From memory, what happened is that with the OtherOS, Geohot was able to outline a proof of concept to run arbitrary code on the PS3. He didn't release much, and nothing he released would have directly facilitated piracy - there were no keys exposed for instance.
Sony, in a knee-jerk reaction, promptly issued a software update that removed OtherOS support altogether - even though Geohot's work was just a proof of concept.
This is when the real work then started to get back what was once there - and in the process through discovering these keys, this has now opened the doors to piracy on the system.
If Sony had have kept OtherOS in there and instead done something like fixed the flaw in the hypervisor that allowed Geohot's exploit to work, or just ignored it and moved on, it's arguable that no one would have bothered to put in the effort they have recently to discover the crypto keys.
I've read so many stories like yours and I'm simply amazed that this level of inefficiency is not only tolerated but mandated in the USA today.
I've only once been through an airport in the USA and this was many years before 9/11, so I've honestly got no idea what it's like today.
In Australia, you go to the check in counter, give them your checked luggage, get your boarding pass (if you haven't already printed one off the Internet beforehand) and then go through the security checkpoint. At this stage, your bags are on a conveyor belt and on their way to be loaded on a plane.
There is a regulation that checked baggage can only get on the plane if you are travelling on the same flight - ie, you can't check your bags on a different flight to that which you are getting on.
So, how do they deal with it in the USA where you have your checked baggage loaded in the belly of the aircraft and you're detained for more than an hour at the security checkpoint? I only arrive at the airport less than an hour before my flight departs!
I can't imagine that the airlines would be too happy about this - if this happens here then the offending luggage is supposed to be unloaded from the plane, which causes a huge delay. The airlines are penalised quite severely for causing delays and missing their slot on the runway.
Do you know if the situation is the same there? There must be some really well connected people lobbying for these machines - from what I've read the cops are pretty ambivalent about them, not many passengers like them, pilots and other air crew downright hate them and if they're costing the airlines money in delays as well, then there's no love lost there either...
Yes but if the traffic in Sydney is anything like the traffic on the Eastern Freeway (which I assume you're talking about) then it no longer behaves the way that your model assumes.
During the morning peak (which now begins well before 7am), now that the EastLink tollway has been completed, there is a fair amount of traffic already on the Eastern Freeway before you even reach Springvale Road. As a result, a commute that used to pretty much exactly follow your predictions now is bumper-to-bumper from Springvale Road to around Bulleen Road and then it's flowing beautifully until you cross the Yarra just after the Chandler Highway whereupon it's the traditional queue.
Predicting the travel times when you need to take into account the congestion at the beginning or middle of a journey then becomes quite more difficult.
There is also the PDF/A standard, which is designed for exactly this purpose. It's a subset of the PDF spec for long term archiving of documents and it disallows a lot of things like scripting, similar to PDF/X.
But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection. PCs are going from VGA to HDMI. That makes sense. Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.
Umm, Apple have used VGA and then DVI and then Mini DisplayPort for video interfaces in the past 10 years. They had mini versions of these connectors, for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.
There was also the short-lived ADC which was a superset of DVI and all machines that had an ADC connector on them also had a standard VGA or DVI port on them too.
On the PC front, you also seem to have forgotten DVI, which I'd warrant is a lot more common than HDMI.
Now that is a very good question and I was wondering about that myself.
I would guess that you can restore it from a backup as the remote wipe is supposed to prevent information from falling into the wrong hands (ie, you lose your phone, or it's stolen).
From what I can tell, the remote wipe tells the iPhone to delete the (randomly generated) encryption key it holds that decrypts the flash - thereby resulting in the flash essentially being overwritten with random garbage. This is how it can securely wipe itself instantly without having to actually overwrite the flash.
I don't know of any mechanism that would prevent you from restoring from backup after the phone has been wiped - however I don't believe that email from an Exchange ActiveSync account is stored on the phone (at least no permanent message storage or cache) and this data is probably not backed up either, rather it just backs up the account settings. If your account has been deleted or locked on the Exchange server, then you can't retrieve your email but the rest of the phone should be OK.
If your employer wants you to read work email on a mobile device, make them issue one.
Don't run your personal mobile's wireless through the company access points. Use your damn 3g/4g data plan for that.
Seriously. If it's your data, your employer has no business going anywhere near it or the devices that contain it, and you don't let them get that impression by never giving them a sniff of the thing.
It doesn't matter how you are accesing your data - whether it's over the corporate WLAN or via 3G - if you have your phone configured as an ActiveSync client, it can be remote wiped from the server. Apple had to include this feature as it's part of the spec for ActiveSync, which they licensed from Microsoft. No amount of accessing data over a corporate (or any) network will give them the access to wipe your phone, unless you have an ActiveSync account configured.
If you don't want your employer to wipe your phone, don't configure your email account as an Exchange ActiveSync account.
he phone wasn't bricked, even though absolutely all of its data was wiped, because the data could be restored from backup, assuming that someone had remembered to make one.
Simply by plugging your device into iTunes, it automatically makes a backup. This is something you can turn off if you really try, but by default making a backup is a standard part of the sync process with iTunes.
Host your internal media in the cloud? Are you crazy? Would you really prefer to have your large media files, gigabytes in size, at the other end of a 1-10MB/sec Internet connection, or hanging somewhere locally at the other end of a gigabit Ethernet connection?
...but for general day to day use it'll... stop me putting such a load on the Wolfram Alpha servers when I have the odd bit of calculus to double check.
Now, interestingly enough that's the one thing it won't do - if you start with an = sign (indicating the natural language input) then your query is actually sent over the Internet to a Wolfram|Alpha server where it's interpreted and turned into Mathematica language and sent back to Mathematica for you...
Anyone in Government who puts something like this out to tender has already decided what they want to use so the requirements for the open tender can easily be written in such a way that their solution is the only one that "ticks all the boxes"
Something like - the successful tender must be able to provide a handheld computing device with a touch screen that can sync applications with iTunes.
Did you actually read the guide? Here's what you, as the end user, needs to do (hilighted in bold) The process for deploying your own applications is:
Register for enterprise development with Apple.
Sign your applications using your certificate.
Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you’ve signed.
Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users’ computers.
Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes.
No, in an enterprise environment (or anywhere else really for that matter) you are free to sign up as a developer, get a developer signing certificate and deploy apps to iOS devices under your control and these apps don't have to go anywhere near the app store.
Page 63: You can distribute iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad applications to your users. If you want to install iPhone OS applications that you’ve developed, you distribute the application to your users, who install the applications using iTunes. Applications from the online App Store work on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad without any additional steps. If you develop an application that you want to distribute yourself, it must be digitally signed with a certificate issued by Apple. You must also provide your users with a distribution provisioning profile that allows their device to use the application. The process for deploying your own applications is:
Register for enterprise development with Apple.
Sign your applications using your certificate.
Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you’ve signed.
Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users’ computers.
Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes.
User Education - in the real world? You're not serious?
You know as well as I do that users will happily click on anything and everything if they can see teh cute kitteh, enlarge their cock or get a fake r0lex.
^_^
Anyway, my point was really that their SOHO offerings are even worse than their enterprise offerings and MSE is a far better alternative...
It has always bothered me that the interests of Norton, McAfee and the rest are not aligned with the user. You want a clean, fast machine. They want to sell you AV subscriptions. Which means they want to convince you how necessary those are. False alarms are fine, as are in-the-face dialogs and interruptions to remind you what a wonderful piece of crapware you have on your machine.
It's always amused me when I speak to someone and their Windows machine is running like crap, I ask them what AV they're using. Generally they'll answer "Norton" or something similar to that.
I then tell them to uninstall it and install MSE. It's free, it's faster and it's much less in-your-face than the other SOHO offerings. More than half the time however I get the answer "Oh, no, I can't do that, I've paid for Nortons and I want to get my money's worth". Seriously, do you want your computer to run faster or not?
Symantec have two levels of offerings. Their enterprise AV (Symantec branded) is outstanding. Their soho AV (Norton branded) on the other hand is a salty bag of balls.
So, with these Mac mini Servers - how do you get more than 1Gbs out of a single unit? Oh, you can't. How do you connect enterprise storage to them - FireWire? What, you mean there's no Fibre Channel or SAS? How do you connect a real backup system to them - USB? Nice, show me USB attached LTO library or autoloader... How do I support 50 designers working with around 5 TB of data on 4 Mac minis? Put them in a SAN?
Look, I absolutely love the Mac mini Server, I have a large number of clients using them and they're fantastic for what they do but in no way, shape or form are they a viable replacement for an Xserve.
Also, Apple's own Xserve Transition Guide even states that a Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server performs at around 25% of an Xserve, so 4 of them will not be "much more oomph" than a single Xserve... (refer to the performance specs on Page 6 of the linked PDF)
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From memory, what happened is that with the OtherOS, Geohot was able to outline a proof of concept to run arbitrary code on the PS3.
He didn't release much, and nothing he released would have directly facilitated piracy - there were no keys exposed for instance.
Sony, in a knee-jerk reaction, promptly issued a software update that removed OtherOS support altogether - even though Geohot's work was just a proof of concept.
This is when the real work then started to get back what was once there - and in the process through discovering these keys, this has now opened the doors to piracy on the system.
If Sony had have kept OtherOS in there and instead done something like fixed the flaw in the hypervisor that allowed Geohot's exploit to work, or just ignored it and moved on, it's arguable that no one would have bothered to put in the effort they have recently to discover the crypto keys.
damn those linebreaks!
I've read so many stories like yours and I'm simply amazed that this level of inefficiency is not only tolerated but mandated in the USA today. I've only once been through an airport in the USA and this was many years before 9/11, so I've honestly got no idea what it's like today. In Australia, you go to the check in counter, give them your checked luggage, get your boarding pass (if you haven't already printed one off the Internet beforehand) and then go through the security checkpoint. At this stage, your bags are on a conveyor belt and on their way to be loaded on a plane. There is a regulation that checked baggage can only get on the plane if you are travelling on the same flight - ie, you can't check your bags on a different flight to that which you are getting on. So, how do they deal with it in the USA where you have your checked baggage loaded in the belly of the aircraft and you're detained for more than an hour at the security checkpoint? I only arrive at the airport less than an hour before my flight departs! I can't imagine that the airlines would be too happy about this - if this happens here then the offending luggage is supposed to be unloaded from the plane, which causes a huge delay. The airlines are penalised quite severely for causing delays and missing their slot on the runway. Do you know if the situation is the same there? There must be some really well connected people lobbying for these machines - from what I've read the cops are pretty ambivalent about them, not many passengers like them, pilots and other air crew downright hate them and if they're costing the airlines money in delays as well, then there's no love lost there either...
Yes but if the traffic in Sydney is anything like the traffic on the Eastern Freeway (which I assume you're talking about) then it no longer behaves the way that your model assumes.
During the morning peak (which now begins well before 7am), now that the EastLink tollway has been completed, there is a fair amount of traffic already on the Eastern Freeway before you even reach Springvale Road. As a result, a commute that used to pretty much exactly follow your predictions now is bumper-to-bumper from Springvale Road to around Bulleen Road and then it's flowing beautifully until you cross the Yarra just after the Chandler Highway whereupon it's the traditional queue.
Predicting the travel times when you need to take into account the congestion at the beginning or middle of a journey then becomes quite more difficult.
Portable Document Format... Format.
There is also the PDF/A standard, which is designed for exactly this purpose. It's a subset of the PDF spec for long term archiving of documents and it disallows a lot of things like scripting, similar to PDF/X.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
But every generation of your laptop doesn't need a whole new video connection. PCs are going from VGA to HDMI. That makes sense. Macs... started with some apple proprietary garbage, to mini dvi, to mini displayport, and now on to light peak... 4 separate connectors in the same period of time, while managing to bypass anything that anyone actually uses for anything else.
Umm, Apple have used VGA and then DVI and then Mini DisplayPort for video interfaces in the past 10 years. They had mini versions of these connectors, for which you were also given the necessary dongle to upsize it to the standard version of the interface.
There was also the short-lived ADC which was a superset of DVI and all machines that had an ADC connector on them also had a standard VGA or DVI port on them too.
On the PC front, you also seem to have forgotten DVI, which I'd warrant is a lot more common than HDMI.
Yes, there is a possibility for clashes if someone chooses a string which is the same as yours
Does NS stand for NeXT Software, or does it stand for Netscape?
Neither - it stands for NeXTSTEP
Now that is a very good question and I was wondering about that myself.
I would guess that you can restore it from a backup as the remote wipe is supposed to prevent information from falling into the wrong hands (ie, you lose your phone, or it's stolen).
From what I can tell, the remote wipe tells the iPhone to delete the (randomly generated) encryption key it holds that decrypts the flash - thereby resulting in the flash essentially being overwritten with random garbage. This is how it can securely wipe itself instantly without having to actually overwrite the flash.
I don't know of any mechanism that would prevent you from restoring from backup after the phone has been wiped - however I don't believe that email from an Exchange ActiveSync account is stored on the phone (at least no permanent message storage or cache) and this data is probably not backed up either, rather it just backs up the account settings. If your account has been deleted or locked on the Exchange server, then you can't retrieve your email but the rest of the phone should be OK.
was the first mistake.
If your employer wants you to read work email on a mobile device, make them issue one.
Don't run your personal mobile's wireless through the company access points. Use your damn 3g/4g data plan for that.
Seriously. If it's your data, your employer has no business going anywhere near it or the devices that contain it, and you don't let them get that impression by never giving them a sniff of the thing.
It doesn't matter how you are accesing your data - whether it's over the corporate WLAN or via 3G - if you have your phone configured as an ActiveSync client, it can be remote wiped from the server. Apple had to include this feature as it's part of the spec for ActiveSync, which they licensed from Microsoft. No amount of accessing data over a corporate (or any) network will give them the access to wipe your phone, unless you have an ActiveSync account configured.
If you don't want your employer to wipe your phone, don't configure your email account as an Exchange ActiveSync account.
Simply by plugging your device into iTunes, it automatically makes a backup. This is something you can turn off if you really try, but by default making a backup is a standard part of the sync process with iTunes.
Host your internal media in the cloud? Are you crazy? Would you really prefer to have your large media files, gigabytes in size, at the other end of a 1-10MB/sec Internet connection, or hanging somewhere locally at the other end of a gigabit Ethernet connection?
...but for general day to day use it'll ... stop me putting such a load on the Wolfram Alpha servers when I have the odd bit of calculus to double check.
Now, interestingly enough that's the one thing it won't do - if you start with an = sign (indicating the natural language input) then your query is actually sent over the Internet to a Wolfram|Alpha server where it's interpreted and turned into Mathematica language and sent back to Mathematica for you...
Anyone in Government who puts something like this out to tender has already decided what they want to use so the requirements for the open tender can easily be written in such a way that their solution is the only one that "ticks all the boxes"
Something like - the successful tender must be able to provide a handheld computing device with a touch screen that can sync applications with iTunes.
Did you actually read the guide?
Here's what you, as the end user, needs to do (hilighted in bold)
The process for deploying your own applications is:
Register for enterprise development with Apple.
Sign your applications using your certificate.
Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you’ve signed.
Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users’ computers.
Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes.
You seem to be new to this game - how it really goes, if they have to go to an open tender is:
They will specify standards that multiple competing products can't comply with. How can anybody but Apple win this under a competitive tender?
No, in an enterprise environment (or anywhere else really for that matter) you are free to sign up as a developer, get a developer signing certificate and deploy apps to iOS devices under your control and these apps don't have to go anywhere near the app store.
Have a look starting at page 63 here:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf
The App Store isn't the only way to get apps onto iOS devices.
Read up about Enterprise distribution of applications without the app store.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf
Page 63:
You can distribute iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad applications to your users.
If you want to install iPhone OS applications that you’ve developed, you distribute the application to your users, who install the applications using iTunes.
Applications from the online App Store work on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad without any additional steps. If you develop an application that you want to distribute yourself, it must be digitally signed with a certificate issued by Apple. You must also provide your users with a distribution provisioning profile that allows their device to use the application.
The process for deploying your own applications is:
Register for enterprise development with Apple.
Sign your applications using your certificate.
Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you’ve signed.
Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users’ computers.
Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes.
Either that, or remove the mains cable.
User Education - in the real world? You're not serious?
You know as well as I do that users will happily click on anything and everything if they can see teh cute kitteh, enlarge their cock or get a fake r0lex.
^_^
Anyway, my point was really that their SOHO offerings are even worse than their enterprise offerings and MSE is a far better alternative...
Pirates logically don't take anything from anyone or do any harm whatsoever.
No, Pirates do, and that's the problem with the reuse of this word to refer to copyright infringement.
It has always bothered me that the interests of Norton, McAfee and the rest are not aligned with the user. You want a clean, fast machine. They want to sell you AV subscriptions. Which means they want to convince you how necessary those are. False alarms are fine, as are in-the-face dialogs and interruptions to remind you what a wonderful piece of crapware you have on your machine.
It's always amused me when I speak to someone and their Windows machine is running like crap, I ask them what AV they're using. Generally they'll answer "Norton" or something similar to that.
I then tell them to uninstall it and install MSE. It's free, it's faster and it's much less in-your-face than the other SOHO offerings. More than half the time however I get the answer "Oh, no, I can't do that, I've paid for Nortons and I want to get my money's worth". Seriously, do you want your computer to run faster or not?
Oh those crazy Tasmanians are at it again...
Symantec have two levels of offerings.
Their enterprise AV (Symantec branded) is outstanding.
Their soho AV (Norton branded) on the other hand is a salty bag of balls.
So, with these Mac mini Servers - how do you get more than 1Gbs out of a single unit? Oh, you can't.
How do you connect enterprise storage to them - FireWire? What, you mean there's no Fibre Channel or SAS?
How do you connect a real backup system to them - USB? Nice, show me USB attached LTO library or autoloader...
How do I support 50 designers working with around 5 TB of data on 4 Mac minis? Put them in a SAN?
Look, I absolutely love the Mac mini Server, I have a large number of clients using them and they're fantastic for what they do but in no way, shape or form are they a viable replacement for an Xserve.
Also, Apple's own Xserve Transition Guide even states that a Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server performs at around 25% of an Xserve, so 4 of them will not be "much more oomph" than a single Xserve... (refer to the performance specs on Page 6 of the linked PDF)