I'm a little surprised that the locks aren't networked, making mass-updates possible. I'm also impressed that they aren't all networked in a manner that allows f/w updates as that would just be another attack vector. An easily accessible USB port on the bottom of the lock would be just as bad. (as some hacked locks have had, on the *outside*!)
The hack makes millions of locks vulnerable, but it didn't open them all. The annoyance of updating all the locks individually is a consequence of not having them all connected in a way that would have made them more vulnerable.
Some of it already is. The trick to maximizing battery longevity ( not vehicle range ) is to charge slowly and not charge or discharge too much. The OTA update that let Florida owners have an extended range to evacuate ahead of a hurricane was an example of relaxing that discharge amount temporarily. If use only 60-80% of a battery packs actual capacity it will live longer.
There are electric bicycle chargers that do this, charging at a lower rate and to a lower voltage to extend the battery's life. Some are adjustable so you can charge faster when needed or to a higher level for the occasional planned long trip. Setting the battery management system's low voltage cutoff to a higher value keeps you from discharging too deep.
There's no free lunch. If you want to use 700 W/hr of power on your electric bike you can have a 700 W/hr battery and use it till it's dead every time. Or you can have an 850 W/hr battery, use less than it's total capacity and it will have a longer lifespan. That's essentially what Tesla does, the usable range based on something less than the battery's absolute capacity. People who didn't understand whined when Tesla extended the capacity in FL, incorrectly thinking that Tesla had been holding back range from them all along. In reality, it's been a balance between vehicle range and battery longevity.
That's not a PDF of a lawsuit, just a letter complaining to the City Attorney by the councilman. The content is just whining in general no specifics. There's mention of "a street designated for local use", but doesn't name the street.
If the complaints to Waze were as vague as this letter, I wouldn't be surprised that nothing changed.
The city could have pushed through a road reclassification. Had they done so the routing would be updated and problem solved. But this lets someone stand up to Big Bad Google, rather than actually fixing the problem.
I'm with Waze/Google on this one. They route based on accurate and legal road information. Once they start tweaking it things will break. The city can change the road signage to match what they want for traffic and map routing ( not just Waze, but any app based on the actual road network ) will change to match.
Based on the concept of motor-generators used for high-security facilities, a "secure " UPS could just use 2 batteries. Incoming power charges battery A while output runs on battery B. Incoming power disconnects periodically, output switches to battery A and incoming switched to charging battery B. If incoming power is lost ( the main reason for a UPS ) then both batteries are connected in parallel giving the user the full backup capacity. At no time is the output connected to anything other than a battery.
My first thought also was TEMPEST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) ) In the 80s I worked in a facility that was being certified for Top Secret operations inside. It had all the normal shielding, including spot welding of the internal metal shell where testing revealed RF leakage. Incoming power drover a motor. The motor drove a shaft that spun a generator which provided internal power to the facility. I'd guess it would be pretty tough for multiple computers attached to that generator's output to perturb the mass of both the generator and the motor enough to leak any information to the outside.
Like reading the flashing of modem LEDs in the 90s, there's no end to the ways a computer and its associated peripherals can leak information. The important data leaks though are usually done by people.
I am curious about the money laundering part. There have been issues in the past with porn sites and other "naughty" companies being able to accept credit cards or Paypal for payment. That spawned a set of companies to act as middlemen to "launder" the payments to keep the anti-porn companies from seeing who the money is going to.
So I'm wondering whether BP was accepting payments for ads from companies that had their money with these alternative processors, or doing laundering in the traditional sense. It feels to me similar to someone who sold something on Ebay, accepted Paypal, then paid for something else from their Paypal balance.
An obvious difference: People pay a good amount for Apple products and services. Most people pay zero for Facebook. Nothing is truly free, so Facebook is supported by ads, and targeted ads based on your personal info. Is is realistic to compare the business practices of a company that sells hardware and services to consumers to another that doesn't bill it's users?
While I can understand what they're thinking, this will be interesting to see how it shakes out. Where does targeting advertising equal discrimination?
If you posted a 3x5 (A7) card on bulletin boards for a house for rent, would putting them only in white neighborhoods be discrimination? Is not showing an ad to someone the same as discriminating against them when they show up?
How does this apply to TV or radio ads? If you don't do one on a Spanish-only station but only on an English station, is that discriminating against a segment of the population?
Facebook's targeting is much more specific, but it's likely where TV and radio are going with streaming services. It's not a stretch to imagine the same super classification that occurs with Google or Facebook ads coming to ad-supported video. If so, will the advertisers be prohibited from choosing some combinations of the recipient's attributes? My non legally-trained mind imagines this to be prior restraint. They haven't actually discriminated in housing by placing the ad, but they *might* discriminate I'm not sure that's the same.
I hope there isn't a quick settlement, I want to see how this is viewed by the courts.
The other thing is you can only see each movie once, at least according to the agreement. I haven't tried to see if I told it I was seeing movie A when really bought a ticket for identically priced movie B.
When I read that I disabled the app's access to location. If I try to run it it fails since it can't tell where it is. When I get to the theater I'll enable location and turn it back off from inside the theater.
While most people like to blame FB for "selling" your data, much of it is given away by your friends. As this Cow Clicker guy points out, when someone signed up for the game they agreed to give certain information. FB didn't call up and sell it to him, the people playing the game gave it to him. Other apps ask for, and get, your list of friends, email address and other info.
I have more a problem with LinkedIn. They'd casually ask you for your email account and password in order to extract all your contact names and email addresses ( and spam them with generic "please join my network" email ) While LinkedIn has the info and does who knows what with it, they just politely asked your friends for it and they gladly gave it to them. Lots of phone apps will also ask for access to your contact list.
So who's really the worst at keeping your info private? Your idiot friends.
I read, then searched, both articles and didn't find mention of testing glass bottles. The headline had me wondering if the water sources were contaminated with plastic, or the filtering process failed to remove it. I was looking for mention of them testing water from a deep spring that was shipped in glass bottles.
Reading that they tested plastic bottles, and the acknowledgement that the act of opening the bottle could scrape measurable amounts of plastic into the water made the whole study useless to me. But I guess "water shipped in a container may contain microscopic particles of that container" wasn't' as sexy a headline.
I'm no stock or other investment guru, so I'm not sure how to understand how Amazon's business has been to the detriment of shareholders for decades. I do see the stock price going from $261 to $1586 since 2013. Is there a downside to that? Houses are view as investments in most places and increasing six-fold in value over 5 years is usually viewed as a positive sign.
Looking at your GPS: Bad Yelling at your fighting kids in the back seat: Good.
What I can't stand about these surveys and studies is that they all seemed pre-ordained to get the results the researchers are looking for. I have not doubt that driving solo, the radio pre-set before you leave with no food or beverage will give you the maximum amount of attention to pay to the road. But the world doesn't operate like that. People have others in the car, hold hot coffee and change radio stations.
When all these things are present, when is it bad? Is there no difference between going through a school zone at 8:30 and driving on a lightly traveled interstate?
All discussions seem to be centered around the stupidest, least coordinated person driving through a congested street with kids jumping out from between parked cars. There's no allowance made for adjusting to the environment. There are those who argue you must have 2 hands on the steering wheel at all times. And yet, we don't outlaw one-armed drivers or manual transmissions. Does taking your hand off the wheel to shift while operating the clutch with your foot distract you from the steering and observing the road? The absolutists will probably argue that it does, and is less safe.
How many kids can a parent have in the car at once? One? Two will eventually fight. And with the current laws they all have to be in the back seat that will trigger looking in mirrors ( rear view and special ones just for viewing the back seat ) or turning around. How about a study showing the impact of 1, 2 3 or 4 kids i the car with a parent? Not likely, because distraction by looking in the mirror when talking to your kid is being a "good parent" while looking at the radio to change the station is "bad driving".
Every single study is just another attempt to wrap an option in statistics .
On the advice of our lawyers, the continued sale of our products in the city of NY would not be in our best interest. Until the resolution of the case we have stopped selling any heating oil, gasoline or natural gas with the borders of the city of New York.
Other than all the other obvious social engineering comments about going after oil companies rather than people who burn the fuel, I'm also annoyed by the whole divestiture thing.
Who are the oil companies? The guys on the oil rigs? The executives? Or the stockholders? If New York has all these funds that are invested in petroleum companies, wouldn't it make them the owners?
Selling your stock before a big lawsuit ? If they are the owners of the companies they are suing, I'd love to see a court insist they hold onto the stock until the conclusion of the suit. If for some inexplicable reason they win a big settlement it would likely drive down the value of the stock they hold in those companies. Seems fair to me.
I gave this book to a young friend when he first left for college. It's a good read and a good teaching aid for critical thinking, especially when it comes to the media. Since it's math-based it's easier to see how "facts" can be presented in a way that distort the "truth".
Another book I've said would be a great one for high school seniors would be "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". I found it an enjoyable book that weaved fact and fiction. For students, it might be easy to separate some the extremes as fact ( Lincoln becomes president ) from fiction ( vampires living for centuries ) but there's a lots of other parts that would take knowledge or research. The book was not intended to deceive, so it could be an enjoyable project for students to analyze. It would also be less political than using a news story to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Or at least "Standing Next to a Nuclear Reactor Exposes People to Less Radiation than Flying in Airplanes" (I tried to copy the headline, but the subject field wouldn't hold it.)
When comparing relative risks, couldn't this same study show the safety of an operating power plant? Of course someone will bring up failed nuclear plants without discussing people dying in plane crashes.
I still prefer "owning" movies I really like rather than streaming. You aren't subject to the whims of the streaming companies that have libraries that are constantly shrinking ( Netflix ) or rights holders that pull their movies to stream on a competing service (Disney).
Like streaming music, the rights holders are slowly moving in the direct of a model where you'll pay every time you watch or listen to their product.
The article also presumes the *fix* is to change the software. I could be possible to just pop a circuit breaker. There are number of non-critical systems that can fail and the aircraft is still operational. One thing that comes to mind is the Inmarsat communications that was still active in MH370 when all other comms was lost. If that comms link was not required for normal passenger service but turned out to be a vector for hacking there's no need to re-write the code, just open the circuit breaker for that radio and continue on until a more permanent patch is made.
Someone claimed to access critical aircraft systems from the in-flight entertainment system a while back. If that turned out to be true, you could ground all the flights and re-write code. Or, you could just shut down the in-flight entertainment system and tell people to read a book.
Of course with zero details on what was compromised it's impossible to tell how hard, or how easy, it would be to implement a fix.
I was disappointed I had to go so far down the page to see someone comment on this. I followed the link specifically to see *what* was hacked and nothing was mentioned. There's a huge difference between being able turn off the "Fasten Seatbelts" lights, encouraging people to walk around during turbulence and dumping cabin pressure or altering flight controls.
Even something vague like the area they accessed: communications, cabin systems, avionics would make it look less like something sensationalized to get more funding or again increase the scope of DHS power.
I haven't had a return problem with Newegg, but I judge more about not needing to return than the return process. For both Amazon and Newegg, I try to avoid 3rd party sellers. If they have something that is otherwise unobtainable, then fine, but to save a couple bucks? No thanks. What this issue sounds like is that Amazon is making 3rd party sellers rise to the same standard as Amazon. They probably got tired of having customers pissed off at Amazon as a store when Amazon really just was the payment processor in the transaction. Many people don't know the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
And in outlying areas, home building drives up the price of farmland.
I'm a little surprised that the locks aren't networked, making mass-updates possible. I'm also impressed that they aren't all networked in a manner that allows f/w updates as that would just be another attack vector. An easily accessible USB port on the bottom of the lock would be just as bad. (as some hacked locks have had, on the *outside*!)
The hack makes millions of locks vulnerable, but it didn't open them all. The annoyance of updating all the locks individually is a consequence of not having them all connected in a way that would have made them more vulnerable.
Some of it already is. The trick to maximizing battery longevity ( not vehicle range ) is to charge slowly and not charge or discharge too much. The OTA update that let Florida owners have an extended range to evacuate ahead of a hurricane was an example of relaxing that discharge amount temporarily. If use only 60-80% of a battery packs actual capacity it will live longer.
There are electric bicycle chargers that do this, charging at a lower rate and to a lower voltage to extend the battery's life. Some are adjustable so you can charge faster when needed or to a higher level for the occasional planned long trip. Setting the battery management system's low voltage cutoff to a higher value keeps you from discharging too deep.
There's no free lunch. If you want to use 700 W/hr of power on your electric bike you can have a 700 W/hr battery and use it till it's dead every time. Or you can have an 850 W/hr battery, use less than it's total capacity and it will have a longer lifespan.
That's essentially what Tesla does, the usable range based on something less than the battery's absolute capacity. People who didn't understand whined when Tesla extended the capacity in FL, incorrectly thinking that Tesla had been holding back range from them all along. In reality, it's been a balance between vehicle range and battery longevity.
That's not a PDF of a lawsuit, just a letter complaining to the City Attorney by the councilman. The content is just whining in general no specifics. There's mention of "a street designated for local use", but doesn't name the street.
If the complaints to Waze were as vague as this letter, I wouldn't be surprised that nothing changed.
The city could have pushed through a road reclassification. Had they done so the routing would be updated and problem solved. But this lets someone stand up to Big Bad Google, rather than actually fixing the problem.
I'm with Waze/Google on this one. They route based on accurate and legal road information. Once they start tweaking it things will break. The city can change the road signage to match what they want for traffic and map routing ( not just Waze, but any app based on the actual road network ) will change to match.
Based on the concept of motor-generators used for high-security facilities, a "secure " UPS could just use 2 batteries. Incoming power charges battery A while output runs on battery B.
Incoming power disconnects periodically, output switches to battery A and incoming switched to charging battery B.
If incoming power is lost ( the main reason for a UPS ) then both batteries are connected in parallel giving the user the full backup capacity.
At no time is the output connected to anything other than a battery.
My first thought also was TEMPEST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) ) In the 80s I worked in a facility that was being certified for Top Secret operations inside. It had all the normal shielding, including spot welding of the internal metal shell where testing revealed RF leakage. Incoming power drover a motor. The motor drove a shaft that spun a generator which provided internal power to the facility. I'd guess it would be pretty tough for multiple computers attached to that generator's output to perturb the mass of both the generator and the motor enough to leak any information to the outside.
Like reading the flashing of modem LEDs in the 90s, there's no end to the ways a computer and its associated peripherals can leak information. The important data leaks though are usually done by people.
I am curious about the money laundering part. There have been issues in the past with porn sites and other "naughty" companies being able to accept credit cards or Paypal for payment. That spawned a set of companies to act as middlemen to "launder" the payments to keep the anti-porn companies from seeing who the money is going to.
So I'm wondering whether BP was accepting payments for ads from companies that had their money with these alternative processors, or doing laundering in the traditional sense. It feels to me similar to someone who sold something on Ebay, accepted Paypal, then paid for something else from their Paypal balance.
An obvious difference: People pay a good amount for Apple products and services. Most people pay zero for Facebook. Nothing is truly free, so Facebook is supported by ads, and targeted ads based on your personal info. Is is realistic to compare the business practices of a company that sells hardware and services to consumers to another that doesn't bill it's users?
While I can understand what they're thinking, this will be interesting to see how it shakes out. Where does targeting advertising equal discrimination?
If you posted a 3x5 (A7) card on bulletin boards for a house for rent, would putting them only in white neighborhoods be discrimination? Is not showing an ad to someone the same as discriminating against them when they show up?
How does this apply to TV or radio ads? If you don't do one on a Spanish-only station but only on an English station, is that discriminating against a segment of the population?
Facebook's targeting is much more specific, but it's likely where TV and radio are going with streaming services. It's not a stretch to imagine the same super classification that occurs with Google or Facebook ads coming to ad-supported video. If so, will the advertisers be prohibited from choosing some combinations of the recipient's attributes?
My non legally-trained mind imagines this to be prior restraint. They haven't actually discriminated in housing by placing the ad, but they *might* discriminate I'm not sure that's the same.
I hope there isn't a quick settlement, I want to see how this is viewed by the courts.
And Miranda was a rapist. It usually requires someone to commit a crime, or an innocent person unjustly treated before laws get "corrected'.
The other thing is you can only see each movie once, at least according to the agreement. I haven't tried to see if I told it I was seeing movie A when really bought a ticket for identically priced movie B.
When I read that I disabled the app's access to location. If I try to run it it fails since it can't tell where it is. When I get to the theater I'll enable location and turn it back off from inside the theater.
While most people like to blame FB for "selling" your data, much of it is given away by your friends. As this Cow Clicker guy points out, when someone signed up for the game they agreed to give certain information. FB didn't call up and sell it to him, the people playing the game gave it to him. Other apps ask for, and get, your list of friends, email address and other info.
I have more a problem with LinkedIn. They'd casually ask you for your email account and password in order to extract all your contact names and email addresses ( and spam them with generic "please join my network" email ) While LinkedIn has the info and does who knows what with it, they just politely asked your friends for it and they gladly gave it to them. Lots of phone apps will also ask for access to your contact list.
So who's really the worst at keeping your info private? Your idiot friends.
I read, then searched, both articles and didn't find mention of testing glass bottles. The headline had me wondering if the water sources were contaminated with plastic, or the filtering process failed to remove it. I was looking for mention of them testing water from a deep spring that was shipped in glass bottles.
Reading that they tested plastic bottles, and the acknowledgement that the act of opening the bottle could scrape measurable amounts of plastic into the water made the whole study useless to me. But I guess "water shipped in a container may contain microscopic particles of that container" wasn't' as sexy a headline.
I'm no stock or other investment guru, so I'm not sure how to understand how Amazon's business has been to the detriment of shareholders for decades. I do see the stock price going from $261 to $1586 since 2013. Is there a downside to that? Houses are view as investments in most places and increasing six-fold in value over 5 years is usually viewed as a positive sign.
Looking at your GPS: Bad
Yelling at your fighting kids in the back seat: Good.
What I can't stand about these surveys and studies is that they all seemed pre-ordained to get the results the researchers are looking for. I have not doubt that driving solo, the radio pre-set before you leave with no food or beverage will give you the maximum amount of attention to pay to the road. But the world doesn't operate like that. People have others in the car, hold hot coffee and change radio stations.
When all these things are present, when is it bad? Is there no difference between going through a school zone at 8:30 and driving on a lightly traveled interstate?
All discussions seem to be centered around the stupidest, least coordinated person driving through a congested street with kids jumping out from between parked cars. There's no allowance made for adjusting to the environment. There are those who argue you must have 2 hands on the steering wheel at all times. And yet, we don't outlaw one-armed drivers or manual transmissions. Does taking your hand off the wheel to shift while operating the clutch with your foot distract you from the steering and observing the road? The absolutists will probably argue that it does, and is less safe.
How many kids can a parent have in the car at once? One? Two will eventually fight. And with the current laws they all have to be in the back seat that will trigger looking in mirrors ( rear view and special ones just for viewing the back seat ) or turning around. How about a study showing the impact of 1, 2 3 or 4 kids i the car with a parent? Not likely, because distraction by looking in the mirror when talking to your kid is being a "good parent" while looking at the radio to change the station is "bad driving".
Every single study is just another attempt to wrap an option in statistics .
That would be interesting:
On the advice of our lawyers, the continued sale of our products in the city of NY would not be in our best interest. Until the resolution of the case we have stopped selling any heating oil, gasoline or natural gas with the borders of the city of New York.
For some reason I'm reminded of this old joke:
http://www.medical-jokes.com/a...
Other than all the other obvious social engineering comments about going after oil companies rather than people who burn the fuel, I'm also annoyed by the whole divestiture thing.
Who are the oil companies? The guys on the oil rigs? The executives? Or the stockholders? If New York has all these funds that are invested in petroleum companies, wouldn't it make them the owners?
Selling your stock before a big lawsuit ? If they are the owners of the companies they are suing, I'd love to see a court insist they hold onto the stock until the conclusion of the suit. If for some inexplicable reason they win a big settlement it would likely drive down the value of the stock they hold in those companies. Seems fair to me.
https://www.amazon.com/Mathema...
I gave this book to a young friend when he first left for college. It's a good read and a good teaching aid for critical thinking, especially when it comes to the media. Since it's math-based it's easier to see how "facts" can be presented in a way that distort the "truth".
Another book I've said would be a great one for high school seniors would be "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". I found it an enjoyable book that weaved fact and fiction. For students, it might be easy to separate some the extremes as fact ( Lincoln becomes president ) from fiction ( vampires living for centuries ) but there's a lots of other parts that would take knowledge or research. The book was not intended to deceive, so it could be an enjoyable project for students to analyze. It would also be less political than using a news story to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Or at least "Standing Next to a Nuclear Reactor Exposes People to Less Radiation than Flying in Airplanes" (I tried to copy the headline, but the subject field wouldn't hold it.)
When comparing relative risks, couldn't this same study show the safety of an operating power plant? Of course someone will bring up failed nuclear plants without discussing people dying in plane crashes.
I still prefer "owning" movies I really like rather than streaming. You aren't subject to the whims of the streaming companies that have libraries that are constantly shrinking ( Netflix ) or rights holders that pull their movies to stream on a competing service (Disney).
Like streaming music, the rights holders are slowly moving in the direct of a model where you'll pay every time you watch or listen to their product.
The article also presumes the *fix* is to change the software. I could be possible to just pop a circuit breaker. There are number of non-critical systems that can fail and the aircraft is still operational. One thing that comes to mind is the Inmarsat communications that was still active in MH370 when all other comms was lost. If that comms link was not required for normal passenger service but turned out to be a vector for hacking there's no need to re-write the code, just open the circuit breaker for that radio and continue on until a more permanent patch is made.
Someone claimed to access critical aircraft systems from the in-flight entertainment system a while back. If that turned out to be true, you could ground all the flights and re-write code. Or, you could just shut down the in-flight entertainment system and tell people to read a book.
Of course with zero details on what was compromised it's impossible to tell how hard, or how easy, it would be to implement a fix.
I was disappointed I had to go so far down the page to see someone comment on this. I followed the link specifically to see *what* was hacked and nothing was mentioned. There's a huge difference between being able turn off the "Fasten Seatbelts" lights, encouraging people to walk around during turbulence and dumping cabin pressure or altering flight controls.
Even something vague like the area they accessed: communications, cabin systems, avionics would make it look less like something sensationalized to get more funding or again increase the scope of DHS power.
I haven't had a return problem with Newegg, but I judge more about not needing to return than the return process. For both Amazon and Newegg, I try to avoid 3rd party sellers. If they have something that is otherwise unobtainable, then fine, but to save a couple bucks? No thanks.
What this issue sounds like is that Amazon is making 3rd party sellers rise to the same standard as Amazon. They probably got tired of having customers pissed off at Amazon as a store when Amazon really just was the payment processor in the transaction. Many people don't know the difference.