The future of consumer tech support is that your increasingly senile neighbor is still going to call you every time she has a problem with her POS desktop inkjet printer that you helped set up back in 6th grade - only because your mom made you (since you're such a smart young man and I'm sure it won't take you more than half an hour) - even though you now live in a different state that is 3 time zones away, goddamnit.
What's your time worth? What's your suffering worth? Buy the senile old lady a modern $50 inkjet and then forget about it. Sometimes you people miss the obvious solution because you don't want to spend any money. As if your time is worth nothing...
That's sort of like saying, what an idiot I am for not surrounding my house with a moat and 100-foot walls and cauldrons of boiling oil in order to fend off attackers. Yes, I have technical means at my disposal in order to prevent people from abusing my rights. That doesn't mean I am at fault if I fail to take every possible action to defend myself. People should not be walking around violating my rights. I should not need to wear a bullet-proof vest to leave my house. And it is not a legitimate defense to say "Well, the defendant didn't put tape over his video camera, therefore I had every legal right to spy on him in his own home." Holy fuck man, are we talking about rights or tape here?
No -- in the USA, only a prosecutor can file criminal charges. People sometimes say here, "I'm going to press charges," but that really just means cooperating with a prosecutor or attorney general. If your father punches you in a drunken fight, and you tell the cops you don't want to file charges, you better hope they want to cooperate... They can charge, or not charge, whoever they want. You have no control over it.
Get him a dedicated GPS device. What are they, under $100 now? They work off satellites and don't require any spotty cellular phone triangulation. Do it. You seriously don't want to be the guy who sent his father out into the woods with sub-par gear. That's how people fucking die.
I generally agree, but having one's GPS go out is not a good reason to die in the woods. The GPS should be treated as a convenience, not a necessity. At some point we always have to rely on the tools we are carrying with us, but some of those tools are a hell of a lot more durable than a GPS. Carry a map, carry a compass, and know how to use them. If you find yourself in an un-navigable area, you better have shelter, water, and food with you, and a means of acquiring more of all three should the need arise.
You could have the best GPS in the world, then some crazy solar flare happens and you're screwed. It's a good thing to carry with you, but don't bet your life on it.
Last weekend I used an iPhone as a GPS while doing some backcountry stuff. It was an area I was already very familiar with so I figured, why not try using the phone instead of my normal GPS unit and see how it goes? The GPS app I used was MotionX (paid version) and I found that it performed quite well, with quick lock-on and solid signal maintenance. Battery life was about as good as my Garmin unit, but you have to put the thing in airplane mode. When it's not in airplane mode it sucks juice like its water trying to find a tower.
I've seen my iPhone run from 100% to dead in about three hours because I was in an area with zero signal and I forgot to put it in airplane mode.
Still, I would not rely on a smart phone for serious GPS use simply because you can't just swap out the batteries. I can carry five pounds of batteries with me and use my Garmin for over a month. With the phone I'd need some kind of charger and carry that with me. I've seen chargers that run off of AA batteries, but it takes time to charge. With the real GPS, I just swap the batteries and I'm back to full power in a few seconds...
Well I can say with absolute certainty that they will not go below the Planck length.
If the number of transistors goes up by a factor of 2, then the characteristic feature size must go down by a factor of 1.414 (sqrt(2)) in the same period of time. How many such periods would it take to reduce from a feature size of 2e-8 m (20 nm) to 1.6e-35 (Planck length)? Well, that's log(2e-8/1.6e-35)/log(1.414) = 180 doubling periods. Each period is 18 months, so it would take 270 years to get there. I'm seriously hoping that in the next 270 years we'll figure out something besides silicon transistors.
A peltier gets cold on one side and hot on the other. Where are you going to put the hot side, since you're trying to put the thing in the middle of a block of silicon?
This type of paranoid thinking is typical among people with technical skill. The reality is, ideas are a dime a dozen. Even good ideas. Implementing ideas, i.e. getting them to work and then successfully marketing them and making money with those ideas, is orders of magnitude more difficult.
It's a very rare that an idea is so brilliant, so simple, and full of so much potential, that a company could actually "steal" your idea from you and defeat you in the marketplace based on a 15 minute conversation. Seriously, you ain't that smart. No, really.
At any rate, the ideas that make the most money often don't seem to be that valuable on first glance. People aren't really listening to you that closely in the first place.
I can think of at least one. Contestant writes code which is scary-good at predicting your taste in movies, music, beer, and loose women. Company takes your solution and implements it. Some fiasco occurs, a bunch of private data is compromised, and somebody gets outed as being a homosexual (or something). Pissed off person tries to sue company. They probably fail because the company has a zillion dollars. Person is still pissed, tries to go after someone else. Person goes after the original author of the code which detected that he was a homosexual. Person sues you directly.
Don't think it can happen? I've experienced it (though not in the above form, exactly).
I bought World Of Goo. It was $20. It was extremely fun. I want more. To those of you who pirated it: Fuck you. Fuck the horse you rode in on. And fuck your mother.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that patched flaws are harmless. In the industry these are commonly called "1-day" exploits. There is an entire community centered around the analysis of vendor updates and patches in order to figure out the exact nature of the security flaws which are being patched -- these flaws are then exploited in the wild on systems which aren't patched yet.
The whole world doesn't suddenly get fixed when a vendor releases an update. You may have thousands or millions of vulnerable systems for months, and some people just never patch at all. Getting the patch out is just the beginning of a long process of securing that particular vulnerability.
Once you abandon the idea that the market gives a damn about the solidity of retirement accounts or the portfolios of the masses, then it's easier to accept that the purpose of the market is to move money around and around in a big circle, while slowly siphoning it off into the pockets of particular groups.
The purpose of the market has been what it's always been. To give entrepreneurs a chance to raise funding for new ventures in a well-defined manner, in exchange for partial ownership of those ventures.
It's not like if you took away the stock market anything would change for the better. Entrepreneurs would still need funding sources, and those sources would still have well-defined demands on ownership. The official stock market is just a way of concentrating this kind of activity in a central location and applying some degree of regulation to it. I don't think you'd like the alternative.
Isn't it possible to be both a hacker and a "computer oriented criminal" at the same time? I know it's distasteful, but the traditional definition of "hacker" doesn't make any reference to moral values. It's about having an affinity for the technology, an inquisitive nature, a willingness to press the edges of, or even break through, perceived boundaries of what is possible. I'd posit that anybody who is capable of altering the behavior of hardware through physical means is probably a hacker, regardless of their motivations for doing so.
No matter what we think of the black hats, it is undeniably true that there are a number of them which have extremely advanced skill sets and these people would probably be successful in the white hat realm. Why they choose to operate how they do, is a question about humanity not technology. They are still hackers.
But I'm guessing it's still a violation of someone's legal expectation of privacy to photograph them in their swimsuit using a thermal camera.
This is the exact issue, and I find the Supreme Court's ruling on the above mentioned case to be terribly flawed. If the bar for expectation is that the authorities can do what some member of the public could theoretically do, then the authorities can do anything. The argument is that any private citizen could fly in the air and look down on the individual's property. While not technically false, it's a mistake to say that air access over arbitrary locations is easily available to anyone. By that logic, the authorities can legally use publicly available imaging technologies to peer inside your residence -- in theory, any private citizen could purchase a thermal imager and do the same thing, so the cops should be able to as well. In fact, this very same type of surveillance has been ruled illegal by SCOTUS. But the ruling hinges on whether or not the device is "generally available to the public." The set of devices available to the public changes rapidly over time, so we have a situation where a search is legal or illegal depending on whether it happened in 2005 or 2015. That's not right.
Basing the argument on whether a private citizen is capable of the same surveillance is inherently flawed, because not all forms of private surveillance are legal -- see wiretapping, for instance. If this logic was carried through consistently everywhere, we'd basically have no right against search and seizure at all. Did SCOTUS rule that the cops can look for your illegal marijuana grow using an airplane? Yes, they did, but that doesn't mean it's correct, and it certainly doesn't mean the same logic applies in this case, because SCOTUS has already ruled inconsistently on this issue before.
If that was the case and it wasn't for profit, why would they require a secret contract? I get why the resistors were initially added but I'm not understanding why it needs to be a trade secret.
Who the hell knows, and I'm sure Apple doesn't know either. An NDA is like a handshake these days -- you don't do real business without it. You don't ask yourself whether you should have this guy sign an NDA, you ask yourself if there's any pressing reason NOT to sign one. Don't look too hard to find some specific motivation behind it, because chances are there isn't one.
Or are you going to say that you have a right to privacy from the air? Get real.
I most certainly do think I have a right to privacy "from the air." The concept is called curtilage and it means the space around your residence where you have a legal expectation of privacy. Just having a fence which is high enough to stop people from looking into your yard is enough to make your yard curtilage. The government is barred from unwarranted searches and seizures within this area. Just because they are flying in an airplane doesn't change anything. These activities are completely unconstitutional and the fines should be reversed.
It's terrifying how the citizens of this country seem to don't know what the hell their rights are.
You can do what you want with your possessions, but you have no reason to expect that the objects are designed in a way to make it easy for you to do what you want. The phone is what it is. You can try to do something to it and fail because of the design of the phone. This is simply a property of the object, not a trampling of your rights. If you don't like it, get something else.
Look at it another way. Some species of mushrooms are wonderfully good at concentrating heavy metal elements, including radioactive ones. You let the fungus grow, then harvest it and put it in radioactive containment vessels. Now you are using fungus to actively extract and isolate the radioisotopes from the contaminated soil. Yes, it's a shame you can't eat the chanterelles but in some sense, it's nature trying to clean up after humans made a mess of things.
The American chanterelles are much better anyway;-)
I don't know where people get these ideas about Black Hat. Black Hat has some "interesting" attendees, but for the most part the audience is made up of security professionals. I go to Black Hat every year as part of work. Despite the name of the conference, the atmosphere there is very much "white hat." Some of the presenters are in the gray area, but most of the presenters are just other security professionals who are at the top of their game.
No punches are pulled at Black Hat, and the policy is full disclosure in extreme detail, but we're mostly all there to figure out how to COMBAT the behavior of black hats, not become them ourselves. If you want an insane orgy of malice, that's what Defcon is for.
For example the uncertainty in momentum multiplied by the uncertainty in position for a particle must be greater than or equal to h/4pi. Breaking that limit would break Heisenberg, even if the results still weren't totally totally certain, accurate and precise.
Breaking that limit would break the mathematics of quantum physics, not just Heisenberg. The momentum and position wavefunctions are simply the Fourier transforms of each other. If position is precisely known, then the position function is an impulse, and the momentum function must be a wave that extends throughout all space. This is simply the nature of the Fourier transform. If the uncertainty relation between momentum and position did not hold, then it would mean that the momentum and position wavefunctions are NOT the Fourier transforms of each other, and that would mean that all of quantum mechanics is wrong.
What's been demonstrated here is, very clearly, not that.
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The future of consumer tech support is that your increasingly senile neighbor is still going to call you every time she has a problem with her POS desktop inkjet printer that you helped set up back in 6th grade - only because your mom made you (since you're such a smart young man and I'm sure it won't take you more than half an hour) - even though you now live in a different state that is 3 time zones away, goddamnit.
What's your time worth? What's your suffering worth? Buy the senile old lady a modern $50 inkjet and then forget about it. Sometimes you people miss the obvious solution because you don't want to spend any money. As if your time is worth nothing...
That's sort of like saying, what an idiot I am for not surrounding my house with a moat and 100-foot walls and cauldrons of boiling oil in order to fend off attackers. Yes, I have technical means at my disposal in order to prevent people from abusing my rights. That doesn't mean I am at fault if I fail to take every possible action to defend myself. People should not be walking around violating my rights. I should not need to wear a bullet-proof vest to leave my house. And it is not a legitimate defense to say "Well, the defendant didn't put tape over his video camera, therefore I had every legal right to spy on him in his own home." Holy fuck man, are we talking about rights or tape here?
No -- in the USA, only a prosecutor can file criminal charges. People sometimes say here, "I'm going to press charges," but that really just means cooperating with a prosecutor or attorney general. If your father punches you in a drunken fight, and you tell the cops you don't want to file charges, you better hope they want to cooperate... They can charge, or not charge, whoever they want. You have no control over it.
You can swap the batteries, but what are they? Can I buy them at 7-11? Anyway, I'm not some iPhone fanatic, it's just what I happen to have.
Get him a dedicated GPS device. What are they, under $100 now? They work off satellites and don't require any spotty cellular phone triangulation. Do it. You seriously don't want to be the guy who sent his father out into the woods with sub-par gear. That's how people fucking die.
I generally agree, but having one's GPS go out is not a good reason to die in the woods. The GPS should be treated as a convenience, not a necessity. At some point we always have to rely on the tools we are carrying with us, but some of those tools are a hell of a lot more durable than a GPS. Carry a map, carry a compass, and know how to use them. If you find yourself in an un-navigable area, you better have shelter, water, and food with you, and a means of acquiring more of all three should the need arise.
You could have the best GPS in the world, then some crazy solar flare happens and you're screwed. It's a good thing to carry with you, but don't bet your life on it.
Last weekend I used an iPhone as a GPS while doing some backcountry stuff. It was an area I was already very familiar with so I figured, why not try using the phone instead of my normal GPS unit and see how it goes? The GPS app I used was MotionX (paid version) and I found that it performed quite well, with quick lock-on and solid signal maintenance. Battery life was about as good as my Garmin unit, but you have to put the thing in airplane mode. When it's not in airplane mode it sucks juice like its water trying to find a tower.
I've seen my iPhone run from 100% to dead in about three hours because I was in an area with zero signal and I forgot to put it in airplane mode.
Still, I would not rely on a smart phone for serious GPS use simply because you can't just swap out the batteries. I can carry five pounds of batteries with me and use my Garmin for over a month. With the phone I'd need some kind of charger and carry that with me. I've seen chargers that run off of AA batteries, but it takes time to charge. With the real GPS, I just swap the batteries and I'm back to full power in a few seconds...
Well I can say with absolute certainty that they will not go below the Planck length.
If the number of transistors goes up by a factor of 2, then the characteristic feature size must go down by a factor of 1.414 (sqrt(2)) in the same period of time. How many such periods would it take to reduce from a feature size of 2e-8 m (20 nm) to 1.6e-35 (Planck length)? Well, that's log(2e-8/1.6e-35)/log(1.414) = 180 doubling periods. Each period is 18 months, so it would take 270 years to get there. I'm seriously hoping that in the next 270 years we'll figure out something besides silicon transistors.
A peltier gets cold on one side and hot on the other. Where are you going to put the hot side, since you're trying to put the thing in the middle of a block of silicon?
This type of paranoid thinking is typical among people with technical skill. The reality is, ideas are a dime a dozen. Even good ideas. Implementing ideas, i.e. getting them to work and then successfully marketing them and making money with those ideas, is orders of magnitude more difficult.
It's a very rare that an idea is so brilliant, so simple, and full of so much potential, that a company could actually "steal" your idea from you and defeat you in the marketplace based on a 15 minute conversation. Seriously, you ain't that smart. No, really.
At any rate, the ideas that make the most money often don't seem to be that valuable on first glance. People aren't really listening to you that closely in the first place.
I can think of at least one. Contestant writes code which is scary-good at predicting your taste in movies, music, beer, and loose women. Company takes your solution and implements it. Some fiasco occurs, a bunch of private data is compromised, and somebody gets outed as being a homosexual (or something). Pissed off person tries to sue company. They probably fail because the company has a zillion dollars. Person is still pissed, tries to go after someone else. Person goes after the original author of the code which detected that he was a homosexual. Person sues you directly.
Don't think it can happen? I've experienced it (though not in the above form, exactly).
I bought World Of Goo. It was $20. It was extremely fun. I want more. To those of you who pirated it: Fuck you. Fuck the horse you rode in on. And fuck your mother.
I don't know where you live, but highways here aren't restricted by how much you.
Unfortunately, my ability to understand your sentence was restricted by how much you
I'm not sure where you get the idea that patched flaws are harmless. In the industry these are commonly called "1-day" exploits. There is an entire community centered around the analysis of vendor updates and patches in order to figure out the exact nature of the security flaws which are being patched -- these flaws are then exploited in the wild on systems which aren't patched yet.
The whole world doesn't suddenly get fixed when a vendor releases an update. You may have thousands or millions of vulnerable systems for months, and some people just never patch at all. Getting the patch out is just the beginning of a long process of securing that particular vulnerability.
How do you know millions of phones aren't already compromised? They could just be sitting there quietly, waiting for the dust to settle a bit.
Do we need antivirus/antimalware on smart phones now? Welcome to the 21st century.
Once you abandon the idea that the market gives a damn about the solidity of retirement accounts or the portfolios of the masses, then it's easier to accept that the purpose of the market is to move money around and around in a big circle, while slowly siphoning it off into the pockets of particular groups.
The purpose of the market has been what it's always been. To give entrepreneurs a chance to raise funding for new ventures in a well-defined manner, in exchange for partial ownership of those ventures.
It's not like if you took away the stock market anything would change for the better. Entrepreneurs would still need funding sources, and those sources would still have well-defined demands on ownership. The official stock market is just a way of concentrating this kind of activity in a central location and applying some degree of regulation to it. I don't think you'd like the alternative.
Isn't it possible to be both a hacker and a "computer oriented criminal" at the same time? I know it's distasteful, but the traditional definition of "hacker" doesn't make any reference to moral values. It's about having an affinity for the technology, an inquisitive nature, a willingness to press the edges of, or even break through, perceived boundaries of what is possible. I'd posit that anybody who is capable of altering the behavior of hardware through physical means is probably a hacker, regardless of their motivations for doing so.
No matter what we think of the black hats, it is undeniably true that there are a number of them which have extremely advanced skill sets and these people would probably be successful in the white hat realm. Why they choose to operate how they do, is a question about humanity not technology. They are still hackers.
But I'm guessing it's still a violation of someone's legal expectation of privacy to photograph them in their swimsuit using a thermal camera.
This is the exact issue, and I find the Supreme Court's ruling on the above mentioned case to be terribly flawed. If the bar for expectation is that the authorities can do what some member of the public could theoretically do, then the authorities can do anything. The argument is that any private citizen could fly in the air and look down on the individual's property. While not technically false, it's a mistake to say that air access over arbitrary locations is easily available to anyone. By that logic, the authorities can legally use publicly available imaging technologies to peer inside your residence -- in theory, any private citizen could purchase a thermal imager and do the same thing, so the cops should be able to as well. In fact, this very same type of surveillance has been ruled illegal by SCOTUS. But the ruling hinges on whether or not the device is "generally available to the public." The set of devices available to the public changes rapidly over time, so we have a situation where a search is legal or illegal depending on whether it happened in 2005 or 2015. That's not right.
Basing the argument on whether a private citizen is capable of the same surveillance is inherently flawed, because not all forms of private surveillance are legal -- see wiretapping, for instance. If this logic was carried through consistently everywhere, we'd basically have no right against search and seizure at all. Did SCOTUS rule that the cops can look for your illegal marijuana grow using an airplane? Yes, they did, but that doesn't mean it's correct, and it certainly doesn't mean the same logic applies in this case, because SCOTUS has already ruled inconsistently on this issue before.
Yeah, I always refer to stuff that happened earlier today as "ages ago."
If that was the case and it wasn't for profit, why would they require a secret contract? I get why the resistors were initially added but I'm not understanding why it needs to be a trade secret.
Who the hell knows, and I'm sure Apple doesn't know either. An NDA is like a handshake these days -- you don't do real business without it. You don't ask yourself whether you should have this guy sign an NDA, you ask yourself if there's any pressing reason NOT to sign one. Don't look too hard to find some specific motivation behind it, because chances are there isn't one.
Or are you going to say that you have a right to privacy from the air? Get real.
I most certainly do think I have a right to privacy "from the air." The concept is called curtilage and it means the space around your residence where you have a legal expectation of privacy. Just having a fence which is high enough to stop people from looking into your yard is enough to make your yard curtilage. The government is barred from unwarranted searches and seizures within this area. Just because they are flying in an airplane doesn't change anything. These activities are completely unconstitutional and the fines should be reversed.
It's terrifying how the citizens of this country seem to don't know what the hell their rights are.
I think you just parsed the sentence wrong. Try this rearrangement: "As a work of the federal government, it's ineligible for copyright."
You can do what you want with your possessions, but you have no reason to expect that the objects are designed in a way to make it easy for you to do what you want. The phone is what it is. You can try to do something to it and fail because of the design of the phone. This is simply a property of the object, not a trampling of your rights. If you don't like it, get something else.
Look at it another way. Some species of mushrooms are wonderfully good at concentrating heavy metal elements, including radioactive ones. You let the fungus grow, then harvest it and put it in radioactive containment vessels. Now you are using fungus to actively extract and isolate the radioisotopes from the contaminated soil. Yes, it's a shame you can't eat the chanterelles but in some sense, it's nature trying to clean up after humans made a mess of things.
The American chanterelles are much better anyway ;-)
I don't know where people get these ideas about Black Hat. Black Hat has some "interesting" attendees, but for the most part the audience is made up of security professionals. I go to Black Hat every year as part of work. Despite the name of the conference, the atmosphere there is very much "white hat." Some of the presenters are in the gray area, but most of the presenters are just other security professionals who are at the top of their game.
No punches are pulled at Black Hat, and the policy is full disclosure in extreme detail, but we're mostly all there to figure out how to COMBAT the behavior of black hats, not become them ourselves. If you want an insane orgy of malice, that's what Defcon is for.
For example the uncertainty in momentum multiplied by the uncertainty in position for a particle must be greater than or equal to h/4pi. Breaking that limit would break Heisenberg, even if the results still weren't totally totally certain, accurate and precise.
Breaking that limit would break the mathematics of quantum physics, not just Heisenberg. The momentum and position wavefunctions are simply the Fourier transforms of each other. If position is precisely known, then the position function is an impulse, and the momentum function must be a wave that extends throughout all space. This is simply the nature of the Fourier transform. If the uncertainty relation between momentum and position did not hold, then it would mean that the momentum and position wavefunctions are NOT the Fourier transforms of each other, and that would mean that all of quantum mechanics is wrong.
What's been demonstrated here is, very clearly, not that.