What makes you think any other desktop OS would be less vulnerably to ransomware? Security through obscurity perhaps.
Let's say they were running Linux. The infection vector is usually a browser exploit or email attachment. Linux does nothing extra to prevent the user from executing code that Windows doesn't also do. Then the malware is running, and has access to the user's file, and any other files that the user has access to on the network. Again, Linux does nothing extra to prevent this.
The virus spreads via exploits stolen from the NSA. Even assuming they are not zero-day and a patch is available, it's up to the organization to install that patch. If they were not installing Windows patches, why would they be installing Linux patches?
No, the problem is not the OS. The problem is the IT staff not locking the system down properly. Just switching OS would not help them.
It's pretty much the same in every line of work. Businesses try to mitigate this by creating systems, ways of doing things that avoid the problems. In software development we have all kinds of methodologies to avoid making poor decisions and create reasonably good designs, and we still fail quite often.
In politics there are fewer such systems, especially at local level. And most of the people doing those jobs have zero training. In fact the only qualification they need to get the job is winning a popular vote.
Most people would just buy a tablet and optional Bluetooth keyboard for this purpose.
Integrating a second SoC into a laptop is actually more complex than you probably realize. For example, how are you going to do things like share the screen between the SoC and main GPU? Okay, you need an extra video switch... But the screen power and backlight are also controlled by the main laptop chipset, so you need to split that out and allow the SoC to access that functionality as well. Same for the keyboard, trackpad, USB ports, wifi, battery charging system, audio subsystem and amps...
Now go ask the IT department how hard it is just to get staff to connect to the VPN before browsing some Facebook on the work laptop and you will understand why no-one sells machines like the OP describes.
If the company actually cares about this they will just disable all wifi access except to their trusted network with a valid certificate. Ordinary users won't be able to understand what the hell this feature actually does.
Only tech savvy nerds will use such a complex set up, and they won't trust anyone else to build it for them anyway. Dual boot machines have been sold commercially in the past and they were a complete flop.
I'd sue the company that offers to distribute the flyers only to white people. That company should have refused that request.
The lawsuit would probably name the person who made the request too, of course. But in this case it makes sense to target Facebook, since stopping Facebook from doing it would have a much bigger effect than stopping one of the individual landlords.
So how did you arrange this meeting? Phone call or email or text message? And did either of you put anything in your calendar about it? Did either of you post something about just meeting someone on Facebook afterwards?
Facebook does use location data, so it knows you two were in the same place at the same time. But there are plenty of other ways they could have got this information, all equally creepy but more technically feasible.
Say you were an OS vendor with millions of users, all with different hardware and software configurations. You need to push out a critical security patch, but you obviously can't test with every single user's configuration. What do you do?
If any downtime at all is unacceptable, it seems like the only option is to leave everyone vulnerable. But then imagine it's a bug like the Apple calendar issues, where after a certain date important features stop working or the device even bricks, so you have no choice but to patch or face inevitable downtime...
They generally roll them out slowly, so for example on Android app updates don't go to everyone on day one, they ramp up so that any issues can be detected before too many people are affected. Same with Windows 10.
On the one hand, this means that you might be unlucky and get bricked by a bad update and might be left vulnerable to zero day exploits for a week. On the other hand, for the vast majority of people it's both more reliable than everyone getting the update on Patch Tuesday and definitely better than them delaying or ignoring updates forever.
The number of us power users who want to control the updates ourselves is fairly small, but it is immensely frustrating for us. And even for normal users, the updates should not interrupt normal use of their computer in any way.
There doesn't seem to be a good solution. There are too many configurations out there to be sure a fix won't brick someone, and most users are not tech savvy enough to make good decisions about when to patch, and not getting timely patches is even worse.
If this were possible it would be an incredible technical feat.
Phone batteries don't provide enough energy to constantly record audio and look for speech, then transmit it back to Facebook or do speech recognition on the device. Not to mention the effect on your data allowance.
The way those always on "hay Siri" type things work is to have a special ultra low power chip that recognizes just "hay" and then wakes the phone to process the rest, with an appreciable effect on battery life.
I think more likely is that they do a couple of things. Firstly they are really good at connecting you with your close friend's desire to buy red cookware, and the app noticed that you were near each other with the usual location services so there is a fair chance you might be interested in red cookware too now. Creepy as hell still but based on established, practical techniques.
The other thing they could be doing is a little bit of Shazam style audio recognition. Shazam is an app that listens to a song and tells you what it is. Google has a similar feature on the Pixel 2 that uses audio fingerprint data stored on the phone, so it doesn't need to transmit any audio. Facebook probably only care about fingerprinting a small number of different TV/radio ads and detecting them when the app is open. Again, that's feasible with current tech and won't completely destroy your battery life, or give the game away by transmitting chunks of audio data periodically.
You don't have to install the app, just speaking near someone who installed it.
And even if you did agree, I doubt many people saw the microphone permission as agreeing to have all their conversations sent to Facebook, and I have a feeling most courts would agree.
Even if they put "we will record you 24/7" in their ToS it would still be morally indefensible, considering how deliberately unreadable those things are.
Except that housing is something people actually want, unlike being stabbed in the face.
Imagine you were handing out flyers for an apartment in a mall. As you walk around you carefully avoid all the black people, only giving out flyers to white people. "Oh but I'm just targeting the demographic most likely to be able to afford my rent, to maximize the return on my investment in flyers" probably isn't going to win many people over.
It's more like when someone walks into the local real estate broker's office the staff there look at their skin colour or the fact they have children and avoid showing them certain properties based on the landlord's preference not to have black people or kids in their building.
Lol this is great for business, exactly what they want. Business is probably the reason these rules came in.
Business wants filters like these to protect employees, and by extension protect themselves from lawsuits over harassment and hostile work environments.
Businesses won't be worried. These are exactly the same ToS they put on their own services.
It would show he was serious about dealing with this issue.
No going tells us that he is just waiting for the news cycle to move on and blow over. Facebook won't change, it's not sorry, it doesn't even think it did anything wrong. The only problem is that they got caught.
In fact, he probably views it as free advertising. Look how great this data is, look what you can do with it.
What matters is if anyone is disadvantaged by their actions.
Make up for specific skin tones is fine. No one loses out. Target away. But trying to exclude certain people from housing, a basic resource that everyone needs and is the core of a person's life, is rather different.
Facebook created tools to target protected attributes like gender and race. It therefore has an obligation to ensure they are not misused.
It's like a car rental place that loans out trucks with bull bars, and then does nothing to stop the guys who keep using them for ram-raiding. People keep pointing out that their trucks are being misused, but they just carry on ignoring the bags of swag they see being unloaded.
It's probably the emergency call feature. A lot of users are triggering it by mistake too. Basically you press one of the buttons 5 times and it gives you a few seconds to cancel, then calls 911.
The Apple Watch does it too. I read a story about a guy who woke up at 3 AM with cops in his room, because he wore the watch to monitor his sleep and "butt-dialed" 911.
If anyone gets prosecuted it will likely be the woman in the car. Her job was to pay attention and keep the system safe.
Uber will be in trouble if it turns out that they didn't have any system in place to detect inattentive workers. It seems like the car wasn't monitoring her attention, but they should also have had someone reviewing the video of her work on previous days.
I wonder what she was being paid to do that job. I'm betting minimum wage.
I read TFA and the Mozilla blog post and l still don't know exactly what their add-on does. It's not clear how it contains anything, or why I'd use it over Privacy Badger.
Privacy Badger is great because it doesn't use whitelists. It looks for sites following you around the web, tracking you on multiple other sites, and blocks them. It generally doesn't break anything so I'm happy to install it on friend's and family member's computers.
uBlock Origin is pretty great too, but for other people's computers I tend to only enable the basic ad-blocking to avoid breakage.
The basic problem with F1 is that it's too expensive to be competitive. Back in the 70s garage teams could win, but now even the guys just there to make up the numbers and provide a full grid are very well funded.
It's at the point now where the only way to win is to spend vast amounts on the latest technology. Only a few teams can afford to do it, and they all demand rule changes to make the technology more applicable to road cars so they can justify the expense. And of course, the rule changes favour the well funded teams while making it harder just for the poorer ones to stay legal.
This is also why it's so boring. Every year, one team gets a big technological advantage and dominates. There is little competition, except between their own two drivers. The other teams can't catch up because mid-season improvements to the car are very limited, to keep costs down and allow poorer teams to be a little a little bit competitive.
They found a solution to that in the UK. Just demand a special deal from the government where you have a guaranteed market for the power and a guaranteed price that is 2x the renewable cost, for 35 years.
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What makes you think any other desktop OS would be less vulnerably to ransomware? Security through obscurity perhaps.
Let's say they were running Linux. The infection vector is usually a browser exploit or email attachment. Linux does nothing extra to prevent the user from executing code that Windows doesn't also do. Then the malware is running, and has access to the user's file, and any other files that the user has access to on the network. Again, Linux does nothing extra to prevent this.
The virus spreads via exploits stolen from the NSA. Even assuming they are not zero-day and a patch is available, it's up to the organization to install that patch. If they were not installing Windows patches, why would they be installing Linux patches?
No, the problem is not the OS. The problem is the IT staff not locking the system down properly. Just switching OS would not help them.
It's pretty much the same in every line of work. Businesses try to mitigate this by creating systems, ways of doing things that avoid the problems. In software development we have all kinds of methodologies to avoid making poor decisions and create reasonably good designs, and we still fail quite often.
In politics there are fewer such systems, especially at local level. And most of the people doing those jobs have zero training. In fact the only qualification they need to get the job is winning a popular vote.
Most people would just buy a tablet and optional Bluetooth keyboard for this purpose.
Integrating a second SoC into a laptop is actually more complex than you probably realize. For example, how are you going to do things like share the screen between the SoC and main GPU? Okay, you need an extra video switch... But the screen power and backlight are also controlled by the main laptop chipset, so you need to split that out and allow the SoC to access that functionality as well. Same for the keyboard, trackpad, USB ports, wifi, battery charging system, audio subsystem and amps...
Now go ask the IT department how hard it is just to get staff to connect to the VPN before browsing some Facebook on the work laptop and you will understand why no-one sells machines like the OP describes.
If the company actually cares about this they will just disable all wifi access except to their trusted network with a valid certificate. Ordinary users won't be able to understand what the hell this feature actually does.
Only tech savvy nerds will use such a complex set up, and they won't trust anyone else to build it for them anyway. Dual boot machines have been sold commercially in the past and they were a complete flop.
I'd sue the company that offers to distribute the flyers only to white people. That company should have refused that request.
The lawsuit would probably name the person who made the request too, of course. But in this case it makes sense to target Facebook, since stopping Facebook from doing it would have a much bigger effect than stopping one of the individual landlords.
So how did you arrange this meeting? Phone call or email or text message? And did either of you put anything in your calendar about it? Did either of you post something about just meeting someone on Facebook afterwards?
Facebook does use location data, so it knows you two were in the same place at the same time. But there are plenty of other ways they could have got this information, all equally creepy but more technically feasible.
Okay, so it's just about the timing. Small risk of bricking, but on the user's schedule.
Okay, but what is your solution?
Say you were an OS vendor with millions of users, all with different hardware and software configurations. You need to push out a critical security patch, but you obviously can't test with every single user's configuration. What do you do?
If any downtime at all is unacceptable, it seems like the only option is to leave everyone vulnerable. But then imagine it's a bug like the Apple calendar issues, where after a certain date important features stop working or the device even bricks, so you have no choice but to patch or face inevitable downtime...
It really is an impossible situation.
Forced updates are a mixed blessing.
They generally roll them out slowly, so for example on Android app updates don't go to everyone on day one, they ramp up so that any issues can be detected before too many people are affected. Same with Windows 10.
On the one hand, this means that you might be unlucky and get bricked by a bad update and might be left vulnerable to zero day exploits for a week. On the other hand, for the vast majority of people it's both more reliable than everyone getting the update on Patch Tuesday and definitely better than them delaying or ignoring updates forever.
The number of us power users who want to control the updates ourselves is fairly small, but it is immensely frustrating for us. And even for normal users, the updates should not interrupt normal use of their computer in any way.
There doesn't seem to be a good solution. There are too many configurations out there to be sure a fix won't brick someone, and most users are not tech savvy enough to make good decisions about when to patch, and not getting timely patches is even worse.
If this were possible it would be an incredible technical feat.
Phone batteries don't provide enough energy to constantly record audio and look for speech, then transmit it back to Facebook or do speech recognition on the device. Not to mention the effect on your data allowance.
The way those always on "hay Siri" type things work is to have a special ultra low power chip that recognizes just "hay" and then wakes the phone to process the rest, with an appreciable effect on battery life.
I think more likely is that they do a couple of things. Firstly they are really good at connecting you with your close friend's desire to buy red cookware, and the app noticed that you were near each other with the usual location services so there is a fair chance you might be interested in red cookware too now. Creepy as hell still but based on established, practical techniques.
The other thing they could be doing is a little bit of Shazam style audio recognition. Shazam is an app that listens to a song and tells you what it is. Google has a similar feature on the Pixel 2 that uses audio fingerprint data stored on the phone, so it doesn't need to transmit any audio. Facebook probably only care about fingerprinting a small number of different TV/radio ads and detecting them when the app is open. Again, that's feasible with current tech and won't completely destroy your battery life, or give the game away by transmitting chunks of audio data periodically.
You don't have to install the app, just speaking near someone who installed it.
And even if you did agree, I doubt many people saw the microphone permission as agreeing to have all their conversations sent to Facebook, and I have a feeling most courts would agree.
Even if they put "we will record you 24/7" in their ToS it would still be morally indefensible, considering how deliberately unreadable those things are.
Like these conservative SJWs, you mean?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
How about banning Cosmo from Walmart shelves?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
Except that housing is something people actually want, unlike being stabbed in the face.
Imagine you were handing out flyers for an apartment in a mall. As you walk around you carefully avoid all the black people, only giving out flyers to white people. "Oh but I'm just targeting the demographic most likely to be able to afford my rent, to maximize the return on my investment in flyers" probably isn't going to win many people over.
It's more like when someone walks into the local real estate broker's office the staff there look at their skin colour or the fact they have children and avoid showing them certain properties based on the landlord's preference not to have black people or kids in their building.
Lol this is great for business, exactly what they want. Business is probably the reason these rules came in.
Business wants filters like these to protect employees, and by extension protect themselves from lawsuits over harassment and hostile work environments.
Businesses won't be worried. These are exactly the same ToS they put on their own services.
It would show he was serious about dealing with this issue.
No going tells us that he is just waiting for the news cycle to move on and blow over. Facebook won't change, it's not sorry, it doesn't even think it did anything wrong. The only problem is that they got caught.
In fact, he probably views it as free advertising. Look how great this data is, look what you can do with it.
What matters is if anyone is disadvantaged by their actions.
Make up for specific skin tones is fine. No one loses out. Target away. But trying to exclude certain people from housing, a basic resource that everyone needs and is the core of a person's life, is rather different.
So you are looking for an overweight blond guy with man-boobs who just ran up the stairs? Oddly specific.
Facebook created tools to target protected attributes like gender and race. It therefore has an obligation to ensure they are not misused.
It's like a car rental place that loans out trucks with bull bars, and then does nothing to stop the guys who keep using them for ram-raiding. People keep pointing out that their trucks are being misused, but they just carry on ignoring the bags of swag they see being unloaded.
It's probably the emergency call feature. A lot of users are triggering it by mistake too. Basically you press one of the buttons 5 times and it gives you a few seconds to cancel, then calls 911.
The Apple Watch does it too. I read a story about a guy who woke up at 3 AM with cops in his room, because he wore the watch to monitor his sleep and "butt-dialed" 911.
If anyone gets prosecuted it will likely be the woman in the car. Her job was to pay attention and keep the system safe.
Uber will be in trouble if it turns out that they didn't have any system in place to detect inattentive workers. It seems like the car wasn't monitoring her attention, but they should also have had someone reviewing the video of her work on previous days.
I wonder what she was being paid to do that job. I'm betting minimum wage.
That's what Privacy Badger and uBlock are for.
I read TFA and the Mozilla blog post and l still don't know exactly what their add-on does. It's not clear how it contains anything, or why I'd use it over Privacy Badger.
Privacy Badger is great because it doesn't use whitelists. It looks for sites following you around the web, tracking you on multiple other sites, and blocks them. It generally doesn't break anything so I'm happy to install it on friend's and family member's computers.
uBlock Origin is pretty great too, but for other people's computers I tend to only enable the basic ad-blocking to avoid breakage.
The basic problem with F1 is that it's too expensive to be competitive. Back in the 70s garage teams could win, but now even the guys just there to make up the numbers and provide a full grid are very well funded.
It's at the point now where the only way to win is to spend vast amounts on the latest technology. Only a few teams can afford to do it, and they all demand rule changes to make the technology more applicable to road cars so they can justify the expense. And of course, the rule changes favour the well funded teams while making it harder just for the poorer ones to stay legal.
This is also why it's so boring. Every year, one team gets a big technological advantage and dominates. There is little competition, except between their own two drivers. The other teams can't catch up because mid-season improvements to the car are very limited, to keep costs down and allow poorer teams to be a little a little bit competitive.
They found a solution to that in the UK. Just demand a special deal from the government where you have a guaranteed market for the power and a guaranteed price that is 2x the renewable cost, for 35 years.