There's no reason to reduce the default permissions to open up all kinds of potential for security holes in Safari, thanks to Apple's poor choice of defaults.
To increase the security of Safari significantly:
* Turn off 'Open "safe" files after downloading'.
This option shouldn't even be there. If Apple wants to make it easier for the user, Safari should provide a download manager that makes it convenient for the user to request that files be opened with safe applications.
* Change the FTP: URI handler in Launchservices to something other than Finder.
Bringing an entire hierarchy untrusted objects into the file system by using Finder to open them is unacceptable.
* Change the handler for archives from BOMArchiver to something that doesn't support Apple's "Internet Enabled" archives and HFS extensions.
There's just too many opportunities for exploits there.
In addition, Apple should do a couple more things, changing the approach from "some files are safe" to "soem applications are safe to use on unsafe files".
* Separate the list of safe applications (the ones that handle URIs and files that are untrusted) from the one that is used by local applications.
The choice of which list of LaunchServices to use would be made by the application calling LaunchServices, and would default to whichever list the application itself was launched from. An application could override this for (for example) a web browser (that would call the 'safe applications' list for objects loaded by web pages), or for an application to pull up its own help pages.
* Stop treating installers as "safe" applications.
A web page should never be able to request the installtion of a widget, plugin, or application... whether or not that object will subsequently be automatically run or whether the user is presented with a dialog. Safe applications must be limited to those where there is no mechanism for the object to execute code or request the installation of code that might be subsequently executed by the user.
These changes would dramaticaly increase the inherent security of Safari (and Firefox, Internet Explorer, and many other major browsers that have similar design flaws), AND allow the browser to provide the user with a better experience, with fewer annoying popups and more ability to control their environment and be confident that they're not making bad decisions.
This shouldn't be rocket science. Any time a web page can cause an application to run, the security of the browser is reduced to a lower level than that of either the browser or that application... since any security flaws in the application OR in the browser are available for attack. Applications run from a browser MUST be as simple as possible, they MUST be designed with security as a primary concern, and the MUST be as few as possible. Applications run from the desktop (or via LaunchServices, or equivalent mechanisms in Windows) are normally designed to provide as rich an experience as possible, most of them are not safe...
I don't know if this exploit used any of these kinds of attacks, but the assumption that the default settings for Safari are "safe" is simply not a good one.
The iPhone is *irrelevant* for business. It's not a business device. You won't get an iPhone for business or, really, for any practical reason at all. Anyone who actually needs anything in the iPhone's feature list beyond actually making phone calls has already got a gadget that does whatever it is better than the iPhone ever will. Including being a music player (in which case that device is likely to be an iPod). And if that device isn't a phone, it's almost certainly better off for not being a phone - simply because even the optimistic estimates of bettery life Apple's listing on their website are profoundly unexciting (even the iPod shuffle beats them), and rumor has it that they're profoundly optimistic as well.
Apple's market is the same as the market for things like the Motorola RAZR. I'm sure it will be sell well just from the cool factor, no matter how impractical it is.
It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost no (or none? The point is I've never come across one) viruses or worms.
Back in the '80s and early '90s the Mac was a fertile breeding ground for viruses, because of the design of the system. Just putting a floppy in the drive was enough to run code. Apple's response to this was to get rid of automatic execution of code fragments on floppies and in resource forks of documents. This was a normal and sane response to a bad design.
If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus.
While the fact that there are more Windows boxes out there, there are several features of Windows that are insecure-by-design that have had a huge impact on Windows security. In particular, the design of Internet Explorer and the integration of the HTML control into the desktop and email programs had an enormous and direct effect on the spread of viruses and worms on Windows machines all out of proportion to their popularity.
Before the release of "Open Desktop", the virus problem on Windows really was managable without antivirus software. Just following good software hygiene was enough to make viruses a rare problem. Afterwards, I found that simply not allowing the use of IE and Outlook and other components that used the HTML control to display untrusted documents was more effective than antivirus software, because it removed the mosty common point of entry of new viruses.
The sane response to this would have been to back out the desktop-browser integration and redesign the system so that the right to run unsandboxed code was SOLELY mediated by the application displaying the document. Microsoft, instead, attempted to come up with tighter and tighter heuristics as to when to allow documents out of the sandbox, which boggled my mind then and still boggles my mind now.
There are other problems in the design of Windows that I've discussed before, but this one should be more than enough to make my point, especially after you handed me such a great counterexample.
It wouldn't be but for the fact that there's a dubious assumption that Mac OS X is bulletproof (or close to it) because Windows machines are always being attacked, and, by-and-large, Macs and GNU/Linux are being left alone.
Every open source OS has security-related patches on a regular basis, including the ones that have a good reputation for security like OpenBSD. So why isn't it news when they release security patches?
Because the one and only useful purpose for Wi-Fi in an iPod is real-time streaming of content to other devices on a Wi-Fi network.
That was my thought, indeed. Or rather, streaming content to and from other decices on a short range wireless network. At least that was my first thought, but it was followed immediately by a second... to wit, what devices would it be streaming to?
* Other iPods. * Other hand-held devices. * AppleTV. * Other standalone output devices. * A laptop or other personal computer.
Streaming to other iPods can be ignored, since they will be using the same system, so there's nothing to pick and choose from.
Streaming to the Zune or PSP doesn't seem to be the kind of thing I would expect Apple to do.
To stream from the iPod to AppleTV, it would need Wifi. AppleTV doesn't have Bluetooth, and IR is too slow.
Other standalone output devices? Well, there are quite a few bluetooth speakers and headsets. No Wifi ones that I know of. I can't think of any video devices.
Laptops or other personal computers? Bluetooth and Wifi are both options. Apple's own computers have both.
The only devices that really depend on one protocol or the other are the standalone bluetooth speakers and headsets, and the AppleTV. And I have to say that getting rid of that annoying white cable would make me interested in going back to the iPod again.
Really, it comes down to whether it makes more sense to be able to stream video to an AppleTV over Wifi instead of over a USB dock plugged into the so-far-unused AppleTV USB port. It's not like docking your iPod next to the AppleTV is a bad idea. AppleTV could even use the iPod playlists directly, just using it as an external hard drive.
Why would you be downloading gigabytes or even megabytes of data directly to your iPod over a wireless link? That's not how Apple's ever presented the iPod. It's not a Zune, it's not a laptop. Its a music player that syncs to your computer when you dock it to charge it up.
You don't pick a technology by how cool it is, you pick it by whetehr it solves the problem you're trying to solve. What's the problem that you're trying to solve with wireless on the iPod? You can't tell what technology to use until you've answered that.
It doesn't matter to Apple. They're technology-agnostic. All their computers are ready for Bluetooth, Wifi, USB, or Firewire, and they've started putting IR in as well. If they decided that Wibree or Zigbee was better than Wifi or Bluetooth, they'd use that.
Look, fellow, "it's slower" isn't an answer. I know it's slower. That goes hand in hand with it being lower power.
"It's too slow for X, Y, and Z, because A, B, and C, and Y and Z are critical" would be an answer, but you don't seem to be able to explain what X, Y, and Z are (your example was transferring photos from a camera, which is kind of irrelevant to the iPod), and your reasons are that I don't know what I'm talking about, that I haven't actually used Bluetooth, that Bluetooth is 30 times slower than it actually is, and that I'm starting an argument.
And, you know... the suggestion that the iPod might get Wifi capability is speculation in the first place. This whole topic is speculation. Why is your speculation that this hypothetical use of Wifi in the iPod (which hasn't actually happened yet) shouldn't be reversed (how? it hasn't happened!) so important that I shouldn't be allowed to question it?
Um, OK, I won't question it again. You're the boss, or something.
I'm sorry, but if you were "just trying to help" then you were reading a version of my message from a bizarro universe. I didn't say that Bluetooth was the ultimate solution for everything, I just said that it seemed to me that it was a better fit for what you'd likely be using wireless on an iPod for, and I gave some examples.
I dont want to argue back and forth about BT and whatever.
You know, it sure looks like that's exactly what you want to do. When you throw out deliberate misinterpretations like "So you would say that the cd rom is an "extension" of the floppy drive [...]" they can't be interpreted as anything but a deliberate attempt to pick a fight.
Because most of the things I own aren't suited to Bluetooth. For example, my pool doesn't use bluetooth *or* wifi, it uses pipes laid under the ground. My air conditioner uses ducts. My mailbox uses my two feet.
Currently I'm using bluetooth keyboards and mice. I had to change phones when I left my last job, and my current phone doesn't use bluetooth, but that's not because it's bad... it's because I had to pick a phone out of a pretty restricted set of phones.
If BT is sooooooooo good, a silver bullet, then why doesnt everything use it?
Because it's not a silver bullet, it's a tool with a specific application domain - moderate speed, short range, connection-oriented. A "wireless USB".
For devices that high a high power usage (like the iPod with its hard drive), a wired sync/charging connection is still necessary. Some kind of inductive power scheme would obviate that, but if you're close enough for inductive charging you would use the same connection for syncing - it's more efficient, lower overhead, and since it's inherently short range it's more secure.
Your wireless link on your iPod would be more for streaming music and "localcasting".
The replacement for USB 1.1 WAS USB 2.0!
USB 2.0 is not a replacement for USB 1.1. USB 2.0 is an extension of USB 1.1 into a new domain. USB 1.1 is still used in the domain where it's appropriate: an awful lot of "USB 2.0" devices are actually USB 1.1, since USB 2.0 is forwards and backwards compatible with USB 1.1 and the USB standards org decided to allow people to sell USB 1.1 devices as "USB 2.0 full speed", and real USB 2.0 devices get the moniker "USB 2.0 hi-speed".
I'm talking about replacing a cabled connection with a wireless one. Wifi is a "cable-free" replacement for Ethernet and maybe firewire. That's in the USB 2.0 (the real one, USB 2.0 "hi-speed", the one they came up with to compete with firewire) domain. Bluetooth is a "cable-free" replacement for ADB, USB 1.1, PS/2, and direct serial links... in the USB 1.1 (AKA USB 2.0 "low-speed" and "full-speed") domain.
The PS3 is plugged into AC, the power requirements for radio are pretty much irrelevant.
Bluetooth 1.2 is up to 700 kbps, 2.0 up to 3 Mbps. That's faster than my Internet connection, and I don't consider that an unreasonable time to transfer a song... we're still talking on the order of 20 seconds even at the lower rate... and it's certainly fast enough to stream music and video (I'm thinking of something like a wireless iPod that streamed music from your iTunes library like Apple TV does). The power requirements for Bluetooth are a fraction of Wifi... and at short range (a meter or less) it drops even lower.
Bluetooth isn't a replacement for ethernet, it's a replacement for USB 1.1.
If a teacher assigns a topic for a paper, it's reasonable to expect that they should read the Wikipedia entry on that subject
But not that they'll be able to discover every other entry the student will come across in the course of their browsing, and use the information therefrom in their homework and papers... and not just in Wikipedia. The point is that if the students are not taught how to use potentially inaccurate sources, and they've only got access to them at home, then (a) it's that much harder for their teachers to guide them to effective study habits, and (b) there's no way for the school to tell what they've accessed and check it for accuracy.
It's like the talk about Apple delaying leopard for Vista compatibility... if they're having problems with some new component in Leopard and have to delay it, any plausible excuse would be more acceptable to Apple than inviting the press to cast aspersions at them. I've already seen idiots suggesting they're suffering from some "Vista-like" delays. Vista-like? Leopard's being delayed months, not years!
It's not like they haven't come up with transparent excuses for their business decisions in the past, and they know people will accept just about any gobbledegook they can throw at them. I don't like it, but I can quite understand why they do it.
What they mean by "security issues" is "if you run Vista in a virtual environment, you'll be able to intercept our 'secure audio path' and 'secure video path', so we're going to make you pay extra to discourage people from using Vista in a virtual environment to make a digital recording".
Why on earth would anyone *want* to run Vista rather than XP virtualised on the Mac? The supposed advantages of Vista, Aero and DirectX 10, won't work well or at all under virtualization, and who needs "protected mode" when you can turn the entire virtual machine into a *real* sandbox. All Vista gives you in a virtual environment is more overhead and inconvenience.
As Microsoft made a similar attempt over the past six years, we might now call this the "Vista Effect".
Or the Copland effect, for the delays and cutbacks in Mac OS 8?
Or the Rhapsody effect, for the delays in Mac OS X?
Or the Babbage Effect, for the delays in the development of the Difference Engine as it became the Analytical Engine?
Unless there's a hell of a "Just One More thing" waiting in Leopard, though, there doesn't really seem to be all that much in Leopard over Tiger. It ain't no moon shot. It's not even a chaser.
It seems to me that the most important question is "If it is wrong, can you fix it?".
That's jumping ahead to the answer to "what happens when it's wrong".:)
Though I think the problem is more subtle than you're making out. The teachers won't see the bad information in Wikipedia. At the most, if you're lucky, they'll see the bad information in the student's papers.
Or homework.
And they can't do anything about the kids using Wikipedia for homework, so they need to teach them how to handle Wikipedia at school. Which they can't do if they ban it.
the development of such a rich open source ecosystem that the cost of building unique applications is drastically reduced
My experience is that a rich ecosystem is not always what you want to reduce the cost of building applications... because a rich ecosystem includes mosquitos and malaria and rabies and gangrene. It doesn't matter whether it's a proprietary or an open source "ecosystem", either: the ability to cherry-pick the good stuff and run from the bad like it was a swarm of radioactive bees is already a marketable skill.
I mean, I dare you to follow the crusty dried-out spaghetti inheritence in the Mozilla source tree far enough to tell us exactly how proxy handling is done. I gave up.
That's a "pet peeve" of mine too. Just about everything smaller than you can see "relies on quantum effects". Hell, you can roll human vision into that as well: the human eye is sensitive enough to detect small numbers of photons, and in low-light situations that's probably good enough to observe "quantum effects" with the unaided eye.
Anyone else remember crashme, an early program that ran random code until it crashed, and an NT-based equivalent called "ntcrashme"? I remember that the website for the NT one didn't last long, and the hot spin at the time was that Microsoft had leaned on them.
It seems Microsoft's been in denial about "fuzzers" for some time.
My first summer job was selling encyclopedias door to door.
I sold three sets my first week. That was pretty good money... then I went home, and looked through the sample volume they gave us.
It was horrible. All kinds of errors of fact. Really bad ones.
I couldn't sell any more. I stuck it out another week but got myself booted out for bitching about the company and the trainers who didn't seem to care if they were peddling junk to another trainee. Which was stupid, but I was a teenager. Doing stupid things is in the teenager EULA.
Anyway, "real" encyclopedias can go horribly horribly wrong too. The question is not "can Wikipedia be wrong" but "how often is it wrong?" And "Can you crosscheck"? And "what happens when it is wrong"?
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Looks like they didn't learn anything after NT 3.51.
Regressed, mate. NT 3.51 had the graphics drivers in user space. NT 4.0 moved them into kernel space.
Not that this is unusual, but it *did* serve as an advantage that NT used to have back in the day.
There's no reason to reduce the default permissions to open up all kinds of potential for security holes in Safari, thanks to Apple's poor choice of defaults.
To increase the security of Safari significantly:
* Turn off 'Open "safe" files after downloading'.
This option shouldn't even be there. If Apple wants to make it easier for the user, Safari should provide a download manager that makes it convenient for the user to request that files be opened with safe applications.
* Change the FTP: URI handler in Launchservices to something other than Finder.
Bringing an entire hierarchy untrusted objects into the file system by using Finder to open them is unacceptable.
* Change the handler for archives from BOMArchiver to something that doesn't support Apple's "Internet Enabled" archives and HFS extensions.
There's just too many opportunities for exploits there.
In addition, Apple should do a couple more things, changing the approach from "some files are safe" to "soem applications are safe to use on unsafe files".
* Separate the list of safe applications (the ones that handle URIs and files that are untrusted) from the one that is used by local applications.
The choice of which list of LaunchServices to use would be made by the application calling LaunchServices, and would default to whichever list the application itself was launched from. An application could override this for (for example) a web browser (that would call the 'safe applications' list for objects loaded by web pages), or for an application to pull up its own help pages.
* Stop treating installers as "safe" applications.
A web page should never be able to request the installtion of a widget, plugin, or application... whether or not that object will subsequently be automatically run or whether the user is presented with a dialog. Safe applications must be limited to those where there is no mechanism for the object to execute code or request the installation of code that might be subsequently executed by the user.
These changes would dramaticaly increase the inherent security of Safari (and Firefox, Internet Explorer, and many other major browsers that have similar design flaws), AND allow the browser to provide the user with a better experience, with fewer annoying popups and more ability to control their environment and be confident that they're not making bad decisions.
This shouldn't be rocket science. Any time a web page can cause an application to run, the security of the browser is reduced to a lower level than that of either the browser or that application... since any security flaws in the application OR in the browser are available for attack. Applications run from a browser MUST be as simple as possible, they MUST be designed with security as a primary concern, and the MUST be as few as possible. Applications run from the desktop (or via LaunchServices, or equivalent mechanisms in Windows) are normally designed to provide as rich an experience as possible, most of them are not safe...
I don't know if this exploit used any of these kinds of attacks, but the assumption that the default settings for Safari are "safe" is simply not a good one.
The iPhone is *irrelevant* for business. It's not a business device. You won't get an iPhone for business or, really, for any practical reason at all. Anyone who actually needs anything in the iPhone's feature list beyond actually making phone calls has already got a gadget that does whatever it is better than the iPhone ever will. Including being a music player (in which case that device is likely to be an iPod). And if that device isn't a phone, it's almost certainly better off for not being a phone - simply because even the optimistic estimates of bettery life Apple's listing on their website are profoundly unexciting (even the iPod shuffle beats them), and rumor has it that they're profoundly optimistic as well.
Apple's market is the same as the market for things like the Motorola RAZR. I'm sure it will be sell well just from the cool factor, no matter how impractical it is.
It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost no (or none? The point is I've never come across one) viruses or worms.
Back in the '80s and early '90s the Mac was a fertile breeding ground for viruses, because of the design of the system. Just putting a floppy in the drive was enough to run code. Apple's response to this was to get rid of automatic execution of code fragments on floppies and in resource forks of documents. This was a normal and sane response to a bad design.
If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus.
While the fact that there are more Windows boxes out there, there are several features of Windows that are insecure-by-design that have had a huge impact on Windows security. In particular, the design of Internet Explorer and the integration of the HTML control into the desktop and email programs had an enormous and direct effect on the spread of viruses and worms on Windows machines all out of proportion to their popularity.
Before the release of "Open Desktop", the virus problem on Windows really was managable without antivirus software. Just following good software hygiene was enough to make viruses a rare problem. Afterwards, I found that simply not allowing the use of IE and Outlook and other components that used the HTML control to display untrusted documents was more effective than antivirus software, because it removed the mosty common point of entry of new viruses.
The sane response to this would have been to back out the desktop-browser integration and redesign the system so that the right to run unsandboxed code was SOLELY mediated by the application displaying the document. Microsoft, instead, attempted to come up with tighter and tighter heuristics as to when to allow documents out of the sandbox, which boggled my mind then and still boggles my mind now.
There are other problems in the design of Windows that I've discussed before, but this one should be more than enough to make my point, especially after you handed me such a great counterexample.
It wouldn't be but for the fact that there's a dubious assumption that Mac OS X is bulletproof (or close to it) because Windows machines are always being attacked, and, by-and-large, Macs and GNU/Linux are being left alone.
Every open source OS has security-related patches on a regular basis, including the ones that have a good reputation for security like OpenBSD. So why isn't it news when they release security patches?
Because the one and only useful purpose for Wi-Fi in an iPod is real-time streaming of content to other devices on a Wi-Fi network.
That was my thought, indeed. Or rather, streaming content to and from other decices on a short range wireless network. At least that was my first thought, but it was followed immediately by a second... to wit, what devices would it be streaming to?
* Other iPods.
* Other hand-held devices.
* AppleTV.
* Other standalone output devices.
* A laptop or other personal computer.
Streaming to other iPods can be ignored, since they will be using the same system, so there's nothing to pick and choose from.
Streaming to the Zune or PSP doesn't seem to be the kind of thing I would expect Apple to do.
To stream from the iPod to AppleTV, it would need Wifi. AppleTV doesn't have Bluetooth, and IR is too slow.
Other standalone output devices? Well, there are quite a few bluetooth speakers and headsets. No Wifi ones that I know of. I can't think of any video devices.
Laptops or other personal computers? Bluetooth and Wifi are both options. Apple's own computers have both.
The only devices that really depend on one protocol or the other are the standalone bluetooth speakers and headsets, and the AppleTV. And I have to say that getting rid of that annoying white cable would make me interested in going back to the iPod again.
Really, it comes down to whether it makes more sense to be able to stream video to an AppleTV over Wifi instead of over a USB dock plugged into the so-far-unused AppleTV USB port. It's not like docking your iPod next to the AppleTV is a bad idea. AppleTV could even use the iPod playlists directly, just using it as an external hard drive.
I suspect that not only do they already know about this, but they're depending on it.
First Montanan who runs into a Federal roadblock, they'll file a suit against the Real-ID act.
I suspect the Real-ID act will be repealed before this gets to the Supreme Court.
Why would you be downloading gigabytes or even megabytes of data directly to your iPod over a wireless link? That's not how Apple's ever presented the iPod. It's not a Zune, it's not a laptop. Its a music player that syncs to your computer when you dock it to charge it up.
You don't pick a technology by how cool it is, you pick it by whetehr it solves the problem you're trying to solve. What's the problem that you're trying to solve with wireless on the iPod? You can't tell what technology to use until you've answered that.
It doesn't matter to Apple. They're technology-agnostic. All their computers are ready for Bluetooth, Wifi, USB, or Firewire, and they've started putting IR in as well. If they decided that Wibree or Zigbee was better than Wifi or Bluetooth, they'd use that.
*sigh*
Look, fellow, "it's slower" isn't an answer. I know it's slower. That goes hand in hand with it being lower power.
"It's too slow for X, Y, and Z, because A, B, and C, and Y and Z are critical" would be an answer, but you don't seem to be able to explain what X, Y, and Z are (your example was transferring photos from a camera, which is kind of irrelevant to the iPod), and your reasons are that I don't know what I'm talking about, that I haven't actually used Bluetooth, that Bluetooth is 30 times slower than it actually is, and that I'm starting an argument.
And, you know... the suggestion that the iPod might get Wifi capability is speculation in the first place. This whole topic is speculation. Why is your speculation that this hypothetical use of Wifi in the iPod (which hasn't actually happened yet) shouldn't be reversed (how? it hasn't happened!) so important that I shouldn't be allowed to question it?
Um, OK, I won't question it again. You're the boss, or something.
I'm sorry, but if you were "just trying to help" then you were reading a version of my message from a bizarro universe. I didn't say that Bluetooth was the ultimate solution for everything, I just said that it seemed to me that it was a better fit for what you'd likely be using wireless on an iPod for, and I gave some examples.
I dont want to argue back and forth about BT and whatever.
You know, it sure looks like that's exactly what you want to do. When you throw out deliberate misinterpretations like "So you would say that the cd rom is an "extension" of the floppy drive [...]" they can't be interpreted as anything but a deliberate attempt to pick a fight.
Right oh, have you actually used Bluetooth?
Yes.
How come everything you own doesnt use BT?
Because most of the things I own aren't suited to Bluetooth. For example, my pool doesn't use bluetooth *or* wifi, it uses pipes laid under the ground. My air conditioner uses ducts. My mailbox uses my two feet.
Currently I'm using bluetooth keyboards and mice. I had to change phones when I left my last job, and my current phone doesn't use bluetooth, but that's not because it's bad... it's because I had to pick a phone out of a pretty restricted set of phones.
If BT is sooooooooo good, a silver bullet, then why doesnt everything use it?
Because it's not a silver bullet, it's a tool with a specific application domain - moderate speed, short range, connection-oriented. A "wireless USB".
For devices that high a high power usage (like the iPod with its hard drive), a wired sync/charging connection is still necessary. Some kind of inductive power scheme would obviate that, but if you're close enough for inductive charging you would use the same connection for syncing - it's more efficient, lower overhead, and since it's inherently short range it's more secure.
Your wireless link on your iPod would be more for streaming music and "localcasting".
The replacement for USB 1.1 WAS USB 2.0!
USB 2.0 is not a replacement for USB 1.1. USB 2.0 is an extension of USB 1.1 into a new domain. USB 1.1 is still used in the domain where it's appropriate: an awful lot of "USB 2.0" devices are actually USB 1.1, since USB 2.0 is forwards and backwards compatible with USB 1.1 and the USB standards org decided to allow people to sell USB 1.1 devices as "USB 2.0 full speed", and real USB 2.0 devices get the moniker "USB 2.0 hi-speed".
I'm talking about replacing a cabled connection with a wireless one. Wifi is a "cable-free" replacement for Ethernet and maybe firewire. That's in the USB 2.0 (the real one, USB 2.0 "hi-speed", the one they came up with to compete with firewire) domain. Bluetooth is a "cable-free" replacement for ADB, USB 1.1, PS/2, and direct serial links... in the USB 1.1 (AKA USB 2.0 "low-speed" and "full-speed") domain.
The PS3 is plugged into AC, the power requirements for radio are pretty much irrelevant.
Bluetooth 1.2 is up to 700 kbps, 2.0 up to 3 Mbps. That's faster than my Internet connection, and I don't consider that an unreasonable time to transfer a song... we're still talking on the order of 20 seconds even at the lower rate... and it's certainly fast enough to stream music and video (I'm thinking of something like a wireless iPod that streamed music from your iTunes library like Apple TV does). The power requirements for Bluetooth are a fraction of Wifi... and at short range (a meter or less) it drops even lower.
Bluetooth isn't a replacement for ethernet, it's a replacement for USB 1.1.
They're just not the big expensive productions, they're in flash and java and run in your browser and cellphone.
Why would they use the relatively high powered Wifi instead of the low power Bluetooth for this kind of short-range wireless?
If a teacher assigns a topic for a paper, it's reasonable to expect that they should read the Wikipedia entry on that subject
But not that they'll be able to discover every other entry the student will come across in the course of their browsing, and use the information therefrom in their homework and papers... and not just in Wikipedia. The point is that if the students are not taught how to use potentially inaccurate sources, and they've only got access to them at home, then (a) it's that much harder for their teachers to guide them to effective study habits, and (b) there's no way for the school to tell what they've accessed and check it for accuracy.
It's like the talk about Apple delaying leopard for Vista compatibility... if they're having problems with some new component in Leopard and have to delay it, any plausible excuse would be more acceptable to Apple than inviting the press to cast aspersions at them. I've already seen idiots suggesting they're suffering from some "Vista-like" delays. Vista-like? Leopard's being delayed months, not years!
It's not like they haven't come up with transparent excuses for their business decisions in the past, and they know people will accept just about any gobbledegook they can throw at them. I don't like it, but I can quite understand why they do it.
What they mean by "security issues" is "if you run Vista in a virtual environment, you'll be able to intercept our 'secure audio path' and 'secure video path', so we're going to make you pay extra to discourage people from using Vista in a virtual environment to make a digital recording".
Why on earth would anyone *want* to run Vista rather than XP virtualised on the Mac? The supposed advantages of Vista, Aero and DirectX 10, won't work well or at all under virtualization, and who needs "protected mode" when you can turn the entire virtual machine into a *real* sandbox. All Vista gives you in a virtual environment is more overhead and inconvenience.
As Microsoft made a similar attempt over the past six years, we might now call this the "Vista Effect".
Or the Copland effect, for the delays and cutbacks in Mac OS 8?
Or the Rhapsody effect, for the delays in Mac OS X?
Or the Babbage Effect, for the delays in the development of the Difference Engine as it became the Analytical Engine?
Unless there's a hell of a "Just One More thing" waiting in Leopard, though, there doesn't really seem to be all that much in Leopard over Tiger. It ain't no moon shot. It's not even a chaser.
It seems to me that the most important question is "If it is wrong, can you fix it?".
:)
That's jumping ahead to the answer to "what happens when it's wrong".
Though I think the problem is more subtle than you're making out. The teachers won't see the bad information in Wikipedia. At the most, if you're lucky, they'll see the bad information in the student's papers.
Or homework.
And they can't do anything about the kids using Wikipedia for homework, so they need to teach them how to handle Wikipedia at school. Which they can't do if they ban it.
the development of such a rich open source ecosystem that the cost of building unique applications is drastically reduced
My experience is that a rich ecosystem is not always what you want to reduce the cost of building applications... because a rich ecosystem includes mosquitos and malaria and rabies and gangrene. It doesn't matter whether it's a proprietary or an open source "ecosystem", either: the ability to cherry-pick the good stuff and run from the bad like it was a swarm of radioactive bees is already a marketable skill.
I mean, I dare you to follow the crusty dried-out spaghetti inheritence in the Mozilla source tree far enough to tell us exactly how proxy handling is done. I gave up.
That's a "pet peeve" of mine too. Just about everything smaller than you can see "relies on quantum effects". Hell, you can roll human vision into that as well: the human eye is sensitive enough to detect small numbers of photons, and in low-light situations that's probably good enough to observe "quantum effects" with the unaided eye.
The problem in the US is that there are only 2 parties on either side of the extremities,
The problem in the US is that the Republicans are far-right, and the Democrats are moderate-right. Both extremes are pulling in the same direction.
Anyone else remember crashme, an early program that ran random code until it crashed, and an NT-based equivalent called "ntcrashme"? I remember that the website for the NT one didn't last long, and the hot spin at the time was that Microsoft had leaned on them.
It seems Microsoft's been in denial about "fuzzers" for some time.
My first summer job was selling encyclopedias door to door.
I sold three sets my first week. That was pretty good money... then I went home, and looked through the sample volume they gave us.
It was horrible. All kinds of errors of fact. Really bad ones.
I couldn't sell any more. I stuck it out another week but got myself booted out for bitching about the company and the trainers who didn't seem to care if they were peddling junk to another trainee. Which was stupid, but I was a teenager. Doing stupid things is in the teenager EULA.
Anyway, "real" encyclopedias can go horribly horribly wrong too. The question is not "can Wikipedia be wrong" but "how often is it wrong?" And "Can you crosscheck"? And "what happens when it is wrong"?