throughput.
Apple thieves just have to think different. Perhaps when I turn up I show my iPhone in a shocking pink bumper to Mr Security Guard. When I leave I show the same phone in the same bumper and the guard waves it through. Except that I switched a broken 16GB iPhone 4 for an 64GB iPhone 5 during the day and walked out with that instead. And during the day I booked the iPhone 4 for minor repair for a confederate to pick up and sell later. Or maybe I just palm off a device to a confederate. Or stuff a high price phone into a low price box that the confederate buys. Or switch devices while seeming to pick up and examine the confederate's device. So many ways it could be done with the security theatre or not. Having said this I expect Apple isn't some dumb adversary. Perhaps the bag search is just the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn't put it past them to have hidden cameras all over the place, to do frequent random stock checks, to use RFID / NFC tech to figure out when devices are entering and leaving the store or display area and all the rest. Thieves should probably assume all of this and more.
Flinging projectiles at extremely high speeds sounds more useful for a rail-gun like weapon than for throwing stuff into space. I assume it would have to have extreme accuracy in either case.
Yes and before that in Sun. Basically they both love their precious language so much that they've ended up stifling it. Though in some sense perhaps the reason there are so many 3rd party libs and an increasing number of rival languages running over the JVM may be due to the way the language has been handled. So innovation has happened, just not in the one place where it would benefit the most people.
In the context of a story about hacking devices I really don't see the issue. XDA is a good source of alternative firmwares which work extremely well with these devices. Buy it, grab a good firmware, flash it and away you go. You can stick XBMC, Netflix and all the rest on it at that point.
I don't disagree, but this comment was made in the context of a story about hacking the chromecast, i.e. not the general public. If you want to hack on something, why not buy something for the same price which has more RAM, more flash memory, a better CPU and can perform in a similar role?
I think XKCD only exists so some wit can stink up every /. story by posting an "oblig link" to a tenuously relevant cartoon.
Alibaba is full of them for a similar price to chromecast.
Anyway I didn't consider the OS/2 kernel to be anything special. The NT kernel actually had a Posix and OS/2 personality and was portable across hardware architectures so it was pretty sophisticated for its time.
It's like language development is stuck in a tarpit where stuff is bogged down in committees for years and then delayed (and potentially falls by the wayside) before a new version of Java turns up months or even years behind schedule. Look how long it took for Java 7 to appear and Java 8 is already delayed 6 months from its projected release. It wouldn't surprise me if some significant feature gets dumped between now and then.