Can somebody use this to look inside the mummified remains of all these AC's heads to see what causes them to think it is OK to shit literary diarrhea all over in here about republicans, the SCOTUS pick, and all that? Same with that racist fuck going on about the GNAA or whatever the fuck he keeps railing about, or possibly even APK and his absurdity...
Seriously, You can basically be guaranteed that those assclowns are gonna smear their crap all over every story that comes through here, first thing. It gets depressing after awhile.
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On a more serious, and on topic note; This is a very interesting thing indeed. Even better if they can make a mobile xray version of it, as then they could do minimal disturbance archeology and anthropology.
It could have other uses as well, such as metallurgical analysis of damaged parts (such as from an airplane crash), and in the geological sciences as well.
Given that it is impossible to do what this disgruntled worker demands (which is to pre-filter the offensive content, that THEY are hired to filter!!), what I see happening instead is the addition of new job requirements...
Applicant for this position must have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy or emotional reaction to offensive media, and must be able to endure hours of review in the detection, flagging, and removal process of such media. Items that the applicant must have dulled reactions to include but are not limited to, deep fake pornography, child abuse, including sexual exploitation of children, animal abuse, including sexual exploitation of animals, and offensive political rhetoric.
Applicants are expected to work overtime as instructed by supervisors to meet platform quality standards at corporate mandated deadlines, including weekdays and holidays, as required.
So, Mr Smith. I assume that you have reviewed and agreed to our initial screening waiver while we administer the 4CHAN-Reddit test battery to determine your candidacy for this position-- are you ready to proceed?
Excellent! This equipment will measure your emotional responses to the images and other content in this test battery, which have been selected at random from some of the most infamous place on the internet, and which represent a sampling of the worst kind of content humans are able to produce. The test will last 30 minutes, after which, we will review your data and inform you if you have made our candidate list.
1) Small. It fits neatly on a shelf, and is about the same size as a book. 2) Very low power (electricity wise). It uses 12v @2A. Wooo. Such consumption. 3) Not that weak really. It has a dual core Armv7 SoC running at ~1ghz, with 512mb of RAM, a SATA controller, a gigabit ethernet controller, and a USB3 controller. 4) Not that expensive. Especially now that it is an end of life clearance item.
It makes a pretty decent minecraft server, for instance. It would also make a good collection point for video surveillance systems using IP cameras (with backup to a better remote host at regular intervals).
When planning *ANY* purchase, you should know exactly what you are getting, and why you are getting it. The advertised "persona cloud" functionality is *JUST* openvpn, being wrapped by WD's server front endpoints. (The MyCloud opens a stateful connection from inside your NAT firewall to the WD server farm, which then presents an accessable entrypoint to other users.) It is TOTALLY just a gimmick.
Indeed. This CVE has been known about, and known by WD for at least 2 firmware updates.
WD seems staunchly unwilling to fix it. For whatever reason.
Personally I find the software that runs on the MyCloud units to be... Sub-par on a wide assortment of levels, and have gone full custom debian some time ago. The device is MUCH more responsive without running ufraw-batch all the fucking time, and without a huge chunk of memory getting gobbled up by the ramdisk or WD's proprietary indexing daemon.
I also get the benefits of a much more modern kernel (really, these things run a 3.x kernel! Blech!) with zram support (so the disk can actually go to fucking sleep, and not wake up when there is a paging operation).
Sure, it requires you to know how to manage a linux server--- but the benefits!:P
The Gen2's hardware is really not that bad for something the size of a small book, and which uses very little electricity. It can do a surprising number of tasks.
(~1ghz dual core ARMv7 processor, 512mb RAM, gigabit wired ethernet, USB2 port-- for those interested)
There are at least 3 kinds of MyCloud out there, not counting the multi-bay devices, which are probably likewise vunerable-- stay with me.
First are the two generations of mycloud "personal cloud" devices. The last is the "Mycloud Home" device, which is more of a personal media server than an actual NAS. Of the first two, the generation 1 is possibly fixable by the end user easily. It uses a REAL root file system on persistent storage, meaning you can go in and make changes to the web UI and pals if you want to. The second generation, however, is a real bitch. I will wax philosophical on this latter model, as the multi-bay devices (EX2, EX2 ultra, and pals) are likewise afflicted, and based on the same codebase. In fact, you can poke at a system identification value, and enable features on the single bay units that are selling points on the more expensive dual bay versions, because they run the exact same software.
The gen 2 MyCloud uses an initial ramdisk backed root file system, into which a cramfs container is mounted by the init script. The web UI and pals are hosted by this cramfs container, so unless you want to bake a brand new container to fix the CVE, you are boned.
Also, the single bay mycloud units are now End of Life, as WD is no longer making them. They have switched whole hog to the MyCloud Home device, which is not a NAS appliance at all.
Now, why I really dont give a flying rat's ass about the CVE:
The MyCloud units DO NOT perform any signature checking against the kernel and ramdisk that the bootloader starts.
SO-- You can TOTALLY replace that epic clusterfuck WD put on it, and replace it with a completely sane and sanitary minimalist debian installation, which lacks a web GUI to attack in the first place.
Gen2 (and similar units) use uBoot. There are lots of good tools for making uBoot images and ramdisks. This system is easily made full-custom.
Even if milk, flour, eggs, and sugar could be obtained for 0$, people would still buy cakes from the store.
Why? People will pay for convenience. Specifically, the convenience to free up their time for other, more desirable or productive tasks.
So, even if all the ingredients could be obtained for a genuinely 0$ price point, mom will STILL pay to have a cake made for her, for her little girl's 6th birthday party, because mom is busy doing other things and can better use the hour of her time that would be spent making the cake and (trying to) frosting it herself. Instead, she could be arranging for the party, or checking invites.
Same is true in software installation settings. Sure, the source code and tools are freely available. Do you have the time to spend every month or so vetting the compilation chain, building the suite you use from source, then vetting all the components built right? Or-- would you rather pay a nominal fee to a trusted source--- specifically, the very same group that maintains the free software you are using?
"Good user experience" is very subjective, and very "how I use the phone!" specific.
Not everyone is looking for the same thing in a phone.
For instance, a recent purchase I made from ebay is a modified Motorola Photon Q.
Normally, this phone is incapable of accepting a SIM card, and is locked to Sprint. However, a simple hardware mod removes the baked on SIM module, and attaches a push-push sim card slot instead.
After that, and enabling carrier unlocking, it will accept any sim, even international.
Why bother? It is the most modern phone with a slide-out keyboard. If you use your phone for more than just making calls (you would be surprised how useful being able to jam on an SSH session while on the go can be) then this kind of mod is damn handy, and not being stuck 6 years in the past as far as android is concerned (Did I mention this bad-boy supports LineageOS?:P) and having a fairly decent hardware package along with that swanky keyboard is fan fucking tastic--- If you are into that kind of thing..
If all you want is to poke at facebook, post photos to instagram, or do all that social media shit-- you will want a more mainstream phone.
So, again-- what EXACTLY are you looking for in a phone?
This would be a neat feature for the.1% as well, if you could explicitly define what service back-end provides the TRR. Then it is just a redundant failsafe DNS alternative that you can still control.
The issue is not that there is an alternative resolver that can work even when DNS is down; the issue is that it makes a decision for you that you don't like-- specifically, the choice of who is providing the resolution services. If they give you that control too, then this "issue" disappears completely.
I am not discounting the latter-- I specifically mentioned it as the elephant in the room--- The former is simply not true. The data shows that they get more money with the lower price point, and more customers which they drag away from piracy by making piracy less appealing, due to the pirates making more ancillary purchases through better access.
They will make MORE money by attracting customers with better offerings than they will by being balls-trippin power hungry douche canoes.
They just THINK they will make more money, if they can-- Just SOMEHOW-- *FORCE* those "evil, dirty pirates!" into "PAYING FULL PRICE!"
Even though all the market research data they have collected over the past two and a half decades indicates that pirates will go to EXTRAORDINARY lengths to avoid that, and will purposefully poison the well to prevent such tactics from being employed against others, and will undertake such actions as if they were divine missions from on high.
So, again--- the elephant in the room is that they desire that power trip more than they desire to actually make money--- Because all the data shows that if they re-price and re-market their product according to WHAT THE MARKET ACTUALLY WANTS, (Instead of what THEY want), they will make more total sales, and more total ancillary sales, and produce more total revenue than they currently do with the region restrictions, DRM, and other hoo-ha shoehorned in.
The data is right there, staring them in the face, and refusing to blink, and there they are-- doing everything they fucking can to ignore it, and pretend that it is not what two and a half decades of verified consumer and market research is telling them to do.
They see the impossible scenario of "We get them *ALL* to pay *OUR* MSRP, and we make A FUCKING KILLING!" and they will do, (AND PAY) **ANYTHING** to make that happen, even though all their data indicates that it never will, and that all they are doing is wasting money and other resources.
Today, more than ever, there are tools to understand the user, and their desires, in alarmingly graphic detail.
This is both good, and bad, from both ends of the producer-consumer spectrum.
From the producer side, it utterly DESTROYS deeply cherished misconceptions about what the consumer actually wants, or what drives their purchases (and their lack of purchases.) For example, the time-honored canard of "Pirates just want artists to work for nothing!" and pals. No-- research has shown, REPEATEDLY that this is not the case. The pirate just does not want to deal with the obstructions of your distribution model.
From the consumer side, the analytics tools are seen as highly invasive, and downright creepy, even though they leverage public datasets, and group behavior models, rather than specific data in many circumstances.
But, like it or not, there is no denying the power of data driven marketing and service providence.
As was pointed out when Netflix hit the scene, Netflix alone did more to eliminate movie piracy than any hairbrained scheme created by the RIAA and its constellation of associate organizations ever did, using any of their technological "solutions" at that time. The reason was because access was greatly increased, cost was very affordable, and (at the time) anything you could not stream, you could rent by mail with little personal financial risk if you failed to return the disc.
Naturally, the response of the media industry was "Kill Netflix!", which they have been attempting to do ever since.
The simple truth of "Pirates are customers who wont put up with your obstructionist bullshit, but are perfectly OK with paying for a-la-carte for bulk anytime access, and overall, consume more media then their peers, and will make more aggregate purchases." is readily apparent, and has appeared every time this kind of thing is 'tested' in the market; Every time it has been shown that when this is done, piracy dries up to a tiny fraction of prior incidence rates, with a strong coordinating relation to convenience+pricepoint.
The elephant in the room, is that the 'desire' to force consumers into deals they do not wish to participate in (eg, via region restriction lockouts, DRM, and a host of other bullshit--- to generate artificial scarcity, to drive up unit prices artificially above what the consumer genuinely wishes to spend by exploitation of a monopoly status-- eg, such as via copyright) is stronger than their desire to actually make money.
In this era, we understand the consumer to an alarming degree.
The producers should use the same data driven mechanisms to scrutinize THEMSELVES, and let go of these tired and moth eaten ideas. I suspect that they are afraid of what they will find, given how intently they have been at ignoring what their consumer marketing research has shown them for the past 2 and a half decades, as it relates to piracy.
Hardware unique identifiers that are used as a supply chain or service identification lockout.
A simple identity tag is not what is intended. A tag that gets automatically interrogated by a fixed and central authority for the purposes of denial of service/blacklisting-- that is what I mean.
A VIN number is fine, as long as the VIN number is not part of a centrally enforced denial of service/tamper detection system.
Take for instance, hardware that is more than capable of running other things (take a nintendo switch for instance. Without the locked boot loader, it can run Linux just like any other tegra based system. Works great doing it too.) that is crippled by its retailer/OEM to only run a single ecosystem, designed to be locked down hard, where there is no viable alternative market space for software.
I am picking on Nintendo here, because of how they chose to combine hardware IDs with user IDs for their services. (Each console has a unique console certificate that is used to encrypt the eMMC module, preventing you from simply replacing it, even though it is modular-- for starters. This certificate is also used to ban the console if it is modified in any way nintendo does not like, even if those modifications are redacted/expunged.)
suppose for a moment that you purchase a second hand switch from say-- ebay, or a used item from Amazon. The console works perfectly fine, but has a banned certificate. (Or, it does not work properly, and has a bad eMMC module, which again, is modular.) You might have the right to repair the console, but you do not have access to the digital keys needed to replace or restore the eMMC's contents to factory defaults, and you do not have a means of compelling Nintendo to unban the console if they did so after doing the restoration.
These kinds of things are direct consequences of hardware based distribution control mechanisms, and are wholly incompatible with right to repair, and first sale doctrine type protections.
If the US government is going to start championing for consumer rights in the forms of right to repair type regulations, they are going to have to put a foot down on hardware based DRM mechanisms, which imply a fixed ecosystem for that hardware, and a sole point-of-authority on legitimate repair and return to service.
That means:
No locked boot loaders No hardware unique certificates or identifiers No hardware encrypted storage (software encrypted is fine)
Good luck getting companies like console makers to abide by those. They will tell you all about how those restrictions are absolutely required for their industry, and the like.
In short, the government has to either decide to shit or get off the pot on that. There is no compromise. Either those things are made illegal, and right to repair rules-- or right to repair dies, and locked hardware stays a thing.
A carefully selected group of these working in parallel could theoretically parse the entire possible set of reactions, given sufficient time. (Yes, I know that with infinite molecular weight, there is an infinite number of possible compounds. However, only so many heavy molecules are interesting or useful, and of those, there will be certain classes that are more interesting than others. This approach would permit investigation of pathways without actually expending reagents, once its models are accurate enough. That means after a certain amount of training, a theoretical molecule of interest could be presented to the AI, and it could shit out the ideal synthesis pathway, and the next efficient arbitrary "n" pathways.)
This is the kind of thing that is the beginning of universal replicators.
To be perfectly frank, when I see such interactions, I admit that my eye lingers--
However, it is not because I am greedily taking in the view of her curves or whatever. It is because I am trying to evaluate her body language, as a coarse alternative to the otherwise needed telepathy required to interpret the display.
EG,
"What is this woman thinking, being the only one to wear a red 2-piece suit and red heels, amongst peers wearing grey?"
"Is she broadcasting a power-message, or something else?"
Considering that I am asexual, and have precisely ZERO interest in attracting a mate, I invest precisely ZERO effort into being what is considered socially attractive. That is not to say I show up for work in an unhygienic state or something-- just that I do not take extra precaution about my attire other than it being clean, and work appropriate. This means that by most people's standards, I look a bit fugly. I am down with that, and dont care.
However, the people who broadcast for "power" take great exception to being watched by persons they consider "way below their level", and somebody fugly looking like myself has a pretty consistently high probability of inducing a negative thought when they notice being closely watched. Likewise for the "I am OK with being looked at" demographic.
I need to ascertain what their motive is for this display; It strongly determines other kind of office interraction, and is needed to understandhow and where This person fits in.
In more cut-throad environments, this has actually resulted in on-paper disciplinary hearinggs,
Women often wear clothing as a symbol of femininity/power over OTHER WOMEN-- EG, a woman may "overdress" for work, which sends the "I am ok with having my body's aesthetics enjoyed" message, when that message is not really intended. The intended message is "See bitches, I'm totally hotter than you, and I know it."
Then, after doing this, they file complaints when people "stop and notice", as the"WRONG" people (EG, male co-workers, and NOT the female ones) are the ones giving the lingering looks.
Since it is impossible to determine what the intent of such dress is (without suddenly developing telepathy), it is impossible to "enjoy" the display. Dangerous even, especially in light of how modern sexual harassment law is defined. (It really *IS* defined by the PERCEPTIONS of the person making the complaint, rather than actual circumstances--- meaning, that the person showed up to work in provocative glitter pasties with matching pumps is not a consideration; She did not want to be looked at like that by THOSE people, and they should be punished for their unwanted, lingering stares, etc.)
As for the former, which preceded this aside--- A humanist is a person who fundamentally believes in the dignity and sanctity of "person-hood", or "humanity." Extremism is perfectly possible within this demographic, just like any other ideology. It was not intended to imply that all secular humanists are extreme secular humanists who get paradoxically combative over their extremist positions. (paradoxical, as the notion of committing violence against another human is incompatible with most forms of secular humanism.) I thought this was sufficiently implied when I brought up the logical relationship between similarly extreme religious philosophy holders, and this kind of humanist. (I apologize if this was not sufficiently lamp-lit.)
Likewise one can be a feminist without being a raging misandrist-- This does not make the raging misandrist stop being de-facto, "A feminist."
The opening salvo about people in general selecting an arbitrary set of ideals is exactly that as well. A general observation about what individual humans do; the specifics of the ideals selected and why they were selected are individual to the person, but this does appear to happen. Each person has a conception of what an ideal meal is like, or an ideal vacation, etc. When a person then seeks a satisfying meal, or plans a luxury vacation, they seek to get as close as possible to these idealized conceptions of what those things should be like, out of the arbitrary preferences of their ideals.
The same is true of the modern humanist extremist-- the social justice warrior. This individual has a specific idealized form of social norm that they seek to always have when interacting with other people. What they fail to consider is that not everyone has the same idealized social interaction parameters that they do, and they react with violence (both physical and intellectual) when these ideals are not satisfied, in much the same way a person who expected a certain kind of food at the fancy restaurant my pitch a fit about it, or that a person may complain mightily to the manager of a fancy hotel for "ruining their vacation."
The problem is that "encounter at the restaurant" and "Luxury vacation" are both very exclusive things that exclude most other people from the fallout of the consequences of their choices being mandated, where "social interaction parameters", by their nature, impacts a whole society.
Very selfishly, they try to demand the whole society conform to their arbitrary parameters, then respond with violent outbursts when they are not satisfied, or when people engage socially in ways that best suit [i]THEM[/i] instead of the social justice warrior.
That's a fair cop AC- I will accept this criticism.
However, I would urge people that would turn off their minds because they encounter something like that, to reconsider. Poorly articulated but insightful commentary is still insightful, despite the poor articulation. Using very poor mnemonics like "He used the wrong "too", and makes run-on sentences. He must be an idiot, and so I wont listen." or "That is a poorly constructed example, he must not be very intelligent" is just intellectual laziness, and I heartily would advise against it.
If something is true, it does not matter who says it, how they say it, or how many grammatical or spelling errors they make when saying it. It is still true. Deciding "I wont listen; does not meet my arbitrary standards!" rather than actually critically analyzing what has been said, is not a sign of a high intellect, however much some folks here may wish to assert that it is. (No, arguments about "time" are not justifiable reasons. They are excuses.)
The issue really is quite simple, but fixing it is not.
The issue:
People (in general) develop an idealized set of conditions in their minds, and work tirelessly to attain that ideal. This is true for the religious prudes (like the afore mentioned nuns), and for the modern crop of humanists (to which the nuns were compared.)
These people have an ideal: Women should never be objectified, EVER. (EEEVAAARR).
This includes "OMG! He looked at me in a way that (I perceive) is lustful!" (Even though he could just be having a totally human reaction to the abnormal proportions of some part of that woman's anatomy. How knows, maybe she has a huge bedonkydonk butt that makes that "champaign" pic look tame, and his reaction is just because it is so out of the ordinary that he just cant help but notice. Could be any number of reasons in fact. Maybe he has nearsightedness, and was trying to read the teeny tiny text on the front of her shirt-- who knows.)
Since the *PERCEPTION* of being objectified is what is taken as the standard, rather than investigating what actually is happening, or going on-- we end up with absurdities like the current blatant double standards, with "painful to listen to" rhetoric espousing how the insistence of actually getting to the bottom of a circumstance is somehow sidelining women and their complaints... or something. (No, it's called *fairness*. Taking an unfounded complaint as gospel and giving the other side no recourse is *UNFAIR*, and investigating the complaint is how you determine if actual objectification happened or not. No, insisting that due diligence be undertaken is not some code-speak for denying women their rights to being treated like human beings, or some other imagined thing. No, this is not invitation for a deluge of cherry picked anecdotes or assertions that the process has been used to subvert or oppress women. It is a statement of simple fact-- If you do not take the effort to get all the data, you are purposefully distorting your image of reality. Investigating a complaint is just assuring that all possible data is collected before making a decision, and is really the only SENSIBLE way to approach a 2 sided argument. The presence of penises or vaginas makes no important distinction. It is just as true of complaints between two men, and between two women, as between a woman and a man, or a man and a woman.)
Fixing the problem requires wresting away the presumption that the *perception* of a slight is equivalent to having been slighted, and the restoration of the requirement that intent to harm or cause upset be demonstrated and proven.
For the people which hold these unrealistic idealized perceptions, this is "GOING BACKWARDS!!" and "PUSHING WOMAN'S RIGHTS BACK A DECADE OR MORE!" and a host of other screaming and raving.
There will be wild accusations that the burden of proving intent is just some evil attempt to shut down poor disenfranchised people in favor of the patriarchy, or some such. That this is the wrong direction to take. etc.
Historically, this modality of thinking (the idealist's hardline stance) is, in general (eg, the notion that a (favored) group can make unsubstantiated claims, and that they must be taken as if they are unquestionably true, no matter what, in the general sense-- not that women must always be believed in specific, which is just a specific example of the general pattern I am mentioning here) what has enabled some of mankind's most horrific atrocities.
For the same reasons we assert that the pope's "Infallibility" is bullshit, or that we assert that there is no "Divine right" for kings, etc--- we cannot accept that a woman's belief that she has been the target of an unwanted advance is the same thing as her having been assaulted. Again-- There can be all kinds of perfectly benign reasons for that "Lecherous, perverted stare!" etc. When you deny that those reasons can and do exist (because the woman is 100% CERTAIN that it could not possibly be that, because damnit, she FEELS victimized, an
We need a proactive "I do not respond to notifications, texts, or other attempts to gain my attention" message.
I am sick as fuck at the constant "Site $FOO wants to send you notifications, ?" I get on the internet these days. NO, I DO NOT WANT YOUR NOTIFICATIONS, I NEVER ASKED TO BE NOTIFIED ABOUT ANYTHING FROM YOU, I AM JUST PASSIVELY READING YOUR SITE. LEAVE ME TO READ IN PEACE.
It gets even worse when these sites detect "oh, you are using a mobile device according to your agent string! I will try some underhanded assfuckery to try to get your device to start automatically accepting notifications! Because we just KNOW YOU WILL LOVE THAT!" and start hammering my device as long as I have the browser open.
No, I want a feature that I can turn on, system wide, on all my devices that sets the default mode of "NO, DO NOT WANT, DO NOT SEND OR TRY FUCKERY TO BE ABLE TO SEND." Optionally with a password locked means to whitelist certain things.
Sadly, the powers that be in the universe seem hell bent on ensuring that every nanosecond of time is being spent being accosted by an endless and relentless torrent of "HEY HEY HEY LISTEN HEY HEY HEY!" from site operators, advertisers, and application developers, all trying to squeeze profit from the forced eyeball time.
As you rightly mentioned prior, anyone who uses a poorly defined boogey man to sell you on an idea, policy, or product-- is not someone that should ever be considered trustworthy.
Typically, the sales reps for such services, lobbyists for such policies, or apostles of such products--- are completely and totally unable to tell you the finer details of exactly *HOW* that service, policy, or product is able to defend against their boogey man, because they rely on an inherently unspecific and ephemeral view held by the majority of persons to make their cases.
You might ask (of the sales rep), "Yes, I know about heap randomization and the use of hypervisors to catch possible overflow based escalations and the like-- that's script-kiddy stuff, and while I am glad your product implements that, I am much more interested in how your product claims to be able to "stop hackers." As you may be aware, many modern processors have features that are now considered design flaws. Especially those centered around speculative execution as a means of improving branch prediction, and mitigating the risk of a cache miss as a performance enhancement, which has previously unconsidered behaviors that allow a clever individual to deduce enough information about a system, and do so reliably, that even with heap randomization and a hardware based hypervisor, they can gain consistent control of a stack to not only smash it, but also gain control of the hypervisor itself. What exactly does your product do to alleviate these newer vulnerabilities that allow these old methods to be used so much more aggressively, and with so much more potential risk, given that many production systems these days are virtual servers, and gaining control of the hardware hypervisor would give the attacker control over many, MANY production platforms?"
The result will likely be a stupefied look, and a lot of stammering.
This is because the sales rep is not a security expert. The sales rep is a SALES expert.
Now, he could probably talk your ear off about clever things to do to trick people into buying a product they do not need, or talk shop about how their parent company makes unrealistic sales goals in the endless search for more money-- and may even hold some very insightful ideas about generalized human psychology that revolves around wants, and how to pitch products to make them seem to be able to satisfy those wants, regardless of what those wants actually are---- But actually answering a deep question about the product he is hawking? Outside his knowledge domain. His job is to sell you a product or service; to convince you to part with your money either right now, or on a contractually recurring basis-- and to do so as often as is possible.
When you really consider that a modern corporate entity is not a moral actor of any kind, and is instead a very immoral actor held at financial gunpoint by a legal system to actually fulfill the promises it makes in exchange for money-- and that it does everything it possibly can to get the most money with the least actual delivery of promise-- you will be better able to see the situation. (or at least, see it the way I see it.)
News organizations have long since stopped being about actually informing the public in a nominally efficient form-factor. Take a long hard look at say-- Fox News, (since it is so goddamn blatant..) and honestly tell me that they are trying to be informative, rather than seeking to make money by entertaining the existing biases of their viewers, with stories and "experts" that are cherry picked to do exactly that.
Or, in the more mainstream internet--- That news organizations have not adopted similar tactics to use targeted big data techniques to promote news articles that you are likely to find more agreeable (EG, to "like"), so that you spend more time on their news site, generating ad impressions--- rather than giving everyone the same news experience, that has been tailored to be factually sound, and informative about topics of national or global int
Slashdot Mirror
AC, this is not difficult.
The substances being tested are crystalline solids at room temperature. They are dissolved in a solvent.
In this case, at a concentration of 1mg : 1mL, as an aqueous solution.
Granted, that is pretty damn concentrated. But still.
Must have been somebody else's mom AC.
Mine is dead, and cremated. Has been for over a year.
Maybe you should get your eyes checked? ;)
Can somebody use this to look inside the mummified remains of all these AC's heads to see what causes them to think it is OK to shit literary diarrhea all over in here about republicans, the SCOTUS pick, and all that? Same with that racist fuck going on about the GNAA or whatever the fuck he keeps railing about, or possibly even APK and his absurdity...
Seriously, You can basically be guaranteed that those assclowns are gonna smear their crap all over every story that comes through here, first thing. It gets depressing after awhile.
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On a more serious, and on topic note; This is a very interesting thing indeed. Even better if they can make a mobile xray version of it, as then they could do minimal disturbance archeology and anthropology.
It could have other uses as well, such as metallurgical analysis of damaged parts (such as from an airplane crash), and in the geological sciences as well.
Always good to have a shiny new tool.
Given that it is impossible to do what this disgruntled worker demands (which is to pre-filter the offensive content, that THEY are hired to filter!!), what I see happening instead is the addition of new job requirements...
So, Mr Smith. I assume that you have reviewed and agreed to our initial screening waiver while we administer the 4CHAN-Reddit test battery to determine your candidacy for this position-- are you ready to proceed?
Excellent! This equipment will measure your emotional responses to the images and other content in this test battery, which have been selected at random from some of the most infamous place on the internet, and which represent a sampling of the worst kind of content humans are able to produce. The test will last 30 minutes, after which, we will review your data and inform you if you have made our candidate list.
(Begin horror scene from A Clockwork Orange)
-----
You know, that kind of thing.
Not really.
The hardware is:
1) Small. It fits neatly on a shelf, and is about the same size as a book.
2) Very low power (electricity wise). It uses 12v @2A. Wooo. Such consumption.
3) Not that weak really. It has a dual core Armv7 SoC running at ~1ghz, with 512mb of RAM, a SATA controller, a gigabit ethernet controller, and a USB3 controller.
4) Not that expensive. Especially now that it is an end of life clearance item.
It makes a pretty decent minecraft server, for instance. It would also make a good collection point for video surveillance systems using IP cameras (with backup to a better remote host at regular intervals).
When planning *ANY* purchase, you should know exactly what you are getting, and why you are getting it. The advertised "persona cloud" functionality is *JUST* openvpn, being wrapped by WD's server front endpoints. (The MyCloud opens a stateful connection from inside your NAT firewall to the WD server farm, which then presents an accessable entrypoint to other users.) It is TOTALLY just a gimmick.
Indeed. This CVE has been known about, and known by WD for at least 2 firmware updates.
WD seems staunchly unwilling to fix it. For whatever reason.
Personally I find the software that runs on the MyCloud units to be... Sub-par on a wide assortment of levels, and have gone full custom debian some time ago. The device is MUCH more responsive without running ufraw-batch all the fucking time, and without a huge chunk of memory getting gobbled up by the ramdisk or WD's proprietary indexing daemon.
I also get the benefits of a much more modern kernel (really, these things run a 3.x kernel! Blech!) with zram support (so the disk can actually go to fucking sleep, and not wake up when there is a paging operation).
Sure, it requires you to know how to manage a linux server--- but the benefits! :P
The Gen2's hardware is really not that bad for something the size of a small book, and which uses very little electricity. It can do a surprising number of tasks.
(~1ghz dual core ARMv7 processor, 512mb RAM, gigabit wired ethernet, USB2 port-- for those interested)
First up--
There are at least 3 kinds of MyCloud out there, not counting the multi-bay devices, which are probably likewise vunerable-- stay with me.
First are the two generations of mycloud "personal cloud" devices. The last is the "Mycloud Home" device, which is more of a personal media server than an actual NAS. Of the first two, the generation 1 is possibly fixable by the end user easily. It uses a REAL root file system on persistent storage, meaning you can go in and make changes to the web UI and pals if you want to. The second generation, however, is a real bitch. I will wax philosophical on this latter model, as the multi-bay devices (EX2, EX2 ultra, and pals) are likewise afflicted, and based on the same codebase. In fact, you can poke at a system identification value, and enable features on the single bay units that are selling points on the more expensive dual bay versions, because they run the exact same software.
The gen 2 MyCloud uses an initial ramdisk backed root file system, into which a cramfs container is mounted by the init script. The web UI and pals are hosted by this cramfs container, so unless you want to bake a brand new container to fix the CVE, you are boned.
Also, the single bay mycloud units are now End of Life, as WD is no longer making them. They have switched whole hog to the MyCloud Home device, which is not a NAS appliance at all.
Now, why I really dont give a flying rat's ass about the CVE:
The MyCloud units DO NOT perform any signature checking against the kernel and ramdisk that the bootloader starts.
SO-- You can TOTALLY replace that epic clusterfuck WD put on it, and replace it with a completely sane and sanitary minimalist debian installation, which lacks a web GUI to attack in the first place.
Gen2 (and similar units) use uBoot. There are lots of good tools for making uBoot images and ramdisks. This system is easily made full-custom.
A better way to put this:
Even if milk, flour, eggs, and sugar could be obtained for 0$, people would still buy cakes from the store.
Why? People will pay for convenience. Specifically, the convenience to free up their time for other, more desirable or productive tasks.
So, even if all the ingredients could be obtained for a genuinely 0$ price point, mom will STILL pay to have a cake made for her, for her little girl's 6th birthday party, because mom is busy doing other things and can better use the hour of her time that would be spent making the cake and (trying to) frosting it herself. Instead, she could be arranging for the party, or checking invites.
Same is true in software installation settings. Sure, the source code and tools are freely available. Do you have the time to spend every month or so vetting the compilation chain, building the suite you use from source, then vetting all the components built right? Or-- would you rather pay a nominal fee to a trusted source--- specifically, the very same group that maintains the free software you are using?
Right.. Exactly.
"Good user experience" is very subjective, and very "how I use the phone!" specific.
Not everyone is looking for the same thing in a phone.
For instance, a recent purchase I made from ebay is a modified Motorola Photon Q.
Normally, this phone is incapable of accepting a SIM card, and is locked to Sprint. However, a simple hardware mod removes the baked on SIM module, and attaches a push-push sim card slot instead.
After that, and enabling carrier unlocking, it will accept any sim, even international.
Why bother? It is the most modern phone with a slide-out keyboard. If you use your phone for more than just making calls (you would be surprised how useful being able to jam on an SSH session while on the go can be) then this kind of mod is damn handy, and not being stuck 6 years in the past as far as android is concerned (Did I mention this bad-boy supports LineageOS? :P) and having a fairly decent hardware package along with that swanky keyboard is fan fucking tastic--- If you are into that kind of thing..
If all you want is to poke at facebook, post photos to instagram, or do all that social media shit-- you will want a more mainstream phone.
So, again-- what EXACTLY are you looking for in a phone?
This would be a neat feature for the .1% as well, if you could explicitly define what service back-end provides the TRR. Then it is just a redundant failsafe DNS alternative that you can still control.
The issue is not that there is an alternative resolver that can work even when DNS is down; the issue is that it makes a decision for you that you don't like-- specifically, the choice of who is providing the resolution services. If they give you that control too, then this "issue" disappears completely.
I am not discounting the latter-- I specifically mentioned it as the elephant in the room--- The former is simply not true. The data shows that they get more money with the lower price point, and more customers which they drag away from piracy by making piracy less appealing, due to the pirates making more ancillary purchases through better access.
They will make MORE money by attracting customers with better offerings than they will by being balls-trippin power hungry douche canoes.
They just THINK they will make more money, if they can-- Just SOMEHOW-- *FORCE* those "evil, dirty pirates!" into "PAYING FULL PRICE!"
Even though all the market research data they have collected over the past two and a half decades indicates that pirates will go to EXTRAORDINARY lengths to avoid that, and will purposefully poison the well to prevent such tactics from being employed against others, and will undertake such actions as if they were divine missions from on high.
So, again--- the elephant in the room is that they desire that power trip more than they desire to actually make money--- Because all the data shows that if they re-price and re-market their product according to WHAT THE MARKET ACTUALLY WANTS, (Instead of what THEY want), they will make more total sales, and more total ancillary sales, and produce more total revenue than they currently do with the region restrictions, DRM, and other hoo-ha shoehorned in.
The data is right there, staring them in the face, and refusing to blink, and there they are-- doing everything they fucking can to ignore it, and pretend that it is not what two and a half decades of verified consumer and market research is telling them to do.
They see the impossible scenario of "We get them *ALL* to pay *OUR* MSRP, and we make A FUCKING KILLING!" and they will do, (AND PAY) **ANYTHING** to make that happen, even though all their data indicates that it never will, and that all they are doing is wasting money and other resources.
Today, more than ever, there are tools to understand the user, and their desires, in alarmingly graphic detail.
This is both good, and bad, from both ends of the producer-consumer spectrum.
From the producer side, it utterly DESTROYS deeply cherished misconceptions about what the consumer actually wants, or what drives their purchases (and their lack of purchases.) For example, the time-honored canard of "Pirates just want artists to work for nothing!" and pals. No-- research has shown, REPEATEDLY that this is not the case. The pirate just does not want to deal with the obstructions of your distribution model.
From the consumer side, the analytics tools are seen as highly invasive, and downright creepy, even though they leverage public datasets, and group behavior models, rather than specific data in many circumstances.
But, like it or not, there is no denying the power of data driven marketing and service providence.
As was pointed out when Netflix hit the scene, Netflix alone did more to eliminate movie piracy than any hairbrained scheme created by the RIAA and its constellation of associate organizations ever did, using any of their technological "solutions" at that time. The reason was because access was greatly increased, cost was very affordable, and (at the time) anything you could not stream, you could rent by mail with little personal financial risk if you failed to return the disc.
Naturally, the response of the media industry was "Kill Netflix!", which they have been attempting to do ever since.
The simple truth of "Pirates are customers who wont put up with your obstructionist bullshit, but are perfectly OK with paying for a-la-carte for bulk anytime access, and overall, consume more media then their peers, and will make more aggregate purchases." is readily apparent, and has appeared every time this kind of thing is 'tested' in the market; Every time it has been shown that when this is done, piracy dries up to a tiny fraction of prior incidence rates, with a strong coordinating relation to convenience+pricepoint.
The elephant in the room, is that the 'desire' to force consumers into deals they do not wish to participate in (eg, via region restriction lockouts, DRM, and a host of other bullshit--- to generate artificial scarcity, to drive up unit prices artificially above what the consumer genuinely wishes to spend by exploitation of a monopoly status-- eg, such as via copyright) is stronger than their desire to actually make money.
In this era, we understand the consumer to an alarming degree.
The producers should use the same data driven mechanisms to scrutinize THEMSELVES, and let go of these tired and moth eaten ideas. I suspect that they are afraid of what they will find, given how intently they have been at ignoring what their consumer marketing research has shown them for the past 2 and a half decades, as it relates to piracy.
I should probably clarify--
Hardware unique identifiers that are used as a supply chain or service identification lockout.
A simple identity tag is not what is intended. A tag that gets automatically interrogated by a fixed and central authority for the purposes of denial of service/blacklisting-- that is what I mean.
A VIN number is fine, as long as the VIN number is not part of a centrally enforced denial of service/tamper detection system.
Take for instance, hardware that is more than capable of running other things (take a nintendo switch for instance. Without the locked boot loader, it can run Linux just like any other tegra based system. Works great doing it too.) that is crippled by its retailer/OEM to only run a single ecosystem, designed to be locked down hard, where there is no viable alternative market space for software.
I am picking on Nintendo here, because of how they chose to combine hardware IDs with user IDs for their services. (Each console has a unique console certificate that is used to encrypt the eMMC module, preventing you from simply replacing it, even though it is modular-- for starters. This certificate is also used to ban the console if it is modified in any way nintendo does not like, even if those modifications are redacted/expunged.)
suppose for a moment that you purchase a second hand switch from say-- ebay, or a used item from Amazon. The console works perfectly fine, but has a banned certificate. (Or, it does not work properly, and has a bad eMMC module, which again, is modular.) You might have the right to repair the console, but you do not have access to the digital keys needed to replace or restore the eMMC's contents to factory defaults, and you do not have a means of compelling Nintendo to unban the console if they did so after doing the restoration.
These kinds of things are direct consequences of hardware based distribution control mechanisms, and are wholly incompatible with right to repair, and first sale doctrine type protections.
If the US government is going to start championing for consumer rights in the forms of right to repair type regulations, they are going to have to put a foot down on hardware based DRM mechanisms, which imply a fixed ecosystem for that hardware, and a sole point-of-authority on legitimate repair and return to service.
That means:
No locked boot loaders
No hardware unique certificates or identifiers
No hardware encrypted storage (software encrypted is fine)
Good luck getting companies like console makers to abide by those. They will tell you all about how those restrictions are absolutely required for their industry, and the like.
In short, the government has to either decide to shit or get off the pot on that. There is no compromise. Either those things are made illegal, and right to repair rules-- or right to repair dies, and locked hardware stays a thing.
A carefully selected group of these working in parallel could theoretically parse the entire possible set of reactions, given sufficient time. (Yes, I know that with infinite molecular weight, there is an infinite number of possible compounds. However, only so many heavy molecules are interesting or useful, and of those, there will be certain classes that are more interesting than others. This approach would permit investigation of pathways without actually expending reagents, once its models are accurate enough. That means after a certain amount of training, a theoretical molecule of interest could be presented to the AI, and it could shit out the ideal synthesis pathway, and the next efficient arbitrary "n" pathways.)
This is the kind of thing that is the beginning of universal replicators.
To be perfectly frank, when I see such interactions, I admit that my eye lingers--
However, it is not because I am greedily taking in the view of her curves or whatever. It is because I am trying to evaluate her body language, as a coarse alternative to the otherwise needed telepathy required to interpret the display.
EG,
"What is this woman thinking, being the only one to wear a red 2-piece suit and red heels, amongst peers wearing grey?"
"Is she broadcasting a power-message, or something else?"
Considering that I am asexual, and have precisely ZERO interest in attracting a mate, I invest precisely ZERO effort into being what is considered socially attractive. That is not to say I show up for work in an unhygienic state or something-- just that I do not take extra precaution about my attire other than it being clean, and work appropriate. This means that by most people's standards, I look a bit fugly. I am down with that, and dont care.
However, the people who broadcast for "power" take great exception to being watched by persons they consider "way below their level", and somebody fugly looking like myself has a pretty consistently high probability of inducing a negative thought when they notice being closely watched. Likewise for the "I am OK with being looked at" demographic.
I need to ascertain what their motive is for this display; It strongly determines other kind of office interraction, and is needed to understandhow and where This person fits in.
In more cut-throad environments, this has actually resulted in on-paper disciplinary hearinggs,
A passing look is not sexual assault.
Assault happens when there is touching. I am indeed capable of sexually assaulting somebody. However, I have no sexual motive to do so.
Why do you think I was referring to assault, when I was clearly waxing philosophical about HARASSMENT. ??
Do you frequently make a habit of conflating related, but different things?
There is another disconnect there as well though.
Women often wear clothing as a symbol of femininity/power over OTHER WOMEN-- EG, a woman may "overdress" for work, which sends the "I am ok with having my body's aesthetics enjoyed" message, when that message is not really intended. The intended message is "See bitches, I'm totally hotter than you, and I know it."
Then, after doing this, they file complaints when people "stop and notice", as the"WRONG" people (EG, male co-workers, and NOT the female ones) are the ones giving the lingering looks.
Since it is impossible to determine what the intent of such dress is (without suddenly developing telepathy), it is impossible to "enjoy" the display. Dangerous even, especially in light of how modern sexual harassment law is defined. (It really *IS* defined by the PERCEPTIONS of the person making the complaint, rather than actual circumstances--- meaning, that the person showed up to work in provocative glitter pasties with matching pumps is not a consideration; She did not want to be looked at like that by THOSE people, and they should be punished for their unwanted, lingering stares, etc.)
As for the former, which preceded this aside--- A humanist is a person who fundamentally believes in the dignity and sanctity of "person-hood", or "humanity." Extremism is perfectly possible within this demographic, just like any other ideology. It was not intended to imply that all secular humanists are extreme secular humanists who get paradoxically combative over their extremist positions. (paradoxical, as the notion of committing violence against another human is incompatible with most forms of secular humanism.) I thought this was sufficiently implied when I brought up the logical relationship between similarly extreme religious philosophy holders, and this kind of humanist. (I apologize if this was not sufficiently lamp-lit.)
Likewise one can be a feminist without being a raging misandrist-- This does not make the raging misandrist stop being de-facto, "A feminist."
The opening salvo about people in general selecting an arbitrary set of ideals is exactly that as well. A general observation about what individual humans do; the specifics of the ideals selected and why they were selected are individual to the person, but this does appear to happen. Each person has a conception of what an ideal meal is like, or an ideal vacation, etc. When a person then seeks a satisfying meal, or plans a luxury vacation, they seek to get as close as possible to these idealized conceptions of what those things should be like, out of the arbitrary preferences of their ideals.
The same is true of the modern humanist extremist-- the social justice warrior. This individual has a specific idealized form of social norm that they seek to always have when interacting with other people. What they fail to consider is that not everyone has the same idealized social interaction parameters that they do, and they react with violence (both physical and intellectual) when these ideals are not satisfied, in much the same way a person who expected a certain kind of food at the fancy restaurant my pitch a fit about it, or that a person may complain mightily to the manager of a fancy hotel for "ruining their vacation."
The problem is that "encounter at the restaurant" and "Luxury vacation" are both very exclusive things that exclude most other people from the fallout of the consequences of their choices being mandated, where "social interaction parameters", by their nature, impacts a whole society.
Very selfishly, they try to demand the whole society conform to their arbitrary parameters, then respond with violent outbursts when they are not satisfied, or when people engage socially in ways that best suit [i]THEM[/i] instead of the social justice warrior.
Considering that all the people I work with know that I am asexual, I really dont feel threatened.
However, that this is "A Thing(tm)" is indeed a symptom of the problem I am referring to, yes.
That's a fair cop AC- I will accept this criticism.
However, I would urge people that would turn off their minds because they encounter something like that, to reconsider. Poorly articulated but insightful commentary is still insightful, despite the poor articulation. Using very poor mnemonics like "He used the wrong "too", and makes run-on sentences. He must be an idiot, and so I wont listen." or "That is a poorly constructed example, he must not be very intelligent" is just intellectual laziness, and I heartily would advise against it.
If something is true, it does not matter who says it, how they say it, or how many grammatical or spelling errors they make when saying it. It is still true. Deciding "I wont listen; does not meet my arbitrary standards!" rather than actually critically analyzing what has been said, is not a sign of a high intellect, however much some folks here may wish to assert that it is. (No, arguments about "time" are not justifiable reasons. They are excuses.)
The issue really is quite simple, but fixing it is not.
The issue:
People (in general) develop an idealized set of conditions in their minds, and work tirelessly to attain that ideal. This is true for the religious prudes (like the afore mentioned nuns), and for the modern crop of humanists (to which the nuns were compared.)
These people have an ideal: Women should never be objectified, EVER. (EEEVAAARR).
This includes "OMG! He looked at me in a way that (I perceive) is lustful!" (Even though he could just be having a totally human reaction to the abnormal proportions of some part of that woman's anatomy. How knows, maybe she has a huge bedonkydonk butt that makes that "champaign" pic look tame, and his reaction is just because it is so out of the ordinary that he just cant help but notice. Could be any number of reasons in fact. Maybe he has nearsightedness, and was trying to read the teeny tiny text on the front of her shirt-- who knows.)
Since the *PERCEPTION* of being objectified is what is taken as the standard, rather than investigating what actually is happening, or going on-- we end up with absurdities like the current blatant double standards, with "painful to listen to" rhetoric espousing how the insistence of actually getting to the bottom of a circumstance is somehow sidelining women and their complaints... or something. (No, it's called *fairness*. Taking an unfounded complaint as gospel and giving the other side no recourse is *UNFAIR*, and investigating the complaint is how you determine if actual objectification happened or not. No, insisting that due diligence be undertaken is not some code-speak for denying women their rights to being treated like human beings, or some other imagined thing. No, this is not invitation for a deluge of cherry picked anecdotes or assertions that the process has been used to subvert or oppress women. It is a statement of simple fact-- If you do not take the effort to get all the data, you are purposefully distorting your image of reality. Investigating a complaint is just assuring that all possible data is collected before making a decision, and is really the only SENSIBLE way to approach a 2 sided argument. The presence of penises or vaginas makes no important distinction. It is just as true of complaints between two men, and between two women, as between a woman and a man, or a man and a woman.)
Fixing the problem requires wresting away the presumption that the *perception* of a slight is equivalent to having been slighted, and the restoration of the requirement that intent to harm or cause upset be demonstrated and proven.
For the people which hold these unrealistic idealized perceptions, this is "GOING BACKWARDS!!" and "PUSHING WOMAN'S RIGHTS BACK A DECADE OR MORE!" and a host of other screaming and raving.
There will be wild accusations that the burden of proving intent is just some evil attempt to shut down poor disenfranchised people in favor of the patriarchy, or some such. That this is the wrong direction to take. etc.
Historically, this modality of thinking (the idealist's hardline stance) is, in general (eg, the notion that a (favored) group can make unsubstantiated claims, and that they must be taken as if they are unquestionably true, no matter what, in the general sense-- not that women must always be believed in specific, which is just a specific example of the general pattern I am mentioning here) what has enabled some of mankind's most horrific atrocities.
For the same reasons we assert that the pope's "Infallibility" is bullshit, or that we assert that there is no "Divine right" for kings, etc--- we cannot accept that a woman's belief that she has been the target of an unwanted advance is the same thing as her having been assaulted. Again-- There can be all kinds of perfectly benign reasons for that "Lecherous, perverted stare!" etc. When you deny that those reasons can and do exist (because the woman is 100% CERTAIN that it could not possibly be that, because damnit, she FEELS victimized, an
If it is too big for a single group or site to pull, then coordinate, distribute the slice load, and differentially pull the needed slices.
Then, once the data is secured, see about establishing a trust or group to maintain it free of tiny orange hands.
We need more than just an away message feature.
We need a proactive "I do not respond to notifications, texts, or other attempts to gain my attention" message.
I am sick as fuck at the constant "Site $FOO wants to send you notifications, ?" I get on the internet these days. NO, I DO NOT WANT YOUR NOTIFICATIONS, I NEVER ASKED TO BE NOTIFIED ABOUT ANYTHING FROM YOU, I AM JUST PASSIVELY READING YOUR SITE. LEAVE ME TO READ IN PEACE.
It gets even worse when these sites detect "oh, you are using a mobile device according to your agent string! I will try some underhanded assfuckery to try to get your device to start automatically accepting notifications! Because we just KNOW YOU WILL LOVE THAT!" and start hammering my device as long as I have the browser open.
No, I want a feature that I can turn on, system wide, on all my devices that sets the default mode of "NO, DO NOT WANT, DO NOT SEND OR TRY FUCKERY TO BE ABLE TO SEND." Optionally with a password locked means to whitelist certain things.
Sadly, the powers that be in the universe seem hell bent on ensuring that every nanosecond of time is being spent being accosted by an endless and relentless torrent of "HEY HEY HEY LISTEN HEY HEY HEY!" from site operators, advertisers, and application developers, all trying to squeeze profit from the forced eyeball time.
They can still be plastic, and still be biodegradable.
This looks like a job for potato dextrose based plastics, or even PLA.
https://www.lilyfld.com/bio-po...
https://www.webstaurantstore.c...
As you rightly mentioned prior, anyone who uses a poorly defined boogey man to sell you on an idea, policy, or product-- is not someone that should ever be considered trustworthy.
Typically, the sales reps for such services, lobbyists for such policies, or apostles of such products--- are completely and totally unable to tell you the finer details of exactly *HOW* that service, policy, or product is able to defend against their boogey man, because they rely on an inherently unspecific and ephemeral view held by the majority of persons to make their cases.
You might ask (of the sales rep), "Yes, I know about heap randomization and the use of hypervisors to catch possible overflow based escalations and the like-- that's script-kiddy stuff, and while I am glad your product implements that, I am much more interested in how your product claims to be able to "stop hackers." As you may be aware, many modern processors have features that are now considered design flaws. Especially those centered around speculative execution as a means of improving branch prediction, and mitigating the risk of a cache miss as a performance enhancement, which has previously unconsidered behaviors that allow a clever individual to deduce enough information about a system, and do so reliably, that even with heap randomization and a hardware based hypervisor, they can gain consistent control of a stack to not only smash it, but also gain control of the hypervisor itself. What exactly does your product do to alleviate these newer vulnerabilities that allow these old methods to be used so much more aggressively, and with so much more potential risk, given that many production systems these days are virtual servers, and gaining control of the hardware hypervisor would give the attacker control over many, MANY production platforms?"
The result will likely be a stupefied look, and a lot of stammering.
This is because the sales rep is not a security expert. The sales rep is a SALES expert.
Now, he could probably talk your ear off about clever things to do to trick people into buying a product they do not need, or talk shop about how their parent company makes unrealistic sales goals in the endless search for more money-- and may even hold some very insightful ideas about generalized human psychology that revolves around wants, and how to pitch products to make them seem to be able to satisfy those wants, regardless of what those wants actually are---- But actually answering a deep question about the product he is hawking? Outside his knowledge domain. His job is to sell you a product or service; to convince you to part with your money either right now, or on a contractually recurring basis-- and to do so as often as is possible.
When you really consider that a modern corporate entity is not a moral actor of any kind, and is instead a very immoral actor held at financial gunpoint by a legal system to actually fulfill the promises it makes in exchange for money-- and that it does everything it possibly can to get the most money with the least actual delivery of promise-- you will be better able to see the situation. (or at least, see it the way I see it.)
News organizations have long since stopped being about actually informing the public in a nominally efficient form-factor. Take a long hard look at say-- Fox News, (since it is so goddamn blatant..) and honestly tell me that they are trying to be informative, rather than seeking to make money by entertaining the existing biases of their viewers, with stories and "experts" that are cherry picked to do exactly that.
Or, in the more mainstream internet--- That news organizations have not adopted similar tactics to use targeted big data techniques to promote news articles that you are likely to find more agreeable (EG, to "like"), so that you spend more time on their news site, generating ad impressions--- rather than giving everyone the same news experience, that has been tailored to be factually sound, and informative about topics of national or global int