but it's not software in any sense of the understanding of the vast majority of software engineers that read slashdot--specifically because they've been sheltered from extremely low-level hardware details by various layers of firmware for their entire lives.
x86 micro-code can be changed via flash, as can the low-level software that controls your microwaves, does that need to be programmable by random C++ hackers?
of requiring firmware to be modifiable by external developers. Firmware isn't software. With software we have to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure that the programmer can't do any physical damage and that he or she has a relatively clean and sane way to program the machine. Firmware is much lower level and it's where we hide all sorts of nasty stuff. In many cases it is virtually impossible to write the firmware if you aren't sitting next to the guy who designed the hardware (sometimes it's the same guy). In some cases you can cause physical damage to the device or to people. Engineering teams have careful validation methodologies for firmware--random hackers are the amongst the least careful people on the planet.
It's better to put any compliance burden (FCC, security, etc.) squarely on the manufacturer and let them use signed binary blobs.
What's the point of comparing the magnitude of completely different quantities? Why not compare NYT's paid subscriptions to BBC News paid subscriptions? Or compare NYT unique users per week to BBC.
Both Google and Microsoft also send out pre-release versions of hardware which are restricted use under NDA. iFixit can do whatever they want when they buy an Apple TV from a store.
Grow up. Nobody cares if you think Apple users are stooges. Apple users don't think about you at all.
The definition of "new technology" is "combination of existing technologies to create a new product". Why is this so hard for slashdotters to understand?
Electric cars existed before Tesla. A mass-market electric car that is faster than most gas cars and which travels 200+ miles/charge did NOT exist before Tesla--therefore it is new technology.
1. Apple doesn't make money off of apps, they make money by selling hardware. Their only interest in having a locked down app-store is so that iOS will be perceived as the "safe, virus & malware-free approach". I know it's really hard to understand how a company can make money by selling real physical objects because we've all been so conditioned into thinking that you can only make money off of software and ads.
2. iOS is a gigantic market. Android has more users but those users don't have any money. Dramatically more money is spent by iOS users (on apps and everything else) than by Android users. You are incredibly naive to think that iOS is not a big enough target for virus/malware authors.
3. This is how I know you're a child, because you think that if there's a tiniest chink in the armor then the armor is useless. It's really common for kids to have this perception because their brains are under-developed, can't see shades of gray, and thus can't comprehend that there can be a lot of value to imperfect security. Hopefully at some point in your intellectual development you'll understand that ALL SECURITY IS IMPERFECT. As of right now your brain is just not capable of processing that.
1. investing money and losing money 2. heavily amortized costs (R & D, building a factory) vs. per-unit costs
How the world works will always be a mystery to people like you. You are doomed to witness many companies in your life go [seemingly overnight] from "losing $8400 per unit" to "raking in billions of dollars in profit". Let me try to put it into terms your tiny little brain can understand:
For essentially every single product in history there has been some point in its early production when it was "losing $8400 per unit". The Ford Model T, the Sony Walkman, the iPod, the VCR, all of them. And some idiot pointed it out each time. And then everyone with a brain yawned and ignored them.
I don't understand what you are talking about. The only difference is that Apple makes it very hard to load apps except through their curated store; specifically to avoid creating additional attack vectors.
Security isn't about perfection. It never has been ever before in the history of mankind. The average Apple user is much less likely to experience malware than the average Android or Windows user--that's not something I'm willing to debate anymore than I'm willing to debate whether 2+2=4--the statistics are out there and they are compelling.
I think the problem here is that you don't understand technology. Probably because you're 14.
The biggest tragedy of the government's boneheaded approach to tech spying is that it has managed to convince an entire generation of losers that each and every one of them is a high-value government target. You aren't. Nobody gives a fuck about your insignificant little life. You don't matter. At all. Nobody is reading your emails; not because they can't, because your emails are fucking boring. Nobody is listening to your phone calls, because nobody needs to get up to date on your theories about Jon Snow. You are NOT important. At all.
There were no big racial protests in the 30s, I guess that means that everyone was super happy. Also, the 1890s were even quieter, and the 1840s quieter still.
A wise robot once said, "I think you're confusing peace with quiet". The racial divide isn't created by rabble rousers, it's exposed by them.
And there never has been at any point in human history. Sure you need a warrant to exercise a capability to spy--but there's absolutely nothing illegal about creating an apparatus that enables the spying.
I think you are confusing what is wrong with what is illegal. Not everything that you consider to be wrong is illegal.
malware on iOS. There have been something like 6 total reported cases in iOS history where something slipped past the checks--all of those were pretty much immediately removed.
The XCodeGhost was a new attack vector and managed to infect many apps. Those apps will also be cleaned up and that attack vector will be eliminated.
It is just patently false to claim that the walled garden approach doesn't work. It's the only thing that does work. You are being intellectually dishonest.
Any malware statistics you can find show that iOS has dramatically less malware than Windows or Android.
Amazon's store is fine, but it doesn't matter if one store is okay. You need devices locked to only the "safe stores" or you need customers to be really careful about which stores they download apps from. So, basically, you either need a walled garden model or tech savvy users. Since the whole point of the discussion is how to safely roll out smartphone tech to everyone then the latter option is not really an option.
There's nothing magical about being community operated. There are a lot of community operated app stores doling out metric tons of malware right now on Android, Windows, and jailbroken iOS.
Sure, it's possible for a small community to create a clean and well maintained app store--but who certifies which 'community app stores' are clean and well maintained? If your answer is 'the end customer' then that puts us right back where Windows and Android are--you have to be an expert to use your phone. It is a failed system. You know what is an outrageously successful system? Apple's walled garden. I've yet to hear an alternative that wasn't just a thin repackaging of the failed Windows and Android app ecosystems.
The critical consideration is whether the company that operates the store invests enough money to maintain a high level of QA. Apple makes that investment (even for free apps) because it helps with sales of hardware (which is where they make all the money) and thus can be subsidized by hardware sales.
The answer is NOT to present customers with fourteen more layers of pop-ups and train users to just hit 'accept' on everything. The answer is NOT to load down our mobile devices with anti-virus software, most of which are worse that most viruses. The answer is NOT to expect users to become experts on technology.
Those are the failed ideas and policies of the Windows world. Android is trying hard to make most of the same mistakes. They are horrible, horrible, ideas and it's scary that there are some in the tech community that are still advocating them.
Apple's current model IS the answer. Just look at the stats of malware/virus infections of Apple devices vs. Windows or Android. But nothing is perfect, there are going to be occasional infections.
It doesn't mean that there's no value in imperfect security. Apple's walled garden failed in this attack, but it succeeded in thousands of other cases. The infected apps will be removed from devices and the app store, the hole will be closed.
You think we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom--why not just say that? We've done that many times in the history of our country and we can do it again through reforming the tax structure, raising minimum wage, improving benefits (like government sponsored health care), or any number of ways.
Sure, UBI is one of those ways--it just seems like a horrible one to me. Or put more delicately, "great idea, wrong species": Cash payments for doing nothing is spectacular way to encourage people to do nothing and make lots more babies.
An economy requires effort. $1 corresponds to some unit of effort on my part and can be used to purchase the result of someone else's effort. You can print up more dollars but you can't print up more effort.
Basic Income via inflation is another way of saying, "tax the people who have money and give it to the people who don't"--that's all we're talking about here. It's called welfare and there's quite a bit of prior art on that.
Slashdot Mirror
but it's not software in any sense of the understanding of the vast majority of software engineers that read slashdot--specifically because they've been sheltered from extremely low-level hardware details by various layers of firmware for their entire lives.
x86 micro-code can be changed via flash, as can the low-level software that controls your microwaves, does that need to be programmable by random C++ hackers?
of requiring firmware to be modifiable by external developers. Firmware isn't software. With software we have to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure that the programmer can't do any physical damage and that he or she has a relatively clean and sane way to program the machine. Firmware is much lower level and it's where we hide all sorts of nasty stuff. In many cases it is virtually impossible to write the firmware if you aren't sitting next to the guy who designed the hardware (sometimes it's the same guy). In some cases you can cause physical damage to the device or to people. Engineering teams have careful validation methodologies for firmware--random hackers are the amongst the least careful people on the planet.
It's better to put any compliance burden (FCC, security, etc.) squarely on the manufacturer and let them use signed binary blobs.
What's the point of comparing the magnitude of completely different quantities? Why not compare NYT's paid subscriptions to BBC News paid subscriptions? Or compare NYT unique users per week to BBC.
First off, you're an idiot.
Both Google and Microsoft also send out pre-release versions of hardware which are restricted use under NDA. iFixit can do whatever they want when they buy an Apple TV from a store.
Grow up. Nobody cares if you think Apple users are stooges. Apple users don't think about you at all.
> A lot of people here on slashdot are interested in sex, too.
citation required
The definition of "new technology" is "combination of existing technologies to create a new product". Why is this so hard for slashdotters to understand?
Electric cars existed before Tesla. A mass-market electric car that is faster than most gas cars and which travels 200+ miles/charge did NOT exist before Tesla--therefore it is new technology.
1. Apple doesn't make money off of apps, they make money by selling hardware. Their only interest in having a locked down app-store is so that iOS will be perceived as the "safe, virus & malware-free approach". I know it's really hard to understand how a company can make money by selling real physical objects because we've all been so conditioned into thinking that you can only make money off of software and ads.
2. iOS is a gigantic market. Android has more users but those users don't have any money. Dramatically more money is spent by iOS users (on apps and everything else) than by Android users. You are incredibly naive to think that iOS is not a big enough target for virus/malware authors.
3. This is how I know you're a child, because you think that if there's a tiniest chink in the armor then the armor is useless. It's really common for kids to have this perception because their brains are under-developed, can't see shades of gray, and thus can't comprehend that there can be a lot of value to imperfect security. Hopefully at some point in your intellectual development you'll understand that ALL SECURITY IS IMPERFECT. As of right now your brain is just not capable of processing that.
it seems like you are just generally confused.
distinguish between:
1. investing money and losing money
2. heavily amortized costs (R & D, building a factory) vs. per-unit costs
How the world works will always be a mystery to people like you. You are doomed to witness many companies in your life go [seemingly overnight] from "losing $8400 per unit" to "raking in billions of dollars in profit". Let me try to put it into terms your tiny little brain can understand:
For essentially every single product in history there has been some point in its early production when it was "losing $8400 per unit". The Ford Model T, the Sony Walkman, the iPod, the VCR, all of them. And some idiot pointed it out each time. And then everyone with a brain yawned and ignored them.
Yawn.
I don't understand what you are talking about. The only difference is that Apple makes it very hard to load apps except through their curated store; specifically to avoid creating additional attack vectors.
Security isn't about perfection. It never has been ever before in the history of mankind. The average Apple user is much less likely to experience malware than the average Android or Windows user--that's not something I'm willing to debate anymore than I'm willing to debate whether 2+2=4--the statistics are out there and they are compelling.
I think the problem here is that you don't understand technology. Probably because you're 14.
The biggest tragedy of the government's boneheaded approach to tech spying is that it has managed to convince an entire generation of losers that each and every one of them is a high-value government target. You aren't. Nobody gives a fuck about your insignificant little life. You don't matter. At all. Nobody is reading your emails; not because they can't, because your emails are fucking boring. Nobody is listening to your phone calls, because nobody needs to get up to date on your theories about Jon Snow. You are NOT important. At all.
Let's shut down the military, police force, FBI, CIA, and NSA and use that money instead to shower the world with rose petals.
There were no big racial protests in the 30s, I guess that means that everyone was super happy. Also, the 1890s were even quieter, and the 1840s quieter still.
A wise robot once said, "I think you're confusing peace with quiet". The racial divide isn't created by rabble rousers, it's exposed by them.
And there never has been at any point in human history. Sure you need a warrant to exercise a capability to spy--but there's absolutely nothing illegal about creating an apparatus that enables the spying.
I think you are confusing what is wrong with what is illegal. Not everything that you consider to be wrong is illegal.
malware on iOS. There have been something like 6 total reported cases in iOS history where something slipped past the checks--all of those were pretty much immediately removed.
The XCodeGhost was a new attack vector and managed to infect many apps. Those apps will also be cleaned up and that attack vector will be eliminated.
It is just patently false to claim that the walled garden approach doesn't work. It's the only thing that does work. You are being intellectually dishonest.
Any malware statistics you can find show that iOS has dramatically less malware than Windows or Android.
Amazon's store is fine, but it doesn't matter if one store is okay. You need devices locked to only the "safe stores" or you need customers to be really careful about which stores they download apps from. So, basically, you either need a walled garden model or tech savvy users. Since the whole point of the discussion is how to safely roll out smartphone tech to everyone then the latter option is not really an option.
QED.
There's nothing magical about being community operated. There are a lot of community operated app stores doling out metric tons of malware right now on Android, Windows, and jailbroken iOS.
Sure, it's possible for a small community to create a clean and well maintained app store--but who certifies which 'community app stores' are clean and well maintained? If your answer is 'the end customer' then that puts us right back where Windows and Android are--you have to be an expert to use your phone. It is a failed system. You know what is an outrageously successful system? Apple's walled garden. I've yet to hear an alternative that wasn't just a thin repackaging of the failed Windows and Android app ecosystems.
The critical consideration is whether the company that operates the store invests enough money to maintain a high level of QA. Apple makes that investment (even for free apps) because it helps with sales of hardware (which is where they make all the money) and thus can be subsidized by hardware sales.
The answer is NOT to present customers with fourteen more layers of pop-ups and train users to just hit 'accept' on everything. The answer is NOT to load down our mobile devices with anti-virus software, most of which are worse that most viruses. The answer is NOT to expect users to become experts on technology.
Those are the failed ideas and policies of the Windows world. Android is trying hard to make most of the same mistakes. They are horrible, horrible, ideas and it's scary that there are some in the tech community that are still advocating them.
Apple's current model IS the answer. Just look at the stats of malware/virus infections of Apple devices vs. Windows or Android. But nothing is perfect, there are going to be occasional infections.
It doesn't mean that there's no value in imperfect security. Apple's walled garden failed in this attack, but it succeeded in thousands of other cases. The infected apps will be removed from devices and the app store, the hole will be closed.
Jurisdictions_requiring_periodic_vehicle_emissions_inspections
You think we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom--why not just say that? We've done that many times in the history of our country and we can do it again through reforming the tax structure, raising minimum wage, improving benefits (like government sponsored health care), or any number of ways.
Sure, UBI is one of those ways--it just seems like a horrible one to me. Or put more delicately, "great idea, wrong species": Cash payments for doing nothing is spectacular way to encourage people to do nothing and make lots more babies.
Better to raise the minimum wage.
An economy requires effort. $1 corresponds to some unit of effort on my part and can be used to purchase the result of someone else's effort. You can print up more dollars but you can't print up more effort.
Basic Income via inflation is another way of saying, "tax the people who have money and give it to the people who don't"--that's all we're talking about here. It's called welfare and there's quite a bit of prior art on that.
Lots of people use Apple devices for work.
Finally that mystery is solved.