So he learned how to plug into the can-bus and send messages. How is that a security hack??
Because, as linked to in the article, stuff like this is also possible by hacking into the car via a cellular phone connection:
"In their remote experiment, the researchers were able to undermine the security protecting the cellular phone in the vehicle they bought and then insert malicious software. This allowed them to send commands to the car’s electronic control unit — the nerve center of a vehicle’s electronics system — which in turn made it possible to override various vehicle controls. "
You can do what you want at home, but if your kid's going to be sharing a space with others then you've got to respect those others' basic right to health.
Exactly. If a child has not been vaccinated and there are no valid reasons for not vaccinating (e.g allergies or whatever), that child should not be allowed in public schools / kindergarten.
To say "No, Thank You" in Germany, you say "Nein, Bitte". Yes, bitte is please, but that is not how it works in German. Another common saying in German is "Wie Bitte?" which literally means "How Please?" It is used for "What did you say?" or "What was that again?"
Actually "no, thank you" in German is "Nein, danke". Nobody say "Nein bitte" around here.
I have gotten my phone out of my pocket during a movie in two situations: (1) when the movie is supremely boring or it's dragging on, and I want to check the time--which I do as stealthily as possible so as not to let the illumination of the screen be obtrusive to others around me
Whatever happened to wrist watches? I feel like an old fart for actually looking at my watch when I want to know what time it is. Now get off my lawn.
It's not as bad as haters love to say it is. 0-60 in under 10 seconds in "power" mode puts it ahead of most fuel economy cars and ungimped sedans.
Well, it's definitely not "horribly slow", but it's also not "speedy" in the sense of "faster than I would expect a car of that size to be". From what I understand, the Prius has like 130-140hp and does like 10s 0-60? A 122hp Volkswagen Golf does 0-60 in 9.3 and a 140hp one does 0-60 in 8.4. So the Prius is "comparable", but definitely a bit slower than a similarly-sized standard car, most likely due to the weight (standard Prius 1440-1500 kg, while the 140hp Golf is 1268kg).
I see no reason to believe that the picture in question has been created by using several photos and copying/pasting people or heads around, but the lighting DEFINITELY looks "fake" (heavily edited) to me. Not only the light, also the colours. For example, the old guy (2nd from the left, holding the left child) - his head just looks unrealistically bright. Or the glasses guy two to the right of him. He definitely is in the shadow, yet his face is not dark at all. And the colours - on the hackerfactor page, compare the face of the guy holding the right child in the "fake" pic with his face in the picture just below that one. In the unedited pic, his face is a dark red/brown, completely unlike the world press photo picture.
So - completely faked? No. But definitely heavily edited, and then it's a question of whether they wanted heavily edited pictures in their competition, or instead want "unaltered" pictures. In other words, whether they want pictures which "wow" the observer because the photographer captured a special, noteworthy moment or because the photographer used Photoshop to make a picture TECHNICALLY "perfect".
Steam forces their own DRM, Steamworks, on all games. Unlike some other DD servers (Impulse for example) there is no capability to release a game without the built-in DRM. Publishers can use additional DRM as well, but Steamworks is mandatory.
It's pretty low key DRM over all, most people are ok with it (I am) but it is DRM. You have to have Steam running and be logged in to your account to be able to play a game. You don't have to be online, you can cache your credentials and play offline, but you must have Steam running and logged in or you cannot play a game.
Many people are ok with Steam DRM, I'm one of them, but don't be disingenuous and claim there isn't DRM. There is and it is required.
This is not true. I am able to run several of my games which I bought over Steam without having the actual Steam client running - by simply starting the game executable from Windows Explorer. Steam DRM is NOT a requirement for all games distributed via Steam. Granted, most do use it though.
Yup. The easiest is to upgrade to windows 7 Pro or Ultimate and install XP Mode
XP mode won't fix what this whole thing is about, that support for Windows XP will end next year and continuing to run it will turn into a security risk. Windows 7's XP mode is nothing else than running Windows XP in a VM, and Microsoft will officially stop support for it next year, too.
Just bought 5 PCs from Dell, with Windows 7 Pro. No downgrading or BS... What are you talking about?
Microsoft not selling Win 7 licenses anymore does not mean that there are no unsold Win 7 licenses around on the market. So Dell probably still HAS licenses sitting around and won't be able to sell computers with Win 7 anymore once those are gone.
My guess? Not that many. In my house I have two desktops and one laptop PC, one tablet, three smartphones and one dumbphone. The phones and tablets are all newer than the PCs, but we still use the PCs all the time. I just don't need to replace/rebuild my PC every 18 months like I did most of the 90's. Even gaming is fine on a computer several years old if you are willing to play on less than MAX everything. Games do a much better job of scaling. The new games are going to look and play pretty much as well as they did when your computer was new, they just are not going to look any better. Oh, and there are probably at least a couple dozen great games on Steam for $9.99 that you didn't play 4 years ago that will go great with you 5 year old machine.
The PC isn't dead, it's just a mature market.
This is pretty much it. I remember back in the lat 90s/early 00s, when I upgraded the motherboard/CPU/graphics card of my gaming machine about every half year, because the newer hardware actually gave a huge benefit in gaming performance. I remember not being able to run new games at decent settings until I got the next upgrade, because you constantly kept running into hardware limitations (CPU not fast enough, graphics card not good enough to run at more than 800x600, etc.).
And there was tons of new hardware which actually gave benefits (from the "this new screen can run 1024x768 at non-interlaced" to graphics cards switching from ISA to VLB to PCI to PCIE, to graphics cards actually using 3D (old 3dfx cards, then Nvidia TNT and so on) to RAM increasing more and more to hard disks increasing in size and so on).
These days, it does not really matter much if you have 8GB or 16GB RAM, if you have 1TB or 4 TB disk space, if you have a Core2 Duo CPU or a current i7, if you have a GeForce 680 or still a 460. It all still works fine, more or less. Only if you want to play the absolute latest 3D action shooter in the highest resolution at the highest details settings - then you actually need a high end CPU and a high end graphics card. But there are not that many of those games around, and most of the time they are not actually fun to play anyway (except for the short "ooooh nice graphics" moment). So why upgrade? There's no need to anymore, except if you actually like building PCs or if your old hardware is acting up and you need to replace it because it is failing.
Win98SE runs just fine in VMware Workstation, hardest part was finding all the "latest" update rollup packages for it on the internet, since the built-in windows update is no longer supported by Microsoft.
True, the 1541 was awfully slow, even for its time. The fastest floppy I had at the time was the one hooked up to my Apple ][e. with two drives, diskmuncher would copy a floppy in 11 seconds, vs *way* longer using fasthack'em on the 64
That's why real men used DolphinDOS for their C64/1541. It could read a whole floppy disk in 4-5 seconds.
This car doesn't have a "key", it has a button that says "Start/Stop".
Exactly. And since the button is connected to a computer, any malfunction big enough will result in the button doing absolutely nothing at all when you press it to turn off the engine.
They're going to publish the log data which should prove interesting, but apparently he didn't charge the car completely. For a range test. If the log shows he didn't charge it all the way, then I'd call that quite a valid reason. It's borderline libel.
As I understand it, he DID charge the car completely, as in "the display said charge completed". What he did not use was the special option, battery damage causing "100% charge, long range, do not use all the time" charging option,
But that was not the problem anyway, what caused him to be stranded was that the car battery decided to lose over half its charge overnight due to low temperatures, which caused the range to go from "can easily make it to the recharge point" to "cannot make it to the recharge point at all".
I'd like to see more real life tests like this, with real life problems, because those show best that electric vehicles simply are not a good replacement for a standard car yet except for VERY specific situations (like only driving less than 20 miles a day AND having a guaranteed recharge point at your place of work).
I concur, this machine isn't old at all by Slashdot Unix Graybeard Users standards. What should i call my HP-UX PA-RISC B2000 workstation after reading this story; manufactured somewhere around BC?
Pah B2000, newfangled crap! (looking at the HP 9000/712 in the corner)
I can't see the use of touch at the regular office desktop coming for a long time, unless people get a specific touch screen that replaces the keyboard.
The reason are screens are getting bigger all the time and with them being bigger they have to sit back farther from the user. Then you have to use the touch screen you have to move from your normal arm position.
Exactly. Some people keep telling me "touch screens are the next big thing for the PC", but unless everybody switches from a desktop computer to a tablet PC or a notebook with a touch screen, I just cannot see that happening. Yes, there are 23" etc. displays with touch capabilities, but for exactly the reasons you mentioned, they will never be something anybody will want to use for a office desktop PC as a touch interface. Even for only casual touch use (e.g. selecting an application in the Windows 8 home screen, or selecting a song/movie in your media playback application), it would literally be a pain to use. I have two 25" screens on my desktop, and they are for obvious reasons so far away from me when I sit at the desk that I would have to get up from my chair to be able to reach them. No way I would ever use a touch interface on these displays to select something every couple seconds or use multi touch to zoom/... stuff.
If card A has a performance of x (which I'll define as 1) and card B a performance of x+2, wouldn't that mean it's two times better?
The article keeps saying three times better, but wouldn't the correct way to phrase that be "It's three times as good?"
Similar things with percentages. If something has 200% the value of something else, it's twice as valuable and not two times more valuable, right?
I notice similar things in German, which is my main language. Am I just a grammar Nazi (badum-tis) or does that bother you too?
Yeah, since when you talk about how much BETTER something is than something else, you are describing the difference between the two things. So if card A has performance 1 and card B performance 3, then the difference is 2. So card B is 2 better (or, in this case, even "two times (the performance of A)" better). On the other hand, if you talk about how something is "x times as good", you are looking at the whole thing, not just the difference, so in this case, B would be 3 times as good.
Same with percentages: if card A has performance "1" and card B has performance "3", then B is 200% better than A, while at the same time B's performance is 300% that of A.
People say that you get the "flu" from the flu vaccine because "flu" has become such a generic term for being ill. People say they have the "stomach flu" when they have norovirus or food poisoning of some kind. They say they have a "touch of the flu" when they have a cold. They don't realize that influenza is a specific illness that has a very specific set of symptoms. This is a pet peeve of mine.
Sure Nintendo has a bit of a reputation for being rather nannyish but come on, a 4 hour window for 18 rated games? It sounds completely absurd.
I'm guessing this is either complete bullshit, or there's some parental control enabled by default buried in the options somewhere.
This is only for BUYING that 18+ content, you then can play it at any time of the day you want.
Which does not really make sense either, because surely the big problem is not kids buying 18+ games - kids PLAYING those games is bad. And if Daddy stays up late to buy his 18+ triple-X-rated games, those games will be on the console the next day when his kids want to play, so what is the point of this shopping restriction...
and the version that hit the torrent sites was a cracked DRM version bought from a shop
Isn't that the point of release groups to "crack" stuff as some kind of trophy ? There isn't a lot of pride in it otherwise.
Yes, the whole point of releasing a cracked game is usually not to make the game available to the whole world for free, that is just a side-effect. The groups want to be a.) the first to defeat the DRM and b.) the one who releases the "best" crack (i.e. game is actually working correctly after removing the DRM). How many people then download the game is irrelevant, it's all about "oh, group xyz was the first to release a working cracked version of that game !"
So it is not THAT surprising that the version of "the witcher" which appeared on the torrent side was based on a DRM'd version of the game, the release groups are not interested in the non-DRM version, because there's no fame to be found in offering a non-DRM game - and why would anybody who bought the non-DRM game upload it somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE6Kdo1AQmY
A video worth thinking about.
So he learned how to plug into the can-bus and send messages. How is that a security hack??
Because, as linked to in the article, stuff like this is also possible by hacking into the car via a cellular phone connection:
"In their remote experiment, the researchers were able to undermine the security protecting the cellular phone in the vehicle they bought and then insert malicious software. This allowed them to send commands to the car’s electronic control unit — the nerve center of a vehicle’s electronics system — which in turn made it possible to override various vehicle controls. "
You can do what you want at home, but if your kid's going to be sharing a space with others then you've got to respect those others' basic right to health.
Exactly. If a child has not been vaccinated and there are no valid reasons for not vaccinating (e.g allergies or whatever), that child should not be allowed in public schools / kindergarten.
In Germany, the large political parties are thinking about mandatory vaccinations: http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/zahl-der-masern-ausbrueche-steigt-union-und-spd-erwaegen-impf-pflicht-fuer-alle_aid_1042699.html
To say "No, Thank You" in Germany, you say "Nein, Bitte". Yes, bitte is please, but that is not how it works in German. Another common saying in German is "Wie Bitte?" which literally means "How Please?" It is used for "What did you say?" or "What was that again?"
Actually "no, thank you" in German is "Nein, danke". Nobody say "Nein bitte" around here.
I have gotten my phone out of my pocket during a movie in two situations: (1) when the movie is supremely boring or it's dragging on, and I want to check the time--which I do as stealthily as possible so as not to let the illumination of the screen be obtrusive to others around me
Whatever happened to wrist watches? I feel like an old fart for actually looking at my watch when I want to know what time it is. Now get off my lawn.
My new high-end HP running Win 7-64 with 32GB RAM takes 5 minutes to boot..
I know that HP sometimes make it hard to find the power button on their PC, but that is a bit ridiculous.
It's not as bad as haters love to say it is. 0-60 in under 10 seconds in "power" mode puts it ahead of most fuel economy cars and ungimped sedans.
Well, it's definitely not "horribly slow", but it's also not "speedy" in the sense of "faster than I would expect a car of that size to be". From what I understand, the Prius has like 130-140hp and does like 10s 0-60? A 122hp Volkswagen Golf does 0-60 in 9.3 and a 140hp one does 0-60 in 8.4. So the Prius is "comparable", but definitely a bit slower than a similarly-sized standard car, most likely due to the weight (standard Prius 1440-1500 kg, while the 140hp Golf is 1268kg).
I see no reason to believe that the picture in question has been created by using several photos and copying/pasting people or heads around, but the lighting DEFINITELY looks "fake" (heavily edited) to me. Not only the light, also the colours. For example, the old guy (2nd from the left, holding the left child) - his head just looks unrealistically bright. Or the glasses guy two to the right of him. He definitely is in the shadow, yet his face is not dark at all. And the colours - on the hackerfactor page, compare the face of the guy holding the right child in the "fake" pic with his face in the picture just below that one. In the unedited pic, his face is a dark red/brown, completely unlike the world press photo picture.
So - completely faked? No. But definitely heavily edited, and then it's a question of whether they wanted heavily edited pictures in their competition, or instead want "unaltered" pictures. In other words, whether they want pictures which "wow" the observer because the photographer captured a special, noteworthy moment or because the photographer used Photoshop to make a picture TECHNICALLY "perfect".
Steam forces their own DRM, Steamworks, on all games. Unlike some other DD servers (Impulse for example) there is no capability to release a game without the built-in DRM. Publishers can use additional DRM as well, but Steamworks is mandatory.
It's pretty low key DRM over all, most people are ok with it (I am) but it is DRM. You have to have Steam running and be logged in to your account to be able to play a game. You don't have to be online, you can cache your credentials and play offline, but you must have Steam running and logged in or you cannot play a game.
Many people are ok with Steam DRM, I'm one of them, but don't be disingenuous and claim there isn't DRM. There is and it is required.
This is not true. I am able to run several of my games which I bought over Steam without having the actual Steam client running - by simply starting the game executable from Windows Explorer. Steam DRM is NOT a requirement for all games distributed via Steam. Granted, most do use it though.
Why doesn't XP mode work? XP mode is just a virtual machine running Windows XP. Maybe Microsoft left something out is all I can think of.
Because support for XP mode will end next year, too.
Yup. The easiest is to upgrade to windows 7 Pro or Ultimate and install XP Mode
XP mode won't fix what this whole thing is about, that support for Windows XP will end next year and continuing to run it will turn into a security risk. Windows 7's XP mode is nothing else than running Windows XP in a VM, and Microsoft will officially stop support for it next year, too.
Just bought 5 PCs from Dell, with Windows 7 Pro. No downgrading or BS... What are you talking about?
Microsoft not selling Win 7 licenses anymore does not mean that there are no unsold Win 7 licenses around on the market. So Dell probably still HAS licenses sitting around and won't be able to sell computers with Win 7 anymore once those are gone.
My guess? Not that many. In my house I have two desktops and one laptop PC, one tablet, three smartphones and one dumbphone. The phones and tablets are all newer than the PCs, but we still use the PCs all the time. I just don't need to replace/rebuild my PC every 18 months like I did most of the 90's. Even gaming is fine on a computer several years old if you are willing to play on less than MAX everything. Games do a much better job of scaling. The new games are going to look and play pretty much as well as they did when your computer was new, they just are not going to look any better. Oh, and there are probably at least a couple dozen great games on Steam for $9.99 that you didn't play 4 years ago that will go great with you 5 year old machine.
The PC isn't dead, it's just a mature market.
This is pretty much it. I remember back in the lat 90s/early 00s, when I upgraded the motherboard/CPU/graphics card of my gaming machine about every half year, because the newer hardware actually gave a huge benefit in gaming performance. I remember not being able to run new games at decent settings until I got the next upgrade, because you constantly kept running into hardware limitations (CPU not fast enough, graphics card not good enough to run at more than 800x600, etc.).
And there was tons of new hardware which actually gave benefits (from the "this new screen can run 1024x768 at non-interlaced" to graphics cards switching from ISA to VLB to PCI to PCIE, to graphics cards actually using 3D (old 3dfx cards, then Nvidia TNT and so on) to RAM increasing more and more to hard disks increasing in size and so on).
These days, it does not really matter much if you have 8GB or 16GB RAM, if you have 1TB or 4 TB disk space, if you have a Core2 Duo CPU or a current i7, if you have a GeForce 680 or still a 460. It all still works fine, more or less. Only if you want to play the absolute latest 3D action shooter in the highest resolution at the highest details settings - then you actually need a high end CPU and a high end graphics card. But there are not that many of those games around, and most of the time they are not actually fun to play anyway (except for the short "ooooh nice graphics" moment). So why upgrade? There's no need to anymore, except if you actually like building PCs or if your old hardware is acting up and you need to replace it because it is failing.
Win98SE runs just fine in VMware Workstation, hardest part was finding all the "latest" update rollup packages for it on the internet, since the built-in windows update is no longer supported by Microsoft.
True, the 1541 was awfully slow, even for its time. The fastest floppy I had at the time was the one hooked up to my Apple ][e. with two drives, diskmuncher would copy a floppy in 11 seconds, vs *way* longer using fasthack'em on the 64
That's why real men used DolphinDOS for their C64/1541. It could read a whole floppy disk in 4-5 seconds.
This car doesn't have a "key", it has a button that says "Start/Stop".
Exactly. And since the button is connected to a computer, any malfunction big enough will result in the button doing absolutely nothing at all when you press it to turn off the engine.
They're going to publish the log data which should prove interesting, but apparently he didn't charge the car completely. For a range test. If the log shows he didn't charge it all the way, then I'd call that quite a valid reason. It's borderline libel.
As I understand it, he DID charge the car completely, as in "the display said charge completed". What he did not use was the special option, battery damage causing "100% charge, long range, do not use all the time" charging option,
But that was not the problem anyway, what caused him to be stranded was that the car battery decided to lose over half its charge overnight due to low temperatures, which caused the range to go from "can easily make it to the recharge point" to "cannot make it to the recharge point at all".
I'd like to see more real life tests like this, with real life problems, because those show best that electric vehicles simply are not a good replacement for a standard car yet except for VERY specific situations (like only driving less than 20 miles a day AND having a guaranteed recharge point at your place of work).
I concur, this machine isn't old at all by Slashdot Unix Graybeard Users standards. What should i call my HP-UX PA-RISC B2000 workstation after reading this story; manufactured somewhere around BC?
Pah B2000, newfangled crap! (looking at the HP 9000/712 in the corner)
I can't see the use of touch at the regular office desktop coming for a long time, unless people get a specific touch screen that replaces the keyboard.
The reason are screens are getting bigger all the time and with them being bigger they have to sit back farther from the user. Then you have to use the touch screen you have to move from your normal arm position.
Exactly. Some people keep telling me "touch screens are the next big thing for the PC", but unless everybody switches from a desktop computer to a tablet PC or a notebook with a touch screen, I just cannot see that happening. Yes, there are 23" etc. displays with touch capabilities, but for exactly the reasons you mentioned, they will never be something anybody will want to use for a office desktop PC as a touch interface. Even for only casual touch use (e.g. selecting an application in the Windows 8 home screen, or selecting a song/movie in your media playback application), it would literally be a pain to use. I have two 25" screens on my desktop, and they are for obvious reasons so far away from me when I sit at the desk that I would have to get up from my chair to be able to reach them. No way I would ever use a touch interface on these displays to select something every couple seconds or use multi touch to zoom/... stuff.
If card A has a performance of x (which I'll define as 1) and card B a performance of x+2, wouldn't that mean it's two times better?
The article keeps saying three times better, but wouldn't the correct way to phrase that be "It's three times as good?"
Similar things with percentages. If something has 200% the value of something else, it's twice as valuable and not two times more valuable, right?
I notice similar things in German, which is my main language. Am I just a grammar Nazi (badum-tis) or does that bother you too?
Yeah, since when you talk about how much BETTER something is than something else, you are describing the difference between the two things. So if card A has performance 1 and card B performance 3, then the difference is 2. So card B is 2 better (or, in this case, even "two times (the performance of A)" better). On the other hand, if you talk about how something is "x times as good", you are looking at the whole thing, not just the difference, so in this case, B would be 3 times as good.
Same with percentages: if card A has performance "1" and card B has performance "3", then B is 200% better than A, while at the same time B's performance is 300% that of A.
People say that you get the "flu" from the flu vaccine because "flu" has become such a generic term for being ill. People say they have the "stomach flu" when they have norovirus or food poisoning of some kind. They say they have a "touch of the flu" when they have a cold. They don't realize that influenza is a specific illness that has a very specific set of symptoms. This is a pet peeve of mine.
Actually you cannot get the flu from many of the modern vaccines, because you do not receive the actual dead/weakened viruses at all. Look up e.g. subunit vaccines http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/Flu/Research/vaccineResearch/pages/technologies.aspx
One recent example: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/12/data-helps-rebut-the-violent-video-games-cause-shootings-argument/
Sure Nintendo has a bit of a reputation for being rather nannyish but come on, a 4 hour window for 18 rated games? It sounds completely absurd.
I'm guessing this is either complete bullshit, or there's some parental control enabled by default buried in the options somewhere.
This is only for BUYING that 18+ content, you then can play it at any time of the day you want.
Which does not really make sense either, because surely the big problem is not kids buying 18+ games - kids PLAYING those games is bad. And if Daddy stays up late to buy his 18+ triple-X-rated games, those games will be on the console the next day when his kids want to play, so what is the point of this shopping restriction...
The thing about suicide missions most people aren't considering is body disposal.
Well, they thought about that question:
http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/19-faq-health/205-what-if-one-of-the-mars-inhabitants-passes-away
and the version that hit the torrent sites was a cracked DRM version bought from a shop
Isn't that the point of release groups to "crack" stuff as some kind of trophy ? There isn't a lot of pride in it otherwise.
Yes, the whole point of releasing a cracked game is usually not to make the game available to the whole world for free, that is just a side-effect. The groups want to be a.) the first to defeat the DRM and b.) the one who releases the "best" crack (i.e. game is actually working correctly after removing the DRM). How many people then download the game is irrelevant, it's all about "oh, group xyz was the first to release a working cracked version of that game !"
So it is not THAT surprising that the version of "the witcher" which appeared on the torrent side was based on a DRM'd version of the game, the release groups are not interested in the non-DRM version, because there's no fame to be found in offering a non-DRM game - and why would anybody who bought the non-DRM game upload it somewhere.