A wifi driver exploit wouldn't be necessary. The wifi chip hack could send/modify packets of data to the device which leads to a malware infection via a different vector. Say, a HTML redirect to a website that contains a jailbreak malware hack. Or whatever other iOS exploit. It can go right through the wifi driver, if packets are expected to be received (and who wants to bet a daemon is always listening). May not work for SSL connections, but it can just wait patiently for an unencrypted connection.
My understanding is that the main job for humans in Amazon warehouses is for 'pickers', that these machines are claimed to be able to replace (no word on accuracy, however). The article mentions that packing items in boxes is still done by hand, and I imagine loading/unloading trucks is still done with humans. However I can foresee completely-automated Amazon warehouses in the near future. With self-driving trucks, and completely-automated factories, there will likely soon be some products whose packaging are unseen by a human until they reach a consumer's doorstep. Completely-automated retail. From what I could find here, at least 10.1 million Americans work jobs that'd be replaced with automated retail. The American Trucking Association claims 3.4 million American truck drivers. So that adds up to 13.5 million jobs between retail and trucking, add in other driving jobs and it'd be 10% of all jobs.
For comparison, about 2.5 million new jobs are created in the US each year. In the unlikely event every driver and retail supply chain worker were laid off at once, it'd take ~5 years for new jobs to be created to absorb them (assuming an equal number of vacancies.) That's ignoring the fact that many of these 'new jobs' are in the driving and retail sectors. Another 5.4 million Americans work as food preparers/waiters; as minimum wage increases I wonder how many restaurants will increase automation. I know many restaurants won't fully-automate due to tradition or being high-class, but most restaurants aren't too high-class and will automate if it's either that or go out of business.
I recall years ago, reading about a study which found that unpatched Win XP systems would get pwned in an average of ~5 seconds, once connected to the internet. This was due to old, long-since-patched worms like Blaster and Sasser, that still lived on in unpatchable systems. I imagine in the near future there will be a worm where every pwned device activates its wifi (even if the official wifi setting is set to 'off') and attacks every nearby device. EOL phones will be permanently vulnerable (how many iphones use this Broadcom chip yet are ineligible for iOS 10.3.1?), just like those permanently unpatched WinXP systems. It's an even worse situation on Android devices that are supported for a few months on average.
Ironically people will have to enable wifi in order to download the firmware update to patch this bug, if their OS only allows OS updates via wifi.
Look at how much Freud and Jung live on in pop psychology. Dark Matter/Energy aren't going anywhere in the public consciousness, even if they are fully debunked tomorrow. That said, they don't have much presence in the public consciousness, and there's always the good-old fallback explanation: aliens.
I'm not sure I want to support a robotics company named RISE. Particularly if said robots are specifically designed to kill things. Oh wait, this is actually a Waldo and not a robot, with a human operator consciously deciding to do the mass fish-killing? Carry on. (Can't decide if I mean that sarcastically.)
Let's be real, the 'death of Flash' is only being talked about because the major web browsers are cutting support for it. An opinion posted by Jobs in 2010 related to a decision not to support Flash in iOS is supposedly the reason browser makers are cutting support for Flash in 2017? I'm not buying it. HTML5 video has everything to do with the death of Flash, as most usage of Flash was simply for audiovisual playback. Webgames and webapps used to use Flash, but how many people use those nowadays compared to mobile apps? Even on Android, which supports Flash? Youtube moving over to HTML5 video by default was the death knell of Flash. The constant drumbeat of 'more critical Flash vulnerabilities found and exploited in the wild, uninstall it already' didn't help, either. I wonder how Flash would've done if it were a) secure, and b) not a resource hog.
Copying Snapchat's key gimmick, that photos/etc. are ephemeral, is missing the point. People join Snapchat to communicate with their friends that're already on Snapchat. Also, Snapchat is 'the hot new thing' while Facebook is yesterday's news. Facebook is so big it resembles a corporate behemoth, rather than something coded in someone's spare time in their bedroom that only a few people know about. Key word 'resembles', I know Snapchat is no longer actually that.
According to Wikipedia, The Times AND Wall Street Journal are both owned by News Corp. Coincidence they both did Youtube hit pieces in a short timeframe? Is Rupert Murdoch above such things?
Just over a month ago, the WSJ did a hitjob on Pewdiepie, one of Youtube's most-subscribed personalities, causing his ad funding and Youtube Red channel to get cancelled. Now, a Times of London investigation decided now is the time to publish an article pointing out something that must've been the case for many years that noone bothered making a stink about before: there's little to no vetting of whoever wants to attach ads to their videos. I have to wonder if this is the MSM doing a focused attack on New Media, now that the TPP was effectively buried by Trump. That makes me wonder how badly they were actually planning on abusing the DNS blocking etc. provisions of that treaty... maybe we dodged a bullet but they still have illegal-capacity magazines.
It was also able to successfully demonstrate a chain of six bugs in Apple Safari, gaining root access on macOS.
I have a feeling as security gets more sophisticated, these chains will get longer. Eventually, the chain will get too long for a human cracker to think up themselves, and software will be needed which classifies and chains together vulnerabilities to achieve a desired effect. Then it's a short auto-bug-finder away from allowing a self-sustaining botnet that adapts to security upgrades, and could become permanently out of control if the C&C is taken down/abandoned.
Unfortunately my water heater uses my house's pipes as an antenna. I tried putting up Faraday cage wallpaper (even on the ceiling!), but am unsure what to do about the windows. Oh well, no windows means more privacy, right? Now I'm just worried that I didn't layer enough aluminum foil on the basement floor to stop the mole-drones from snooping on me. Stop trying to hack into my precious, life-giving water! I paid for that, mole-drones, not you! Well, my mom did, but still.
In practice we're going to get 'best-practices' checklists that they check off (self-certified), which are so overspecific (and quickly out of date) that huge classes of vulnerabilities will be completely unaddressed, and others will be 'addressed' inadequately. What we NEED is a provision that if anyone manages to find a vulnerability that grants unauthorized entry, all units must be recalled and installed units shall be refunded (oh and the consumer gets to keep the installed unit). That'll guarantee a bare-minimum of hackable features, and thorough testing of everything put in, rather than "Bluetooth and a full wifi stack on my front door lock" BS.
The way I see things eventually going is there being a central 'house computer' that controls all of the IoT devices in the home, utilizing some industry-standard protocol for interacting with the IoT devices so that the computer's OS doesn't matter (networkable lightbulbs have had this for decades). There's one central point of failure, but also only one device that needs security updates, and these things will be sold on their quality/length of updates.
I think the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are much bigger threats. Think of all the bogus DMCA takedowns justified by 'combating illegal copyright infringement', or Bitcoin being shut down due to money laundering concerns, or laws requiring people to decrypt their devices for officials who ask them to (to ensure nothing illegal/incriminating/sexy is there).
Mercantilism is the rich owning (or being) the government. One can avoid it via any form of government that isn't capable of being primarily influenced by money. Direct democracy could potentially subvert mercantilism; votes could be bought but likely not enough to sway a decision (and the people would have themselves to blame if that happened) and it would be impossible to 'cover up' at that scale.
Also, a benevolent dictator unconcerned with material wealth, or a Plato-esque ruling class forbidden from owning material goods or money, are potential alternatives.
When washing machines and dishwashers became commonplace, the economy's capacity for human labor was rapidly expanding due to technological innovations and the rise of consumerism. Go to a supermarket today, and half of the stuff on the shelves hadn't been invented back then, in its exact current incarnation; even things like shoes, lightbulbs, garbage bins etc. are constructed completely differently today from how they were 50, 100 years ago. Soon, the economy's capacity for new productive human jobs will increase slower than the rate at which old jobs are replaced with automation, 'peak human labor' we can call it. We can have more busywork jobs, lowering average productivity, but total human productivity is near its peak (in advanced western societies, different story in developing nations, although they're catching up quick).
As far as I could glean from the article, the USG does nothing to stop USB devices from registering as a keyboard and then emulating keypresses to open up a back door. Having a physical switch on the USG that indicates 'this device is a keyboard' could stop that... for malicious devices that aren't actually USB keyboards.
I'm also skeptical hat the 'short list of approved commands' is 100% safe and there are no driver vulnerabilities linked to any of those commands. Also, if you plug a new USB device in thru this USG and it doesn't work, are you going to say 'too bad, probably infected', or are you going to remove the USG and try again?
WiiU + Switch owner here. The Switch (with joycons) is smaller than the WiiU gamepad in every dimension, and is noticeably lighter. The joycon buttons are smaller and more tightly grouped. The analogue sticks are smaller and stiffer, their ridges have notches in the cardinal directions to help you tell what part of the stick you're touching. I often accidentally click in the left stick when moving it around quickly, whereas I don't recall that happening on the WiiU gamepad. The center of balance of the Switch is about 1cm to the upper-right of its center, similar to the gamepad. The + and - buttons feel different enough from the nearby buttons that it's easy to make them out by touch, whereas groping for the start and select buttons on the gamepad sometimes required me looking. It's much easier to reach the Switch's volume rocker than the volume switch on the gamepad, which pretty much requires looking to see what position it's at. The Switch's home button can be hit without completely moving your hand. When using touchscreen controls with the gamepad, I'd have to awkwardly move my hand to slide out the stylus, touch something, then put it back, or hold the stylus while pressing buttons/sticks, which is incredibly unergonomic. The Switch has no stylus so its games will likely take that into account, and I have a feeling few games will use touch controls given they're unusable docked. When I hold the gamepad, I put my fingers on all of the shoulder buttons simultaneously, which isn't very comfortable. The Switch's shoulder buttons are closer together so I just move my fingers between them rather than dedicating a finger to each one, which is more comfortable. Having 4 buttons under the left joycon's stick feels weird though, I'll feel the buttons and think "where's the dpad?!" for a moment. The joycon surface is more matte and grippy than the shiny smooth gamepad, but I wouldn't call it rough. Subjectively, I feel the Switch is less fatiguing to hold, mostly due to the easier to grip material and the lighter weight, I don't have to grip it as hard. Much of my grip on the gamepad comes from my palm, which comes into contact with the smooth top side of the gamepad. I should point out that every time I used the WiiU I had the gamepad plugged in 100% of the time because the battery life was crap; not having to deal with the cord as often (due to longer battery life) or not at all (docked mode) is a big plus to ergonomics. I hate getting the charging cable entwined with my headphone cable, and on the Switch the two ports are on opposite sides of the device rather than right next to one another (although they probably should have the headphone jack on bottom and charging port on top). The gamepad has a constant amount of battery drain, whereas the battery life of the Switch is longer when playing less demanding games. The standard Switch grip is lightweight and reasonably comfortable, and can be used when undocked as well. Your hands don't go all the way around the handles, but that doesn't bother me.
I recently tried to post a (long) comment on Slashdot, and the filter prevented me from doing so; it seemed to particularly take issue with one section that talked about guns. I guess I used too many 'graylist' words too many times in my post, or something. Regardless, it wasn't spam, or offensive, and it took me a while to figure out how to split it into two posts successfully.
I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but I couldn't post everything at once (lame filter). So here's the rest:
Motion controllers also allow for more immersive/intuitive controls, e.g. reloading a gun, throwing a grenade, or aiming a bow. Aiming a gun can be made close enough to real gun aiming that real-world skill enters the picture; most VR games with shooting have some degree of autoaim because most gamers are poor shots IRL.
VR hardware is improving in every way, as well. Third-party accessories for the Vive are allowing data to be wirelessly transmitted to and from the PC, and replacing the headstrap with a more comfortably-fitting one. Motion controller tech is iteratively improving, with 2nd-gen Vive controllers in the works, and Oculus' Touch controllers just came out. Third-party headsets utilizing the Vive's tracking hardware/software are coming, likely with improvements and cost reductions of their own. I'm personally waiting for the 2nd-gen hardware before I buy in, the cost is too high for me to justify buying something I know I'd want to replace within a year or so.
Considering how brief and low-budget many of these apps are, it's not too surprising that only ~3% have made more than a quarter-million bucks. Many of the apps aren't even games, but 'experiences' that are either non-interactive, or are sandboxes with no rules/win condition. A VR game that lasts 5 hours is considered 'long' still, with ports of 2d games being nearly the only ones that are significantly longer. Recall that many early 2d games on the Atari or NES would only last an hour or so for a playthrough, if not for their difficulty.
AAA video games have been stuck in a rut for the past 12 or so years, I think due to the standardization of controllers. New controller features/more buttons drove much of the development of more sophisticated games. I recall first seeing a PSX controller and thinking "that's too many buttons! two on each shoulder?!" but now suspect that a few more might give the industry a shot in the arm; look at how overloaded the buttons are in e.g. the Dark Souls games, and how often a context-sensitive button gets the context wrong. The PS2 added analog face buttons but they were then removed a generation or two later since no games figured out how to use them in a compelling fashion, although the analog triggers remained (thanks, Dreamcast!). Recall what new ideas came out of early mobile games from touchscreen/gyroscope controls, e.g. Angry Birds and Zenbound.
VR makes gameplay that depends on depth perception a possibility; the 3ds was supposed to do this but it was too unstable (at first) and low-resolution to give accurate depth cues. Interacting with depth is made easier with the new generation of motion controllers, that are finally accurate enough to make it feel like your hands are in the game.
Most critics cite the high price of VR but it's been gradually coming down. You can get a Google Cardboard viewer for nearly free from multiple sources, and if you don't have a smartphone you can get a used old-model Galaxy S from ebay cheap, and combine it with a Gear VR. If you have a ps4 there's the $500 (all included) PS VR. Even the high-end PC-connected VR is getting cheaper; a year ago you'd need a ~$320 Geforce 970 graphics card plus a $600 Oculus Rift (assuming your PC is somewhat recent), but now a $170 Radeon RX 470 will suffice, and the Rift and Vive were $100 off (more or less) around Christmas. Rumor is the Vive's price will drop $100 or so later this year due to cheaper base stations/tracking chips. Windows Holographic headsets are coming out this year for $300, which connect to Windows PCs of course. In addition, multiple companies are working on all-in-one solutions, some of which will likely hit market this year, expected to be around $500.
Disclaimer: I've never actually tried VR, but am excited about it and follow the scene closely.
I made an Amazon.co.jp account just to preorder a Nintendo Switch (for some reason they're abundant in Japan). After (shipping (from Japan to USA) + duties/customs/export taxes, currency conversion fees etc.) ~= $18 the total was a few bucks less than if I'd bought one at a store down the street (if they weren't all sold out of preorders, that is.) I imagine the weak Yen is responsible for this. Oh and I get it 3 days after it's released. And I pay no sales tax (although my state does have a Use Tax so I pay a bit regardless.)
I'm sure some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or central planning/rationing system will be the endgame for our economy, once robots completely replace humans. However, I've been having trouble imagining a system that can easily scale to accommodate both 25% unemployment, and also (theoretical) 100% unemployment.
The primary problem is thus: under 100% automation and UBI, all goods/services are paid for with tax money. If a productivity/income tax on the robot/business that creates/sells a widget (respectively) equals less than 100% of the value of the widget, then private business will gradually siphon money from the human side of the economy, leading to deflation. OTOH, if tax equals 100% of the value then gross profit is impossible, making it impossible for the business to grow or pay off loans used to make it grow. As I see it, at this point, established businesses would have to be nationalized in order to avoid breaking the economy. Each person with a college degree could be given some resources to experiment with a pet project or two, but otherwise resources would be spent according to consumer demand. Give some nice bonus to those who have a successful new business/invention and then nationalize it; hey that sounds like how patents and copyright are supposed to work. However...
Central planning, nationalization and UBI aren't feasible/easy with 25% unemployment because ~25% of purchases will be with tax money, and so ~25% of GDP will need to go back into taxes. The 75% of employed people (and businesses) will pay 1/3 of their income on average, as tax (who wants to take bets that lobbying causes businesses to pay less than average). As the permanently unemployed increase in numbers, this portion paid as taxes will increase, encouraging people to quit their job and live off the UBI, leading to a runaway effect, even if automation isn't yet ready for 100% replacement of humans. There will be cases where there is a point where it is too expensive to hire a human yet there is no robot capable of doing their job. For example, if all your needs were taken care of with the UBI, would you work full time for $15k/year (2016 dollars) doing unpleasant drudgery if 75% of that were taken as tax?
I suppose one could say "well, as an economic revolution, of course there will be hard times during the transition" but who's going to vote for temporary hard times? People would rather hang on tight to the status quo, watching the inevitable train crash come straight towards them in slow motion. History bears this out, as explained e.g. in the novel Collapse. I predict nothing will change until many years after the point at which a difficult change would have been less painful than trying to hang on.
It doesn't. A high-precision timer is used to execute a timing attack to infer what the cache contains; major browsers nixed their built-in javascript high-precision timers, but they managed to cobble together their own (from allowed javascript functions, presumably), which incidentally reintroduces old timing attacks like RowHammer. Browsers can fudge javascript timing, but the larger problem would remain. Presumably, microcode updates could fix this.
but could also be used for cosmetic enhancements and lead to permanent, heritable changes in the human species.
Excuse me if I'm failing to see this as a downside. Instead of repairing heritable diseases for one person, those fixes persist to their descendants as well? Sure in the short term, untested changes could lead to unknown side-effects, but that's obvious and wouldn't justify a broad ban on germline changes. Eventually/soon, germline gene editing will be cheaper than treating these diseases for even one individual, much less them and all their descendants; with socialized medicine, some countries will DEMAND gene editing, once it's cheaper. The moral panic reminds me of that surrounding in-vitro fertilization when it was novel. Remember, right now the standard practice is to do genetic testing on fetuses in the womb, and if any developmental problems are found, it's recommended the pregnancy be aborted; it's not like abortion is controversial or anything, right? To ensure I get modded to oblivion, I present this thought experiment: once inbreeding depression has been genetically eliminated, would people still consider inbreeding morally unacceptable?
Who really cares about 'cosmetic changes'? What's considered an 'enhancement' varies from culture to culture. If e.g. Japanese want to edit their genes to have wider eyelids rather than getting them surgically widened, sure why not. Is "you are tall because your parents were tall" more comforting than "you are tall because your parents wanted you to be tall"? Do we really want to revive the spectre of 'genetic purity'?
As for the rich being the only ones with access to this technology, leading to them becoming a master race that the unwashed masses can't compete with, that's nonsense. Consider how quickly the cost of genome sequencing has plummeted in the past 20 years; the same thing will happen with gene editing. Furthermore, consider how many parents in e.g. China are willing to do ANYTHING, including sacrifice their life (e.g. Foxconn suicides), for the sake of their children; many, many parents would be willing to save money for decades, so that before they died, they could afford gene editing for their children, assuring their offspring a better life. A MUCH more likely scenario is that gene editing is outright made illegal in a given country, so only the rich can leave the country to have it done elsewhere; this goes doubly for oppressive countries with restrictions on travel.
Slashdot Mirror
A wifi driver exploit wouldn't be necessary. The wifi chip hack could send/modify packets of data to the device which leads to a malware infection via a different vector. Say, a HTML redirect to a website that contains a jailbreak malware hack. Or whatever other iOS exploit. It can go right through the wifi driver, if packets are expected to be received (and who wants to bet a daemon is always listening). May not work for SSL connections, but it can just wait patiently for an unencrypted connection.
My understanding is that the main job for humans in Amazon warehouses is for 'pickers', that these machines are claimed to be able to replace (no word on accuracy, however). The article mentions that packing items in boxes is still done by hand, and I imagine loading/unloading trucks is still done with humans. However I can foresee completely-automated Amazon warehouses in the near future. With self-driving trucks, and completely-automated factories, there will likely soon be some products whose packaging are unseen by a human until they reach a consumer's doorstep. Completely-automated retail. From what I could find here, at least 10.1 million Americans work jobs that'd be replaced with automated retail. The American Trucking Association claims 3.4 million American truck drivers. So that adds up to 13.5 million jobs between retail and trucking, add in other driving jobs and it'd be 10% of all jobs.
For comparison, about 2.5 million new jobs are created in the US each year. In the unlikely event every driver and retail supply chain worker were laid off at once, it'd take ~5 years for new jobs to be created to absorb them (assuming an equal number of vacancies.) That's ignoring the fact that many of these 'new jobs' are in the driving and retail sectors. Another 5.4 million Americans work as food preparers/waiters; as minimum wage increases I wonder how many restaurants will increase automation. I know many restaurants won't fully-automate due to tradition or being high-class, but most restaurants aren't too high-class and will automate if it's either that or go out of business.
I recall years ago, reading about a study which found that unpatched Win XP systems would get pwned in an average of ~5 seconds, once connected to the internet. This was due to old, long-since-patched worms like Blaster and Sasser, that still lived on in unpatchable systems. I imagine in the near future there will be a worm where every pwned device activates its wifi (even if the official wifi setting is set to 'off') and attacks every nearby device. EOL phones will be permanently vulnerable (how many iphones use this Broadcom chip yet are ineligible for iOS 10.3.1?), just like those permanently unpatched WinXP systems. It's an even worse situation on Android devices that are supported for a few months on average.
Ironically people will have to enable wifi in order to download the firmware update to patch this bug, if their OS only allows OS updates via wifi.
Look at how much Freud and Jung live on in pop psychology. Dark Matter/Energy aren't going anywhere in the public consciousness, even if they are fully debunked tomorrow. That said, they don't have much presence in the public consciousness, and there's always the good-old fallback explanation: aliens.
I'm not sure I want to support a robotics company named RISE. Particularly if said robots are specifically designed to kill things.
Oh wait, this is actually a Waldo and not a robot, with a human operator consciously deciding to do the mass fish-killing? Carry on.
(Can't decide if I mean that sarcastically.)
Let's be real, the 'death of Flash' is only being talked about because the major web browsers are cutting support for it. An opinion posted by Jobs in 2010 related to a decision not to support Flash in iOS is supposedly the reason browser makers are cutting support for Flash in 2017? I'm not buying it. HTML5 video has everything to do with the death of Flash, as most usage of Flash was simply for audiovisual playback. Webgames and webapps used to use Flash, but how many people use those nowadays compared to mobile apps? Even on Android, which supports Flash? Youtube moving over to HTML5 video by default was the death knell of Flash. The constant drumbeat of 'more critical Flash vulnerabilities found and exploited in the wild, uninstall it already' didn't help, either. I wonder how Flash would've done if it were a) secure, and b) not a resource hog.
Copying Snapchat's key gimmick, that photos/etc. are ephemeral, is missing the point. People join Snapchat to communicate with their friends that're already on Snapchat. Also, Snapchat is 'the hot new thing' while Facebook is yesterday's news. Facebook is so big it resembles a corporate behemoth, rather than something coded in someone's spare time in their bedroom that only a few people know about. Key word 'resembles', I know Snapchat is no longer actually that.
According to Wikipedia, The Times AND Wall Street Journal are both owned by News Corp. Coincidence they both did Youtube hit pieces in a short timeframe? Is Rupert Murdoch above such things?
Just over a month ago, the WSJ did a hitjob on Pewdiepie, one of Youtube's most-subscribed personalities, causing his ad funding and Youtube Red channel to get cancelled. Now, a Times of London investigation decided now is the time to publish an article pointing out something that must've been the case for many years that noone bothered making a stink about before: there's little to no vetting of whoever wants to attach ads to their videos. I have to wonder if this is the MSM doing a focused attack on New Media, now that the TPP was effectively buried by Trump. That makes me wonder how badly they were actually planning on abusing the DNS blocking etc. provisions of that treaty... maybe we dodged a bullet but they still have illegal-capacity magazines.
It was also able to successfully demonstrate a chain of six bugs in Apple Safari, gaining root access on macOS.
I have a feeling as security gets more sophisticated, these chains will get longer. Eventually, the chain will get too long for a human cracker to think up themselves, and software will be needed which classifies and chains together vulnerabilities to achieve a desired effect. Then it's a short auto-bug-finder away from allowing a self-sustaining botnet that adapts to security upgrades, and could become permanently out of control if the C&C is taken down/abandoned.
Unfortunately my water heater uses my house's pipes as an antenna. I tried putting up Faraday cage wallpaper (even on the ceiling!), but am unsure what to do about the windows. Oh well, no windows means more privacy, right? Now I'm just worried that I didn't layer enough aluminum foil on the basement floor to stop the mole-drones from snooping on me. Stop trying to hack into my precious, life-giving water! I paid for that, mole-drones, not you! Well, my mom did, but still.
In practice we're going to get 'best-practices' checklists that they check off (self-certified), which are so overspecific (and quickly out of date) that huge classes of vulnerabilities will be completely unaddressed, and others will be 'addressed' inadequately. What we NEED is a provision that if anyone manages to find a vulnerability that grants unauthorized entry, all units must be recalled and installed units shall be refunded (oh and the consumer gets to keep the installed unit). That'll guarantee a bare-minimum of hackable features, and thorough testing of everything put in, rather than "Bluetooth and a full wifi stack on my front door lock" BS.
The way I see things eventually going is there being a central 'house computer' that controls all of the IoT devices in the home, utilizing some industry-standard protocol for interacting with the IoT devices so that the computer's OS doesn't matter (networkable lightbulbs have had this for decades). There's one central point of failure, but also only one device that needs security updates, and these things will be sold on their quality/length of updates.
Now instead of siphoning gasoline for your car, you can siphon electricity for your smartphone, and then hail an Uber. Progress!
I think the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are much bigger threats.
Think of all the bogus DMCA takedowns justified by 'combating illegal copyright infringement', or Bitcoin being shut down due to money laundering concerns, or laws requiring people to decrypt their devices for officials who ask them to (to ensure nothing illegal/incriminating/sexy is there).
Mercantilism is the rich owning (or being) the government. One can avoid it via any form of government that isn't capable of being primarily influenced by money. Direct democracy could potentially subvert mercantilism; votes could be bought but likely not enough to sway a decision (and the people would have themselves to blame if that happened) and it would be impossible to 'cover up' at that scale.
Also, a benevolent dictator unconcerned with material wealth, or a Plato-esque ruling class forbidden from owning material goods or money, are potential alternatives.
When washing machines and dishwashers became commonplace, the economy's capacity for human labor was rapidly expanding due to technological innovations and the rise of consumerism. Go to a supermarket today, and half of the stuff on the shelves hadn't been invented back then, in its exact current incarnation; even things like shoes, lightbulbs, garbage bins etc. are constructed completely differently today from how they were 50, 100 years ago. Soon, the economy's capacity for new productive human jobs will increase slower than the rate at which old jobs are replaced with automation, 'peak human labor' we can call it. We can have more busywork jobs, lowering average productivity, but total human productivity is near its peak (in advanced western societies, different story in developing nations, although they're catching up quick).
As far as I could glean from the article, the USG does nothing to stop USB devices from registering as a keyboard and then emulating keypresses to open up a back door. Having a physical switch on the USG that indicates 'this device is a keyboard' could stop that... for malicious devices that aren't actually USB keyboards.
I'm also skeptical hat the 'short list of approved commands' is 100% safe and there are no driver vulnerabilities linked to any of those commands. Also, if you plug a new USB device in thru this USG and it doesn't work, are you going to say 'too bad, probably infected', or are you going to remove the USG and try again?
WiiU + Switch owner here. The Switch (with joycons) is smaller than the WiiU gamepad in every dimension, and is noticeably lighter. The joycon buttons are smaller and more tightly grouped. The analogue sticks are smaller and stiffer, their ridges have notches in the cardinal directions to help you tell what part of the stick you're touching. I often accidentally click in the left stick when moving it around quickly, whereas I don't recall that happening on the WiiU gamepad. The center of balance of the Switch is about 1cm to the upper-right of its center, similar to the gamepad. The + and - buttons feel different enough from the nearby buttons that it's easy to make them out by touch, whereas groping for the start and select buttons on the gamepad sometimes required me looking. It's much easier to reach the Switch's volume rocker than the volume switch on the gamepad, which pretty much requires looking to see what position it's at. The Switch's home button can be hit without completely moving your hand. When using touchscreen controls with the gamepad, I'd have to awkwardly move my hand to slide out the stylus, touch something, then put it back, or hold the stylus while pressing buttons/sticks, which is incredibly unergonomic. The Switch has no stylus so its games will likely take that into account, and I have a feeling few games will use touch controls given they're unusable docked. When I hold the gamepad, I put my fingers on all of the shoulder buttons simultaneously, which isn't very comfortable. The Switch's shoulder buttons are closer together so I just move my fingers between them rather than dedicating a finger to each one, which is more comfortable. Having 4 buttons under the left joycon's stick feels weird though, I'll feel the buttons and think "where's the dpad?!" for a moment. The joycon surface is more matte and grippy than the shiny smooth gamepad, but I wouldn't call it rough.
Subjectively, I feel the Switch is less fatiguing to hold, mostly due to the easier to grip material and the lighter weight, I don't have to grip it as hard. Much of my grip on the gamepad comes from my palm, which comes into contact with the smooth top side of the gamepad. I should point out that every time I used the WiiU I had the gamepad plugged in 100% of the time because the battery life was crap; not having to deal with the cord as often (due to longer battery life) or not at all (docked mode) is a big plus to ergonomics. I hate getting the charging cable entwined with my headphone cable, and on the Switch the two ports are on opposite sides of the device rather than right next to one another (although they probably should have the headphone jack on bottom and charging port on top). The gamepad has a constant amount of battery drain, whereas the battery life of the Switch is longer when playing less demanding games.
The standard Switch grip is lightweight and reasonably comfortable, and can be used when undocked as well. Your hands don't go all the way around the handles, but that doesn't bother me.
I recently tried to post a (long) comment on Slashdot, and the filter prevented me from doing so; it seemed to particularly take issue with one section that talked about guns. I guess I used too many 'graylist' words too many times in my post, or something. Regardless, it wasn't spam, or offensive, and it took me a while to figure out how to split it into two posts successfully.
I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but I couldn't post everything at once (lame filter). So here's the rest:
Motion controllers also allow for more immersive/intuitive controls, e.g. reloading a gun, throwing a grenade, or aiming a bow. Aiming a gun can be made close enough to real gun aiming that real-world skill enters the picture; most VR games with shooting have some degree of autoaim because most gamers are poor shots IRL.
VR hardware is improving in every way, as well. Third-party accessories for the Vive are allowing data to be wirelessly transmitted to and from the PC, and replacing the headstrap with a more comfortably-fitting one. Motion controller tech is iteratively improving, with 2nd-gen Vive controllers in the works, and Oculus' Touch controllers just came out. Third-party headsets utilizing the Vive's tracking hardware/software are coming, likely with improvements and cost reductions of their own. I'm personally waiting for the 2nd-gen hardware before I buy in, the cost is too high for me to justify buying something I know I'd want to replace within a year or so.
Considering how brief and low-budget many of these apps are, it's not too surprising that only ~3% have made more than a quarter-million bucks. Many of the apps aren't even games, but 'experiences' that are either non-interactive, or are sandboxes with no rules/win condition. A VR game that lasts 5 hours is considered 'long' still, with ports of 2d games being nearly the only ones that are significantly longer. Recall that many early 2d games on the Atari or NES would only last an hour or so for a playthrough, if not for their difficulty.
AAA video games have been stuck in a rut for the past 12 or so years, I think due to the standardization of controllers. New controller features/more buttons drove much of the development of more sophisticated games. I recall first seeing a PSX controller and thinking "that's too many buttons! two on each shoulder?!" but now suspect that a few more might give the industry a shot in the arm; look at how overloaded the buttons are in e.g. the Dark Souls games, and how often a context-sensitive button gets the context wrong. The PS2 added analog face buttons but they were then removed a generation or two later since no games figured out how to use them in a compelling fashion, although the analog triggers remained (thanks, Dreamcast!). Recall what new ideas came out of early mobile games from touchscreen/gyroscope controls, e.g. Angry Birds and Zenbound.
VR makes gameplay that depends on depth perception a possibility; the 3ds was supposed to do this but it was too unstable (at first) and low-resolution to give accurate depth cues. Interacting with depth is made easier with the new generation of motion controllers, that are finally accurate enough to make it feel like your hands are in the game.
Most critics cite the high price of VR but it's been gradually coming down. You can get a Google Cardboard viewer for nearly free from multiple sources, and if you don't have a smartphone you can get a used old-model Galaxy S from ebay cheap, and combine it with a Gear VR. If you have a ps4 there's the $500 (all included) PS VR. Even the high-end PC-connected VR is getting cheaper; a year ago you'd need a ~$320 Geforce 970 graphics card plus a $600 Oculus Rift (assuming your PC is somewhat recent), but now a $170 Radeon RX 470 will suffice, and the Rift and Vive were $100 off (more or less) around Christmas. Rumor is the Vive's price will drop $100 or so later this year due to cheaper base stations/tracking chips. Windows Holographic headsets are coming out this year for $300, which connect to Windows PCs of course. In addition, multiple companies are working on all-in-one solutions, some of which will likely hit market this year, expected to be around $500.
Disclaimer: I've never actually tried VR, but am excited about it and follow the scene closely.
I made an Amazon.co.jp account just to preorder a Nintendo Switch (for some reason they're abundant in Japan). After (shipping (from Japan to USA) + duties/customs/export taxes, currency conversion fees etc.) ~= $18 the total was a few bucks less than if I'd bought one at a store down the street (if they weren't all sold out of preorders, that is.) I imagine the weak Yen is responsible for this. Oh and I get it 3 days after it's released. And I pay no sales tax (although my state does have a Use Tax so I pay a bit regardless.)
I'm sure some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or central planning/rationing system will be the endgame for our economy, once robots completely replace humans. However, I've been having trouble imagining a system that can easily scale to accommodate both 25% unemployment, and also (theoretical) 100% unemployment.
The primary problem is thus: under 100% automation and UBI, all goods/services are paid for with tax money. If a productivity/income tax on the robot/business that creates/sells a widget (respectively) equals less than 100% of the value of the widget, then private business will gradually siphon money from the human side of the economy, leading to deflation. OTOH, if tax equals 100% of the value then gross profit is impossible, making it impossible for the business to grow or pay off loans used to make it grow. As I see it, at this point, established businesses would have to be nationalized in order to avoid breaking the economy. Each person with a college degree could be given some resources to experiment with a pet project or two, but otherwise resources would be spent according to consumer demand. Give some nice bonus to those who have a successful new business/invention and then nationalize it; hey that sounds like how patents and copyright are supposed to work. However...
Central planning, nationalization and UBI aren't feasible/easy with 25% unemployment because ~25% of purchases will be with tax money, and so ~25% of GDP will need to go back into taxes. The 75% of employed people (and businesses) will pay 1/3 of their income on average, as tax (who wants to take bets that lobbying causes businesses to pay less than average). As the permanently unemployed increase in numbers, this portion paid as taxes will increase, encouraging people to quit their job and live off the UBI, leading to a runaway effect, even if automation isn't yet ready for 100% replacement of humans. There will be cases where there is a point where it is too expensive to hire a human yet there is no robot capable of doing their job. For example, if all your needs were taken care of with the UBI, would you work full time for $15k/year (2016 dollars) doing unpleasant drudgery if 75% of that were taken as tax?
I suppose one could say "well, as an economic revolution, of course there will be hard times during the transition" but who's going to vote for temporary hard times? People would rather hang on tight to the status quo, watching the inevitable train crash come straight towards them in slow motion. History bears this out, as explained e.g. in the novel Collapse.
I predict nothing will change until many years after the point at which a difficult change would have been less painful than trying to hang on.
It doesn't. A high-precision timer is used to execute a timing attack to infer what the cache contains; major browsers nixed their built-in javascript high-precision timers, but they managed to cobble together their own (from allowed javascript functions, presumably), which incidentally reintroduces old timing attacks like RowHammer. Browsers can fudge javascript timing, but the larger problem would remain. Presumably, microcode updates could fix this.
but could also be used for cosmetic enhancements and lead to permanent, heritable changes in the human species.
Excuse me if I'm failing to see this as a downside. Instead of repairing heritable diseases for one person, those fixes persist to their descendants as well? Sure in the short term, untested changes could lead to unknown side-effects, but that's obvious and wouldn't justify a broad ban on germline changes. Eventually/soon, germline gene editing will be cheaper than treating these diseases for even one individual, much less them and all their descendants; with socialized medicine, some countries will DEMAND gene editing, once it's cheaper. The moral panic reminds me of that surrounding in-vitro fertilization when it was novel. Remember, right now the standard practice is to do genetic testing on fetuses in the womb, and if any developmental problems are found, it's recommended the pregnancy be aborted; it's not like abortion is controversial or anything, right? To ensure I get modded to oblivion, I present this thought experiment: once inbreeding depression has been genetically eliminated, would people still consider inbreeding morally unacceptable?
Who really cares about 'cosmetic changes'? What's considered an 'enhancement' varies from culture to culture. If e.g. Japanese want to edit their genes to have wider eyelids rather than getting them surgically widened, sure why not. Is "you are tall because your parents were tall" more comforting than "you are tall because your parents wanted you to be tall"? Do we really want to revive the spectre of 'genetic purity'?
As for the rich being the only ones with access to this technology, leading to them becoming a master race that the unwashed masses can't compete with, that's nonsense. Consider how quickly the cost of genome sequencing has plummeted in the past 20 years; the same thing will happen with gene editing. Furthermore, consider how many parents in e.g. China are willing to do ANYTHING, including sacrifice their life (e.g. Foxconn suicides), for the sake of their children; many, many parents would be willing to save money for decades, so that before they died, they could afford gene editing for their children, assuring their offspring a better life. A MUCH more likely scenario is that gene editing is outright made illegal in a given country, so only the rich can leave the country to have it done elsewhere; this goes doubly for oppressive countries with restrictions on travel.