I don't think that market economics are enough to stop global warming. It requires a political component...
I think it requires a technical component. Man's greatest achievements have been enabled by science and technology, not politics.
Obviously. But what motivates the development and deployment of the technology? If you rely only on the market to do that, then green technology will only win when it's cheaper than fossil fuel technology... which it will certainly do, eventually, if for no other reason that the stocks of easily-accessible fossil fuels will be depleted. But there's absolutely no guarantee that will happen fast enough to avoid severe impacts on humanity from climate change. Adding a carbon tax, or similar, serves to increase the market incentives for creating greener technology and building out greener infrastructure. There are still no guarantees that we'll avoid severe impacts, of course, but it increases the odds.
I never look at critic's scores, just whether the audience liked it. Critics have a tendency to be windbags...
I look at both. The problem with critic ratings is that critics look for somewhat different things in a movie than I do. The problem with audience ratings is they are doubly self-selected, as well as vulnerable to astroturfing. I find that looking at both gives me a really good idea of whether I'm going to like it: if both critic and audience ratings are high, I know I'm good. If either one is really low, I can be pretty sure the movie sucks. In other cases, I have to look closer, which means actually reading a sampling of both critic and viewer reviews. I do weight critic ratings/reviews a little more heavily.
In the case of these movies, a 32% RT score is a strong negative indicator, but if the audience ratings are high, I might see it. I probably will see Pirates 5. Any RT score below 20% is a clear loser. I'll stay home if there's no better option.
hen the court arguably just deferred to that intent.
No, the court is simply reading the book of law and stating what is written under "privacy of correspondence".
Which means they deferred to the will of the child, the owner of the correspondence. Or, if you prefer, that the law defers to the will of the child, the owner of the correspondence.
It seems to me like what the courts actually decided is that, when your child dies, Facebook has more rights to their personal property than you do.
Well, to be fair, the child gave that information to Facebook, and didn't give it to the parents. If the child's intent still has any force after death (and I'm not sure if it does; I'm inclined to say that it shouldn't), then the court arguably just deferred to that intent.
You do know that even telco providers keep trying to develop competitive options to Netflix, and could throttle the hell out of the routes to those peering servers if they managed to roll one out?
True, but again, Netflix's size keeps them safe. Since approximately 100% of their customers subscribe to Netflix, and since their customers like Netflix a lot more than the telcos, making Netflix service bad has huge potential to backfire. If they want to guarantee that strong Net Neutrality legislation gets passed, making Netflix suck would be an excellent way to accomplish it.
any ratified treaty becomes as binding as the US Constitution itself
That's not true. It's a common mis-reading of the Supremacy Clause, but it's wrong, and SCOTUS has made that clear in multiple rulings. Specifically, the Clause says:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The confusion arises because it's easy to read the word "Constitution" in "any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of Any State" as referring to the US Constitution, but it doesn't, it refers to the "Constitution... of Any State". That is, it's "(Constitution or Laws) of Any State", not "(Constitution) or (Laws of Any State)". The correct interpretation is actually clear if you look at the first part of the Clause, which clearly places the Constitution, Federal Law and Treaties all on the same level. Not that they are on the same level, but they all supersede anything the states may do.
Treaties have exactly the same force of law as any other federal law, which makes the choice of senate ratification or the normal legislative process a purely tactical one, with no effect whatsoever on the "strength" of the agreement. If treaties (however passed) conflict with any other federal law, courts use the same processes for breaking the ties that they would use with any conflict between laws.
and it's significantly tougher to back out of it if it's suddenly a bad treaty for the country
This is true, for exactly the same reasons that it's easier to pass a congressional-executive agreement than to ratify a formal treaty in the first place.
Other countries may not feel as confident in that model as the Constitutional Treaty
Mostly they don't know or care.
these days I believe other countries are getting a lot more out of us than we're getting out of them, so I'm sure they're more than willing to "risk" it.
That's what Trump thinks. I think he's going to prove that it's not true.
Yes, I was aware of that clause of the law. It's not clear to me, and wasn't clear to the judges, that it enables the president to find that a given class is detrimental merely because he doesn't like their religion.
We'll see what SCOTUS says, unless the administration drops the issue.
Considering that Obama never sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification, the United states was never a signer of this treaty.
One nit: Treaties are rarely sent to the Senate for ratification. That's the constitutionally-defined process, but getting 2/3 approval of the senate is generally harder than getting a majority in both House and Senate. So usually what we do is to write legislation that contains the treaty terms and pass it through both houses and then on to the White House for signature like any other purely-domestic law. Treaties handled this way are called "congressional-executive agreements", and it's been the usual treaty process for most of the nation's history.
For completeness, in addition to congressional-executive agreements and formal treaties, there is one other type of international agreements the US enters into, called a "sole-executive agreement". Those are signed only by the president, because the terms commit the US only to things that are within the president's power to direct. A common example is treaties related to the behavior of US military forces stationed in other countries, called Status of Forces Agreements. As commander-in-chief, the president can order the military to abide by the agreements, so there's no need for Congress to get involved.
It isn't until after they actually lose their jobs that the economic consequences will be felt, and only then will anything meaningful happen.
That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to be thinking / planning / experimenting now, so that if / when that occurs we can act based on data, rather than randomly.
I can see that's funny to most people not immersed in the world of computer security, but to those who are it's just business as usual. It's extremely common to write code that intentionally crashes in the face of attack. It's obviously better to build systems that are sufficiently resilient that they can shrug off an attack and continue functioning, but in many cases that's not feasible, and crashing is a completely legitimate and very often-used threat mitigation strategy.
Intentionally crashing is mostly used in circumstances where the software can identify that something has gone horribly wrong, that it's gotten into a state that should be impossible because of some other defect, whether a security bug being exploited or an ordinary software bug. If you can't prove that it's possible to recover safely and correctly, then immediately crashing is the best possible response.
I don't know if XP crashes intentionally or unintentionally in this case, but it wouldn't shock me if the crash was a deliberate response to identifying a state that should be impossible.
The ONLY 'Constitutional Crisis' has been over the travel restrictions. That is only a crisis because of activist judges. Judges who in even recent times would have been hound (rightly so) from the bench for even suggesting that the President's personal prejudices should have any bearing whatsoever on the plain meaning of the law.
You misspelled "executive order". Executive orders are not laws, and they (quite rightly) get a very different level of scrutiny from the courts. Because they're the dictates of a single individual, that individual's motivations in issuing them definitely are relevant to questions of their constitutionality. There are countless examples of this in the judicial record, especially with respect to orders issued by law enforcement officials and state governors. The intent of the order has a great deal of bearing on its constitutionality.
This principle hasn't (AFAIK) been applied to presidential executive orders until now, but that's only because past presidents (with the possible exception of Andrew Jackson) haven't been batshit crazy. Note that I'm not saying executive orders haven't been struck down, several have, just that the analysis of intent hasn't been explicitly considered. SCOTUS came close by lightly analyzing intent when they struck down Obama's recess appointments, and it can be argued that intent was a factor in their decision (though I don't think it was really necessary to consider intent in that case; it was a pretty clear subversion of the constitutional process).
BTW, before you go calling me a "liberal", I should point out that I voted for the Republican candidate for president in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. In 2016 I voted for a conservative independent in order to avoid voting for Trump.
I stand corrected, in part. My core point, however, was that the Internet was not "designed for entertainment and casual communication". And the rest of my argument holds, that the Internet does what it does very well and is in no way "insecure".
What they want is to quit using an obviously insecure technology designed for entertainment and casual communication for command and control of critical infrastructure.
You have that backwards. The Internet was originally designed for command and control of critical (military) infrastructure. One of the core design goals was that it be able to survive nuclear war, which it does by supporting multiple paths for data, with automatic re-routing. We repurposed this military design first for education and then later for business and entertainment, and now for nearly everything.
Maybe the internet can actually be secured. But so far, all the signs seem to say that it can not be -- at least not any time soon.
Nonsense. The Internet is quite secure. But to make that statement mean anything we have to define what "secure" means in this context. What it means in this case is that the Internet delivers packets from point A to point B with high reliability, and that it's infeasible to cause large scale misrouting or packet loss. It does that extremely well. It's not terribly difficult to disrupt specific links in the vast network, but that only affects the nodes serviced by the affected link -- and then only if the nodes don't have any redundant connectivity.
Now, the endpoints, those we clearly are not very good at securing. But that's not the Internet's fault. This isn't just semantics, either. When you distinguish the connectivity fabric from the endpoints, it makes the risks much clearer. The problem isn't that the Internet is in any way insecure or defective, the problem is that people are connecting insecure nodes that manage critical infrastructure to this globally-accessible network. I may be sitting in a Starbucks in Moscow, and attacking a power delivery substation in New York City. The Internet will be faithfully doing its job of delivering my packets to the substation and the substation's responses back to me. The computer controlling the substation, on the other hand, may not be doing it's job of properly authenticating the commands given to it.
So... how does retaining analog copper help? At all? It's not like the power company can use that copper to manage the substation. It's not like the existence of that copper does anything to make the fact that I can ping the insecure substation from Moscow any less problematic. It's useless. What might be useful is to put critical infrastructure on separate networks, but there's no reason to use old analog technology for that. And I said "might" not "would" in that last sentence very deliberately, because it's not at all clear that the flexibility gained and money saved by using the Internet rather than a separate network isn't worth the risk. Real-world security is all about cost/benefit analyses, not because bean counters say so, but because there are real societal benefits associated with openness, alongside the risks.
It's remotely possible that a large EMP burst would take out the Internet, because modern electronics, including all of the endpoints and the routers, are extremely sensitive to EMP. In that event, having the old copper network in place might be useful, if we also have EMP-resilient devices to connect to it, meaning old-style analog telephones and telephone switches. But those are long gone. If that's the goal, we can't "keep" that infrastructure, we have to rebuild that infrastructure. And, if we're going to plow the billions into it, we'd be better served putting those billions into EMP-hardening the core routing infrastructure (luckily, most of the network is optical fiber, already EMP-oblivious, excepting the repeaters), and ensuring that critical emergency services, etc., have EMP-hardened endpoint devices.
they're all terrible solutions for the problem of course, but then again, so are wireless headphones for a portable media player device.
I don't agree that wireless is a bad solution; I think it's a superior solution. But if you like wires, use wires. Removal of the headphone jack doesn't mean you can't use wires.
Have you actually ever disassembled a reasonably modern phone? I run a small repair shop after hours, so I have. The headphone jack is not particularily large, it absolutely doesn't have to be in a corner (although it helps) and it is usually a module with several other stuff attached or placed on it, like the LEDs, ambient light sensors or antennas (which often are just plastic covers with metallic ink lines drawn on them.
I'm just telling you what a friend of mine, a hardware engineer who works on smartphones and tablets, told me. I don't know enough of the details to debate them.
Would that mean Waymo would be free to pursue criminal charges against Levandowski? How does this substantively change how the litigation moves forward? Seems more like Stall Theater to me. We fired that guy for not cooperating in a lawsuit we didn't want him to cooperate with in the first place.
That makes no sense.
Levandowski took the fifth when asked to testify in court. The court ordered Uber to do everything in their power to convince Levandowski to testify. Uber had to threaten him with the strongest punishment they had available, terminating his employment. They threatened, he didn't comply, they had to carry out their threat.
That's one perspective, anyway, and the one that Uber is presenting to the court. They did what they could, so they can't be held in contempt. There are other possibilities, but I'll leave those to others.
No, I didn't. Making a thicker device wouldn't help much with the issues that are driving the removal of the audio jack. And, frankly, even if that were the case, it appears that -- slashdotters notwithstanding -- the market really does like thinner phones, so trying to tell OEMs to make them thicker isn't going to work.
Total size/volume matters less than the volume near the edges. This is particularly true on devices with metal bodies since you can't put an antenna behind a metal shield. And, increasingly, metal bodies are essential for performance because SoCs are hot and the large heat sink and radiant surface provided by a metal body is very helpful with heat dissipation. Inadequate heat dissipation will result in CPU/GPU thermal throttling, which kills performance under heavy use.
Google made the switch in early 2012, but ultimately repository size is only one input into the performance of a revision control system. You're comparing two very different companies and a single produce repository to a global repository (which also includes things like documentation and build tools, which are presumably almost static content).
Certainly; I never said otherwise.
If you look at something like code commits, presentations from Google show something on the order of 30-50k per week, which is in the same neighborhood as the 8500 per day that the Windows repository sees.
From the link above: "On a typical workday, they commit 16,000 changes to the codebase, and another 24,000 changes are committed by automated systems." So that's about 40K commits per day, quite a bit more than Microsoft.
And while it is laudable that Perforce could handle the repository at all, it is clear from the whitepaper that it took significant investment, ingenuity and vigilance in order to provide acceptable performance
Certainly. As did Microsoft's investment into Git. It's clear, though, that Microsoft's decision to switch wasn't made because Perforce couldn't handle the workload; it manifestly can given the right infrastructure. That trail had already been blazed by Google, so Microsoft clearly could have gone that route.
Anyway, that wasn't really my point. My point was that 300 GB is not an insanely large repository. 90 PB is an insanely large repository:-)
In this case, I'd wager the jack isn't the problem in and of itself, it's the design constraint of an artificially imposed cosmetic requirement that the device be thinner than the last model.
No, thinness isn't really an issue. The jack is only 3.5mm in diameter, and phones are around three times thicker than that. The issue is the 15 mm length.
The "Great Firewall of China" is an infamous example of such monitoring
The GFC does do some TLS MiTM, based on government CA certificates installed in many browsers. Not much, though, because it's pretty expensive, and not that hard to work around. Mostly the GFC prefers to simply block HTTPS connections to sites the government doesn't want its people to access.
and the AT&T hosted fiver optic taps revealed in the infamous "Room 641A" are the tip of the iceberg of network monitoring accepted as a part of doing Internet business
Red herring. Those sort of taps are exactly what TLS make useless.
Take a good look at the old "NetInercept" box by Sandstorm Enterprises, which does just such monitoring wholesale. The product went off the public radar for awhile since their purchase by NikSun, but it's still in use and still a strong seller to various Nefarious Security Agencies(tm).
No, those boxes aren't very useful to government agencies. They're mostly used by corporations who can push certs to the browsers of all of the corporate-managed devices.
You're assuming there isn't a good reason. (...) The headphone jack has been causing problems with the placement of components, especially antennas, for years now because the thing is enormous, cutting deep into the device, and has to be on the edge and at one end.
You know what else is enormous and so on? Wheels on cars. We still have them, even though they, together with the wheel wells, ruin the aerodynamics of the car. Levitating cars somehow are less useful. Just because you have good reasons to remove something, it doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.
Bad analogy, since phones we have several effective alternatives to the 3.5mm audio port, both wireless and wired. Cars obviously cannot function without wheels. They arguably can't even be cars.
Unfortunately they didn't. Otherwise I would tell them that it's very stupid for a newcomer to reduce the number of potential buyers without a good reason.
(Prefatory note: I do not expect that this will convince you to buy a phone without a headphone jack, and I'm in no way trying to imply that you should if you don't want to.)
You're assuming there isn't a good reason. Most consumers assume that device designers can just stick anything they want into a device, any place they like, but that's not remotely true. The headphone jack has been causing problems with the placement of components, especially antennas, for years now because the thing is enormous, cutting deep into the device, and has to be on the edge and at one end. The USB port is a similar problem, it's less than half as deep and it serves many purposes -- including audio.
The obvious engineering solution: eliminate the huge and anachronistic headphone jack. Hardware engineers have been afraid to do this for a long time, because of the obvious backlash from consumers who don't understand the complexities involved and will see it as nothing more than a way to extract more money from them in the form of new headphones, or adapters for their old ones. This is why Apple called their decision "courageous", because they decided to accept the backlash.
Now that Apple has broken that trail, you can expect everyone else to follow suit, not because they particularly want to emulate Apple, but because there are good engineering reasons for doing it. Over the next couple of years, you will see almost all "flagship" devices dumping the headphone jack, and within four or five years the only new devices that still have it will be those who are catering specifically to the market of people who demand it. Meanwhile, USB-C headphones will become cheap and plentiful, as will adapters.
Personally, I haven't used a headphone jack in at least a year. I find wireless headphones to be so much more convenient to use that I'm willing to put up with the necessity of charging them. I know lots of people find the quality of bluetooth audio to be unacceptable, but that actually has nothing to do with bluetooth per se, because the protocol can easily support high quality audio, and everything to do with the implementation in current-generation devices. And it's been something of a vicious circle: bluetooth audio sucks so audiophiles don't buy bluetooth headphones, so there's no reason to build bluetooth headphones with high quality audio. The coming dearth of headphone jacks is likely to break that circle, I think. I hope so, because I like not having wires from my pocket to my head, and although I'm rarely bothered by bluetooth audio quality, perhaps because I rarely listen to music, I wouldn't mind having better.
Anyway, the bottom line is that there are good (to hardware engineers) reasons to lose the headphone jack, and I suspect that you're going to find it increasingly hard to find phones that have one. Not right away, but in a few years.
Here you go. The Chinese government requires all browsers to have their root certificate installed, allowing them to intercept encrypted traffic. Not every government is that technically competent, though.
Yes, that's an example of compromised certificates being identified and removed from trust stores... or in this case blocked via certificate pinning.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that market economics are enough to stop global warming. It requires a political component...
I think it requires a technical component. Man's greatest achievements have been enabled by science and technology, not politics.
Obviously. But what motivates the development and deployment of the technology? If you rely only on the market to do that, then green technology will only win when it's cheaper than fossil fuel technology... which it will certainly do, eventually, if for no other reason that the stocks of easily-accessible fossil fuels will be depleted. But there's absolutely no guarantee that will happen fast enough to avoid severe impacts on humanity from climate change. Adding a carbon tax, or similar, serves to increase the market incentives for creating greener technology and building out greener infrastructure. There are still no guarantees that we'll avoid severe impacts, of course, but it increases the odds.
I have a seen a number of movies that critics decided were rubbish but that audiences loved.
Me too. What I haven't seen is a movie that critics decided was terrible, but audiences loved, and I liked. YMMV, of course.
I never look at critic's scores, just whether the audience liked it. Critics have a tendency to be windbags...
I look at both. The problem with critic ratings is that critics look for somewhat different things in a movie than I do. The problem with audience ratings is they are doubly self-selected, as well as vulnerable to astroturfing. I find that looking at both gives me a really good idea of whether I'm going to like it: if both critic and audience ratings are high, I know I'm good. If either one is really low, I can be pretty sure the movie sucks. In other cases, I have to look closer, which means actually reading a sampling of both critic and viewer reviews. I do weight critic ratings/reviews a little more heavily.
In the case of these movies, a 32% RT score is a strong negative indicator, but if the audience ratings are high, I might see it. I probably will see Pirates 5. Any RT score below 20% is a clear loser. I'll stay home if there's no better option.
hen the court arguably just deferred to that intent. No, the court is simply reading the book of law and stating what is written under "privacy of correspondence".
Which means they deferred to the will of the child, the owner of the correspondence. Or, if you prefer, that the law defers to the will of the child, the owner of the correspondence.
It seems to me like what the courts actually decided is that, when your child dies, Facebook has more rights to their personal property than you do.
Well, to be fair, the child gave that information to Facebook, and didn't give it to the parents. If the child's intent still has any force after death (and I'm not sure if it does; I'm inclined to say that it shouldn't), then the court arguably just deferred to that intent.
You do know that even telco providers keep trying to develop competitive options to Netflix, and could throttle the hell out of the routes to those peering servers if they managed to roll one out?
True, but again, Netflix's size keeps them safe. Since approximately 100% of their customers subscribe to Netflix, and since their customers like Netflix a lot more than the telcos, making Netflix service bad has huge potential to backfire. If they want to guarantee that strong Net Neutrality legislation gets passed, making Netflix suck would be an excellent way to accomplish it.
any ratified treaty becomes as binding as the US Constitution itself
That's not true. It's a common mis-reading of the Supremacy Clause, but it's wrong, and SCOTUS has made that clear in multiple rulings. Specifically, the Clause says:
The confusion arises because it's easy to read the word "Constitution" in "any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of Any State" as referring to the US Constitution, but it doesn't, it refers to the "Constitution... of Any State". That is, it's "(Constitution or Laws) of Any State", not "(Constitution) or (Laws of Any State)". The correct interpretation is actually clear if you look at the first part of the Clause, which clearly places the Constitution, Federal Law and Treaties all on the same level. Not that they are on the same level, but they all supersede anything the states may do.
Treaties have exactly the same force of law as any other federal law, which makes the choice of senate ratification or the normal legislative process a purely tactical one, with no effect whatsoever on the "strength" of the agreement. If treaties (however passed) conflict with any other federal law, courts use the same processes for breaking the ties that they would use with any conflict between laws.
and it's significantly tougher to back out of it if it's suddenly a bad treaty for the country
This is true, for exactly the same reasons that it's easier to pass a congressional-executive agreement than to ratify a formal treaty in the first place.
Other countries may not feel as confident in that model as the Constitutional Treaty
Mostly they don't know or care.
these days I believe other countries are getting a lot more out of us than we're getting out of them, so I'm sure they're more than willing to "risk" it.
That's what Trump thinks. I think he's going to prove that it's not true.
Yes, I was aware of that clause of the law. It's not clear to me, and wasn't clear to the judges, that it enables the president to find that a given class is detrimental merely because he doesn't like their religion.
We'll see what SCOTUS says, unless the administration drops the issue.
Considering that Obama never sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification, the United states was never a signer of this treaty.
One nit: Treaties are rarely sent to the Senate for ratification. That's the constitutionally-defined process, but getting 2/3 approval of the senate is generally harder than getting a majority in both House and Senate. So usually what we do is to write legislation that contains the treaty terms and pass it through both houses and then on to the White House for signature like any other purely-domestic law. Treaties handled this way are called "congressional-executive agreements", and it's been the usual treaty process for most of the nation's history.
For completeness, in addition to congressional-executive agreements and formal treaties, there is one other type of international agreements the US enters into, called a "sole-executive agreement". Those are signed only by the president, because the terms commit the US only to things that are within the president's power to direct. A common example is treaties related to the behavior of US military forces stationed in other countries, called Status of Forces Agreements. As commander-in-chief, the president can order the military to abide by the agreements, so there's no need for Congress to get involved.
It isn't until after they actually lose their jobs that the economic consequences will be felt, and only then will anything meaningful happen.
That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to be thinking / planning / experimenting now, so that if / when that occurs we can act based on data, rather than randomly.
That WinXP was reliable by crashing?
I can see that's funny to most people not immersed in the world of computer security, but to those who are it's just business as usual. It's extremely common to write code that intentionally crashes in the face of attack. It's obviously better to build systems that are sufficiently resilient that they can shrug off an attack and continue functioning, but in many cases that's not feasible, and crashing is a completely legitimate and very often-used threat mitigation strategy.
Intentionally crashing is mostly used in circumstances where the software can identify that something has gone horribly wrong, that it's gotten into a state that should be impossible because of some other defect, whether a security bug being exploited or an ordinary software bug. If you can't prove that it's possible to recover safely and correctly, then immediately crashing is the best possible response.
I don't know if XP crashes intentionally or unintentionally in this case, but it wouldn't shock me if the crash was a deliberate response to identifying a state that should be impossible.
The ONLY 'Constitutional Crisis' has been over the travel restrictions. That is only a crisis because of activist judges. Judges who in even recent times would have been hound (rightly so) from the bench for even suggesting that the President's personal prejudices should have any bearing whatsoever on the plain meaning of the law.
You misspelled "executive order". Executive orders are not laws, and they (quite rightly) get a very different level of scrutiny from the courts. Because they're the dictates of a single individual, that individual's motivations in issuing them definitely are relevant to questions of their constitutionality. There are countless examples of this in the judicial record, especially with respect to orders issued by law enforcement officials and state governors. The intent of the order has a great deal of bearing on its constitutionality.
This principle hasn't (AFAIK) been applied to presidential executive orders until now, but that's only because past presidents (with the possible exception of Andrew Jackson) haven't been batshit crazy. Note that I'm not saying executive orders haven't been struck down, several have, just that the analysis of intent hasn't been explicitly considered. SCOTUS came close by lightly analyzing intent when they struck down Obama's recess appointments, and it can be argued that intent was a factor in their decision (though I don't think it was really necessary to consider intent in that case; it was a pretty clear subversion of the constitutional process).
BTW, before you go calling me a "liberal", I should point out that I voted for the Republican candidate for president in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. In 2016 I voted for a conservative independent in order to avoid voting for Trump.
I stand corrected, in part. My core point, however, was that the Internet was not "designed for entertainment and casual communication". And the rest of my argument holds, that the Internet does what it does very well and is in no way "insecure".
What they want is to quit using an obviously insecure technology designed for entertainment and casual communication for command and control of critical infrastructure.
You have that backwards. The Internet was originally designed for command and control of critical (military) infrastructure. One of the core design goals was that it be able to survive nuclear war, which it does by supporting multiple paths for data, with automatic re-routing. We repurposed this military design first for education and then later for business and entertainment, and now for nearly everything.
Maybe the internet can actually be secured. But so far, all the signs seem to say that it can not be -- at least not any time soon.
Nonsense. The Internet is quite secure. But to make that statement mean anything we have to define what "secure" means in this context. What it means in this case is that the Internet delivers packets from point A to point B with high reliability, and that it's infeasible to cause large scale misrouting or packet loss. It does that extremely well. It's not terribly difficult to disrupt specific links in the vast network, but that only affects the nodes serviced by the affected link -- and then only if the nodes don't have any redundant connectivity.
Now, the endpoints, those we clearly are not very good at securing. But that's not the Internet's fault. This isn't just semantics, either. When you distinguish the connectivity fabric from the endpoints, it makes the risks much clearer. The problem isn't that the Internet is in any way insecure or defective, the problem is that people are connecting insecure nodes that manage critical infrastructure to this globally-accessible network. I may be sitting in a Starbucks in Moscow, and attacking a power delivery substation in New York City. The Internet will be faithfully doing its job of delivering my packets to the substation and the substation's responses back to me. The computer controlling the substation, on the other hand, may not be doing it's job of properly authenticating the commands given to it.
So... how does retaining analog copper help? At all? It's not like the power company can use that copper to manage the substation. It's not like the existence of that copper does anything to make the fact that I can ping the insecure substation from Moscow any less problematic. It's useless. What might be useful is to put critical infrastructure on separate networks, but there's no reason to use old analog technology for that. And I said "might" not "would" in that last sentence very deliberately, because it's not at all clear that the flexibility gained and money saved by using the Internet rather than a separate network isn't worth the risk. Real-world security is all about cost/benefit analyses, not because bean counters say so, but because there are real societal benefits associated with openness, alongside the risks.
It's remotely possible that a large EMP burst would take out the Internet, because modern electronics, including all of the endpoints and the routers, are extremely sensitive to EMP. In that event, having the old copper network in place might be useful, if we also have EMP-resilient devices to connect to it, meaning old-style analog telephones and telephone switches. But those are long gone. If that's the goal, we can't "keep" that infrastructure, we have to rebuild that infrastructure. And, if we're going to plow the billions into it, we'd be better served putting those billions into EMP-hardening the core routing infrastructure (luckily, most of the network is optical fiber, already EMP-oblivious, excepting the repeaters), and ensuring that critical emergency services, etc., have EMP-hardened endpoint devices.
they're all terrible solutions for the problem of course, but then again, so are wireless headphones for a portable media player device.
I don't agree that wireless is a bad solution; I think it's a superior solution. But if you like wires, use wires. Removal of the headphone jack doesn't mean you can't use wires.
Have you actually ever disassembled a reasonably modern phone? I run a small repair shop after hours, so I have. The headphone jack is not particularily large, it absolutely doesn't have to be in a corner (although it helps) and it is usually a module with several other stuff attached or placed on it, like the LEDs, ambient light sensors or antennas (which often are just plastic covers with metallic ink lines drawn on them.
I'm just telling you what a friend of mine, a hardware engineer who works on smartphones and tablets, told me. I don't know enough of the details to debate them.
Would that mean Waymo would be free to pursue criminal charges against Levandowski? How does this substantively change how the litigation moves forward? Seems more like Stall Theater to me. We fired that guy for not cooperating in a lawsuit we didn't want him to cooperate with in the first place.
That makes no sense.
Levandowski took the fifth when asked to testify in court. The court ordered Uber to do everything in their power to convince Levandowski to testify. Uber had to threaten him with the strongest punishment they had available, terminating his employment. They threatened, he didn't comply, they had to carry out their threat.
That's one perspective, anyway, and the one that Uber is presenting to the court. They did what they could, so they can't be held in contempt. There are other possibilities, but I'll leave those to others.
No, I didn't. Making a thicker device wouldn't help much with the issues that are driving the removal of the audio jack. And, frankly, even if that were the case, it appears that -- slashdotters notwithstanding -- the market really does like thinner phones, so trying to tell OEMs to make them thicker isn't going to work.
Total size/volume matters less than the volume near the edges. This is particularly true on devices with metal bodies since you can't put an antenna behind a metal shield. And, increasingly, metal bodies are essential for performance because SoCs are hot and the large heat sink and radiant surface provided by a metal body is very helpful with heat dissipation. Inadequate heat dissipation will result in CPU/GPU thermal throttling, which kills performance under heavy use.
Google made the switch in early 2012, but ultimately repository size is only one input into the performance of a revision control system. You're comparing two very different companies and a single produce repository to a global repository (which also includes things like documentation and build tools, which are presumably almost static content).
Certainly; I never said otherwise.
If you look at something like code commits, presentations from Google show something on the order of 30-50k per week, which is in the same neighborhood as the 8500 per day that the Windows repository sees.
From the link above: "On a typical workday, they commit 16,000 changes to the codebase, and another 24,000 changes are committed by automated systems." So that's about 40K commits per day, quite a bit more than Microsoft.
And while it is laudable that Perforce could handle the repository at all, it is clear from the whitepaper that it took significant investment, ingenuity and vigilance in order to provide acceptable performance
Certainly. As did Microsoft's investment into Git. It's clear, though, that Microsoft's decision to switch wasn't made because Perforce couldn't handle the workload; it manifestly can given the right infrastructure. That trail had already been blazed by Google, so Microsoft clearly could have gone that route.
Anyway, that wasn't really my point. My point was that 300 GB is not an insanely large repository. 90 PB is an insanely large repository :-)
In this case, I'd wager the jack isn't the problem in and of itself, it's the design constraint of an artificially imposed cosmetic requirement that the device be thinner than the last model.
No, thinness isn't really an issue. The jack is only 3.5mm in diameter, and phones are around three times thicker than that. The issue is the 15 mm length.
The "Great Firewall of China" is an infamous example of such monitoring
The GFC does do some TLS MiTM, based on government CA certificates installed in many browsers. Not much, though, because it's pretty expensive, and not that hard to work around. Mostly the GFC prefers to simply block HTTPS connections to sites the government doesn't want its people to access.
and the AT&T hosted fiver optic taps revealed in the infamous "Room 641A" are the tip of the iceberg of network monitoring accepted as a part of doing Internet business
Red herring. Those sort of taps are exactly what TLS make useless.
Take a good look at the old "NetInercept" box by Sandstorm Enterprises, which does just such monitoring wholesale. The product went off the public radar for awhile since their purchase by NikSun, but it's still in use and still a strong seller to various Nefarious Security Agencies(tm).
https://www.securitywizardry.c...
No, those boxes aren't very useful to government agencies. They're mostly used by corporations who can push certs to the browsers of all of the corporate-managed devices.
You're assuming there isn't a good reason. (...) The headphone jack has been causing problems with the placement of components, especially antennas, for years now because the thing is enormous, cutting deep into the device, and has to be on the edge and at one end.
You know what else is enormous and so on? Wheels on cars. We still have them, even though they, together with the wheel wells, ruin the aerodynamics of the car. Levitating cars somehow are less useful. Just because you have good reasons to remove something, it doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.
Bad analogy, since phones we have several effective alternatives to the 3.5mm audio port, both wireless and wired. Cars obviously cannot function without wheels. They arguably can't even be cars.
Unfortunately they didn't. Otherwise I would tell them that it's very stupid for a newcomer to reduce the number of potential buyers without a good reason.
(Prefatory note: I do not expect that this will convince you to buy a phone without a headphone jack, and I'm in no way trying to imply that you should if you don't want to.)
You're assuming there isn't a good reason. Most consumers assume that device designers can just stick anything they want into a device, any place they like, but that's not remotely true. The headphone jack has been causing problems with the placement of components, especially antennas, for years now because the thing is enormous, cutting deep into the device, and has to be on the edge and at one end. The USB port is a similar problem, it's less than half as deep and it serves many purposes -- including audio.
The obvious engineering solution: eliminate the huge and anachronistic headphone jack. Hardware engineers have been afraid to do this for a long time, because of the obvious backlash from consumers who don't understand the complexities involved and will see it as nothing more than a way to extract more money from them in the form of new headphones, or adapters for their old ones. This is why Apple called their decision "courageous", because they decided to accept the backlash.
Now that Apple has broken that trail, you can expect everyone else to follow suit, not because they particularly want to emulate Apple, but because there are good engineering reasons for doing it. Over the next couple of years, you will see almost all "flagship" devices dumping the headphone jack, and within four or five years the only new devices that still have it will be those who are catering specifically to the market of people who demand it. Meanwhile, USB-C headphones will become cheap and plentiful, as will adapters.
Personally, I haven't used a headphone jack in at least a year. I find wireless headphones to be so much more convenient to use that I'm willing to put up with the necessity of charging them. I know lots of people find the quality of bluetooth audio to be unacceptable, but that actually has nothing to do with bluetooth per se, because the protocol can easily support high quality audio, and everything to do with the implementation in current-generation devices. And it's been something of a vicious circle: bluetooth audio sucks so audiophiles don't buy bluetooth headphones, so there's no reason to build bluetooth headphones with high quality audio. The coming dearth of headphone jacks is likely to break that circle, I think. I hope so, because I like not having wires from my pocket to my head, and although I'm rarely bothered by bluetooth audio quality, perhaps because I rarely listen to music, I wouldn't mind having better.
Anyway, the bottom line is that there are good (to hardware engineers) reasons to lose the headphone jack, and I suspect that you're going to find it increasingly hard to find phones that have one. Not right away, but in a few years.
Here you go. The Chinese government requires all browsers to have their root certificate installed, allowing them to intercept encrypted traffic. Not every government is that technically competent, though.
Yes, that's an example of compromised certificates being identified and removed from trust stores... or in this case blocked via certificate pinning.