No, it's not a strawman, it's the truth. You explicitly said people should follow the law, no matter how unjust. That means that logically you think Rosa Parks should have been treated as a criminal. You can't have it both ways.
Sorry, I don't buy it. There's just way too many loyal customers for MS to go the way of IBM any time soon.
As for Android, that's irrelevant; Android is a mobile OS only. Windows is for desktop computers. We're not going to be doing serious office work on Android tablets. Supercomputers are irrelevant too; no one edits Word documents on a supercomputer. That's like saying Chrysler is going to disappear because they don't make bulldozers and dump trucks or train locomotives.
Maybe your company is sticking with Win7 for now, but they're eventually going to upgrade. The US government is already upgrading to Windows 10.
Wow, that's really crappy. My 1994 Integra had ABS, and it wasn't exactly the most expensive car on the road back then.
A little bit of research shows that apparently, ABS was not mandatory in the US until 2012 when it was required in conjunction with electronic stability control (ESC).
Why on earth would you buy a car so cheap it doesn't come with ABS? If you're that hard-up for cash, you can get a much better deal on a used car than getting a stripped-down new one.
Their logic is that what they want Apple to do is to put in a back door so they can get the data on anyone's iPhone. They simply don't believe that this back door could possibly be used by anyone else.
Even if you weren't neglecting the other obvious communications devices -- the ones to communicate with the tire-pressure monitoring system,
There's no such system in my car. It uses passive TPMS.
the keyless entry / push-button start
You have a point there, I did overlook that one. It does have keyless entry. However it's one-way: the car has no way to transmit back to the keyfob, it can only receive. You can't communicate with something over a one-way data link.
I would have no confidence whatsoever that there wasn't a cellular modem hidden away somewhere
That's tinfoil-hat territory. There's no cellular modem in my car. If you want remote start by phone app, you have to purchase a separate device and service to get that; the device has to be installed and of course has a cellular modem. If they already had a cellular modem in there, they wouldn't require you to purchase and install another module.
And if you think every major car manufacturer and every major car insurer isn't eyeing up the possibilities of phoning home with driver performance data whether you like it or not, I know a prince in Nigeria who has a really great offer that might interest you.
Insurers, perhaps, but manufacturers, I'm not so sure. If they really wanted to, wouldn't they have done so by now? But not every carmaker has put a cellular modem in their vehicle yet. Perhaps the cost of the cellular service per-car isn't worth the data they'd get from it.
Finally, you're already proven my point. The systems you list do not have any kind of data connection. They aren't connected to the internet: they have no cellular modem. I didn't look at them all, but I looked at your link for Audi Connect, and it was just as I suspected: it has no data connection. It requires your phone to have one: they warn you specifically on the page to check your cellular data plan and consider the data usage of the system and how that'll affect your phone bill. So, *as I said in my first post*, as long as you don't pair your phone with your car using Bluetooth, your car has no way to communicate with the outside world (unless it has OnStar).
No Mazdas do. That system is available for my car, but if you look closely at the site you'll find this nugget:
"MMS hardware must be purchased and installed in your vehicle."
The car, from the factory, does not have a cellular radio for this system to work. So to get MMS, you have to purchase the system and have it installed, which obviously includes a cellular radio. And of course, you have to pay a yearly fee for it to keep working.
Of course, there's no telling if it'll stay this way or if they'll forcibly include it on all new cars at some time in the future, but for now, you can safely buy a Mazda which doesn't have any kind of cellular radio pre-installed.
All cars sold in the US are *required* to have TPMS, and have for several years now.
Not all cars have TPMS sensors inside the wheels; many cars use a passive system instead as I described earlier. The passive system is cheaper and simpler.
It's very doubtful there'd be a radio receiver for a car with passive TPMS, because that model is going to have that same system in every market. Radio receivers cost money, and they're not going to spend money putting something in a car model that will never be used on any such car anywhere.
2012 was 5 years ago (model year wise). They don't make those cars any more.
ABS has been standard in all cars since the 1990s. There's absolutely no possibility your 2012 cars don't have ABS, unless you're in some 3rd-world country where it's not required.
Oh please. It's basically impossible for MS to "undermine their own goals"; it doesn't matter how badly they screw up, people are going to continue to use Windows no matter what.
Why should they care about "improving the reception by end users"? Why would they want to allow people to disable telemetry? It only benefits MS to keep it on, and it doesn't hurt MS if they make it hard or impossible to disable it. What are the users going to do, complain? Whine? They're certainly not going to abandon Windows; they've proven that over and over again.
Personally I think MS is being far too soft with users, especially corporate users and the government too. MS needs to force all of them to have telemetry turned on with all their keystrokes sent to MS, and advertisements shown to them as they work. No systems should be allowed to operate unless they're connected to the internet, and that goes for ones handling highly classified information too. This policy can only benefit MS, and users *will* accept it.
My Mazda was made in 2015, and it has a bunch of receivers: AM, FM, XM (yuck), GPS, and precisely one transceiver: Bluetooth. If you don't pair it with your phone, it has no ability to connect to the outside world.
How many of these systems actually have cellular modems? My Mazda doesn't; it relies on Bluetooth from your phone for any kind of remote data. I was under the impression that most automakers except GM were like this these days. That cellular connection is extra money just for the hardware (Bluetooth radios are cheaper), plus someone has to pay the cellular provider for the monthly data charge.
Not all cars have TPMS sensors. Mazdas don't; they use a cheaper method with the ABS system that just looks for differences in tire rotation rates over time. It's of course not as sensitive or convenient as the systems with sensors, but it's cheaper and you don't have to worry about batteries dying, tire shops screwing them up, having to buy a new set for your winter tires, etc.
Yeah, it's pretty simple: don't get a car with OnStar (I think there's a competing service out there like this from one of the other makers), and don't pair your Bluetooth phone to the car. Viola! Your car is now immune to hacking.
If there's no way to actually communicate remotely with your car, then there's no way to hack it remotely.
It would be nice if the system architectures in cars were open and all their interfaces publicly documented, so we could see what attack vectors are possible. A well-architected system would have Bluetooth for internet connectivity to the infotainment/nav system (so you can do Android Auto, listen to Pandora, etc.), but would have extremely limited ability to write any data to any other modules on the vehicle data bus (just configuration settings really), and all those interfaces would be publicly documented and fully tested by independent security auditors.
People hate buses because they're slow. They like the private Silicon Valley buses because they're not slow, like normal buses. They're fast because they don't take some meandering zig-zaggy route and stop at dozens of stops along the way; they go from one place and then drive straight to Google HQ.
The same goes for other "coaches". We have lots of them on the east coast, and they're very popular. They pick up at one place in one city (DC, NYC, etc.), everyone gets on at once, and then it drives straight to a single destination without stopping (except for lights obviously). When a bus works like that, it's great because it's nearly as fast as a car and you don't have to do the driving yourself.
The city buses all suck because they don't work like that; they have varying schedules (you can't count on them to pick up at the same time every day), and they take forever to get to their destination (because they have too many stops and the route is too meandering), so much so that it's frequently faster to just walk! Having non-smelly passengers is a bonus, but that's nowhere near the top of the reasons for people to hate city buses. It's all about convenience.
You even mention this at the end of your post, but the problem is that you can't make city buses like this, because then you won't have any ridership; people's start and stop points vary too much. It only works for coaches and Google buses because there's a large number of people who need to go from point A to point B at the exact same time. City buses (attempt to) serve an entirely different need.
How many people wouldn't like to take public transit if they could? I know I sure would: no parking hassles, not having to pay attention to driving, being able to sit back and relax, etc. all sound great to me.
However, if it's going to take me longer to take the bus than it is to just walk there, why would I take the bus? Or if I have to walk 2 miles to get to and from bus stops, and just driving and dealing with all that hassle saves me 2 hours per day, how is that even worth it?
This is why public transit fails in so many places. It's not merely "inconvenient", it's *so* inconvenient and unusable that it just makes no sense to bother with it.
What really irks me is that we already have the technology for something far better: SkyTran personal rapid transit. But we're just too stupid to even consider it. We even think self-driving cars (in chaotic city environments) are more doable somehow.
I wonder how this will change after the next President is elected. What is Trump's stance on this issue? (honest question, I don't know) Or Cruz's? I'm quite sure Hillary's position will be the exact same as Obama's, and probably even stronger.
Not likely. This is from McAfee Software (a division of Intel), which John McAfee has no control or ownership of.
Also, John McAfee has publicly stated that McAfee software is "the worst software on the planet". If the guy it's named after says it's total crap, that should tell you something.
Usually, when I bring this up, some naÃve moron replies with some idiotic response about how John doesn't know anything about current McAfee software, some BS about brand value, etc. Obviously, as we can see from this article, John was right all along: this software IS crap, and it's downright malware.
Why would I want to waste time with manually adding stuff when I can just install uBlock Origin, which is made by people who agree with me that there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad" that only become "acceptable" because they paid someone off?
Hey, if you like supporting payola, why don't you just say so?
Maybe, but apparently they aren't hampering your governments so much that you can't do impressive public works projects, or keep your infrastructure from falling apart.
Not in public works, we haven't. Just look at the levees in Louisiana. Or all the bridges that are falling down. They can't even keep the DC Metro subway system running.
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No, it's not a strawman, it's the truth. You explicitly said people should follow the law, no matter how unjust. That means that logically you think Rosa Parks should have been treated as a criminal. You can't have it both ways.
Sorry, I don't buy it. There's just way too many loyal customers for MS to go the way of IBM any time soon.
As for Android, that's irrelevant; Android is a mobile OS only. Windows is for desktop computers. We're not going to be doing serious office work on Android tablets. Supercomputers are irrelevant too; no one edits Word documents on a supercomputer. That's like saying Chrysler is going to disappear because they don't make bulldozers and dump trucks or train locomotives.
Maybe your company is sticking with Win7 for now, but they're eventually going to upgrade. The US government is already upgrading to Windows 10.
Wow, that's really crappy. My 1994 Integra had ABS, and it wasn't exactly the most expensive car on the road back then.
A little bit of research shows that apparently, ABS was not mandatory in the US until 2012 when it was required in conjunction with electronic stability control (ESC).
Why on earth would you buy a car so cheap it doesn't come with ABS? If you're that hard-up for cash, you can get a much better deal on a used car than getting a stripped-down new one.
That's because you don't understand their logic.
Their logic is that what they want Apple to do is to put in a back door so they can get the data on anyone's iPhone. They simply don't believe that this back door could possibly be used by anyone else.
It's just like those dumb TSA master keys.
How sure are you of that?
I'm 100% sure of it.
Even if you weren't neglecting the other obvious communications devices -- the ones to communicate with the tire-pressure monitoring system,
There's no such system in my car. It uses passive TPMS.
the keyless entry / push-button start
You have a point there, I did overlook that one. It does have keyless entry. However it's one-way: the car has no way to transmit back to the keyfob, it can only receive. You can't communicate with something over a one-way data link.
I would have no confidence whatsoever that there wasn't a cellular modem hidden away somewhere
That's tinfoil-hat territory. There's no cellular modem in my car. If you want remote start by phone app, you have to purchase a separate device and service to get that; the device has to be installed and of course has a cellular modem. If they already had a cellular modem in there, they wouldn't require you to purchase and install another module.
And if you think every major car manufacturer and every major car insurer isn't eyeing up the possibilities of phoning home with driver performance data whether you like it or not, I know a prince in Nigeria who has a really great offer that might interest you.
Insurers, perhaps, but manufacturers, I'm not so sure. If they really wanted to, wouldn't they have done so by now? But not every carmaker has put a cellular modem in their vehicle yet. Perhaps the cost of the cellular service per-car isn't worth the data they'd get from it.
Finally, you're already proven my point. The systems you list do not have any kind of data connection. They aren't connected to the internet: they have no cellular modem. I didn't look at them all, but I looked at your link for Audi Connect, and it was just as I suspected: it has no data connection. It requires your phone to have one: they warn you specifically on the page to check your cellular data plan and consider the data usage of the system and how that'll affect your phone bill. So, *as I said in my first post*, as long as you don't pair your phone with your car using Bluetooth, your car has no way to communicate with the outside world (unless it has OnStar).
No Mazdas do. That system is available for my car, but if you look closely at the site you'll find this nugget:
"MMS hardware must be purchased and installed in your vehicle."
The car, from the factory, does not have a cellular radio for this system to work. So to get MMS, you have to purchase the system and have it installed, which obviously includes a cellular radio. And of course, you have to pay a yearly fee for it to keep working.
Of course, there's no telling if it'll stay this way or if they'll forcibly include it on all new cars at some time in the future, but for now, you can safely buy a Mazda which doesn't have any kind of cellular radio pre-installed.
As far as cars that âoedonâ(TM)t haveâ TPMS,
All cars sold in the US are *required* to have TPMS, and have for several years now.
Not all cars have TPMS sensors inside the wheels; many cars use a passive system instead as I described earlier. The passive system is cheaper and simpler.
It's very doubtful there'd be a radio receiver for a car with passive TPMS, because that model is going to have that same system in every market. Radio receivers cost money, and they're not going to spend money putting something in a car model that will never be used on any such car anywhere.
Two problems here:
2012 was 5 years ago (model year wise). They don't make those cars any more.
ABS has been standard in all cars since the 1990s. There's absolutely no possibility your 2012 cars don't have ABS, unless you're in some 3rd-world country where it's not required.
Oh please. It's basically impossible for MS to "undermine their own goals"; it doesn't matter how badly they screw up, people are going to continue to use Windows no matter what.
Why should they care about "improving the reception by end users"? Why would they want to allow people to disable telemetry? It only benefits MS to keep it on, and it doesn't hurt MS if they make it hard or impossible to disable it. What are the users going to do, complain? Whine? They're certainly not going to abandon Windows; they've proven that over and over again.
Personally I think MS is being far too soft with users, especially corporate users and the government too. MS needs to force all of them to have telemetry turned on with all their keystrokes sent to MS, and advertisements shown to them as they work. No systems should be allowed to operate unless they're connected to the internet, and that goes for ones handling highly classified information too. This policy can only benefit MS, and users *will* accept it.
My Mazda was made in 2015, and it has a bunch of receivers: AM, FM, XM (yuck), GPS, and precisely one transceiver: Bluetooth. If you don't pair it with your phone, it has no ability to connect to the outside world.
How many of these systems actually have cellular modems? My Mazda doesn't; it relies on Bluetooth from your phone for any kind of remote data. I was under the impression that most automakers except GM were like this these days. That cellular connection is extra money just for the hardware (Bluetooth radios are cheaper), plus someone has to pay the cellular provider for the monthly data charge.
Not all cars have TPMS sensors. Mazdas don't; they use a cheaper method with the ABS system that just looks for differences in tire rotation rates over time. It's of course not as sensitive or convenient as the systems with sensors, but it's cheaper and you don't have to worry about batteries dying, tire shops screwing them up, having to buy a new set for your winter tires, etc.
Yeah, it's pretty simple: don't get a car with OnStar (I think there's a competing service out there like this from one of the other makers), and don't pair your Bluetooth phone to the car. Viola! Your car is now immune to hacking.
If there's no way to actually communicate remotely with your car, then there's no way to hack it remotely.
It would be nice if the system architectures in cars were open and all their interfaces publicly documented, so we could see what attack vectors are possible. A well-architected system would have Bluetooth for internet connectivity to the infotainment/nav system (so you can do Android Auto, listen to Pandora, etc.), but would have extremely limited ability to write any data to any other modules on the vehicle data bus (just configuration settings really), and all those interfaces would be publicly documented and fully tested by independent security auditors.
They have electric buses in NYC now.
Oh please, this is just stupid.
People hate buses because they're slow. They like the private Silicon Valley buses because they're not slow, like normal buses. They're fast because they don't take some meandering zig-zaggy route and stop at dozens of stops along the way; they go from one place and then drive straight to Google HQ.
The same goes for other "coaches". We have lots of them on the east coast, and they're very popular. They pick up at one place in one city (DC, NYC, etc.), everyone gets on at once, and then it drives straight to a single destination without stopping (except for lights obviously). When a bus works like that, it's great because it's nearly as fast as a car and you don't have to do the driving yourself.
The city buses all suck because they don't work like that; they have varying schedules (you can't count on them to pick up at the same time every day), and they take forever to get to their destination (because they have too many stops and the route is too meandering), so much so that it's frequently faster to just walk! Having non-smelly passengers is a bonus, but that's nowhere near the top of the reasons for people to hate city buses. It's all about convenience.
You even mention this at the end of your post, but the problem is that you can't make city buses like this, because then you won't have any ridership; people's start and stop points vary too much. It only works for coaches and Google buses because there's a large number of people who need to go from point A to point B at the exact same time. City buses (attempt to) serve an entirely different need.
The only sensible answer to this is SkyTran.
How many people wouldn't like to take public transit if they could? I know I sure would: no parking hassles, not having to pay attention to driving, being able to sit back and relax, etc. all sound great to me.
However, if it's going to take me longer to take the bus than it is to just walk there, why would I take the bus? Or if I have to walk 2 miles to get to and from bus stops, and just driving and dealing with all that hassle saves me 2 hours per day, how is that even worth it?
This is why public transit fails in so many places. It's not merely "inconvenient", it's *so* inconvenient and unusable that it just makes no sense to bother with it.
What really irks me is that we already have the technology for something far better: SkyTran personal rapid transit. But we're just too stupid to even consider it. We even think self-driving cars (in chaotic city environments) are more doable somehow.
I wonder how this will change after the next President is elected. What is Trump's stance on this issue? (honest question, I don't know) Or Cruz's? I'm quite sure Hillary's position will be the exact same as Obama's, and probably even stronger.
Apple is/was pro-establishment as long as it benefited them (i.e. IP laws).
Now they've found that the establishment has bitten them in the ass.
... says the guy who thinks black people should sit at the back of the bus and drink from separate water fountains.
Not likely. This is from McAfee Software (a division of Intel), which John McAfee has no control or ownership of.
Also, John McAfee has publicly stated that McAfee software is "the worst software on the planet". If the guy it's named after says it's total crap, that should tell you something.
Usually, when I bring this up, some naÃve moron replies with some idiotic response about how John doesn't know anything about current McAfee software, some BS about brand value, etc. Obviously, as we can see from this article, John was right all along: this software IS crap, and it's downright malware.
Why would I want to waste time with manually adding stuff when I can just install uBlock Origin, which is made by people who agree with me that there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad" that only become "acceptable" because they paid someone off?
Hey, if you like supporting payola, why don't you just say so?
I guess everyone in south Florida just needs to live on a houseboat then...
Maybe, but apparently they aren't hampering your governments so much that you can't do impressive public works projects, or keep your infrastructure from falling apart.
Not in public works, we haven't. Just look at the levees in Louisiana. Or all the bridges that are falling down. They can't even keep the DC Metro subway system running.