Weren't there also some problems with Cisco's legal claim to the name? I can't quite remember what it was but AFAIK they failed in both US and EU to adequately secure the name.
Thus, Cisco may be just hanging on for the nuisance factor. After all, SCO got away with it for years..
It's of course my personal opinion, but I think Cisco were trying it on and Steve Jobs called their bluff. And I think he'll get away with it as well, Cisco can claim as much as it wants but Apple has pretty much claimed the 'i' naming space. We've got 25 more letters to go:-).
Or: how is this different from Passport
on
AOL Now Supports OpenID
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· Score: 1, Interesting
OK, other than NOT being MS driven and a bit more open, where is OpenID conceptually different from Passport? I may have missed something here but it's again single sign on which concentrates your online identity into a single point of failure.
So, it's more modern and has a little shiny "Open" sticker on the side, but the challenges are identical IMHO.
You could use that same argument for Arthur Andersen during the Enron case.
The key question is very simple: what makes them KNOWINGLY risk this, or (put another way) what are they hiding that would be worse when discovered knowingly and willingly destroying potential evidence?
In both cases (Enron and Microsoft) I had a real problem with accepting things of this magnitude as 'accidents'. Too convenient, and too much a feeling of even more skeletons present in the mass burial closet than were discovered. In both cases the questionable events were sustained far longer than could be explained away by it being mere stupidity. Organisational stupidity comes in short bursts, not in week long sustained efforts.
So I don't buy the 'accident' claims, not even for a second.
At the moment there are still alternative methods of access so the forcible removal of body parts is not happening yet (except for people carrying a donor codicil, but that's organ/trade/ and another story altogether). Under threat you can choose to give access.
There are already scanners that check for things like body heat and (IMHO a more clever idea) a pulse in roughly the same way as a hospital finger pulse reader does it, but the pulse one has the problem that it's possible to pick up latent prints from the way it works (it's not a 'swipe' style scanner). But that too will be bypassed - it's the usual arms race.
You would be right with your millions vs. a few incidents (incidentally, also the same argument to put a terror threat into a reasonable perspective) if you consider that not everyone has data worth stealing except for your very identity. So you could say that the height of your presence on the food chain ought to directly correlate with an increased aversion to biometrics..
BTW, as a slight aside, the popping eyeball idea for bypassing biometrics was used in the "Angels and Demons" book by Dan Brown (better known for "The Davinci Code":-). CERN has shown a sense of humo(u)r and put up a page matching the book against reality.
I think Toshiba is breaking new ground with this phone and its release is likely to start a trend.
I most certainly hope not, for reasons stated below.
The need for security is actually higher for a mobile handset than for a laptop, as they get lost far more often.
The need for protecting an asset has little to do with the frequency or potential for loss, more with the information that would be lost or compromised (different facets with different ratings) and that is a very personal assessment. The Paris Hilton hack was very dangerous because her Sidekick contained personal numbers for people that have to fight hard as it is to have some sort of private life and security, but a Mr Average phone is not going to hold data of sufficient value to offer up irreplacable body parts for. You can replace a phone, you can replace numbers but you can't replace a cut off finger (given the likely conditions under which the amputation would occur you can give up any hope on re-attachment as well).
And despite the various comments about cutting off fingers and lifting fingerprints, have we seen much of that in the laptop world? No. Will it happen one day? Maybe.
In laptop world the fingerprint scanner is (a) a relative new device and (b) not working so well, so thankfully most people don't use it. Also, most laptops are removed without the users' knowledge because it's often important to have some time before the theft is discovered (in case of targeted theft) and (using Windows) breaking into the unencrypted device is just a matter of booting up from a CD.
Now imagine a world where biometrics are the ONLY way to gain access - at that point you will lose the option to give in under threat and provide a password - your finger WILL be used, with or without you inconveniently attached to it. It can get even worse: with passwords it requires on your collaboration so there's an interest in keeping you alive. With biometrics-only devices an assailant has the wonderful option of killing you first, then using your chopped off digit in the comfort of his own place with a nice cold beer. That's quite a handy option for them because it stops you from becoming a risk later.
So, with implementing biometrics I would ask the Clint Eastwood question: "Do you feel lucky?".
I don't think so. They don't buy "Windows", they buy "a PeeCee" that happens to use the Net and plays some games. Pretty much like not everyone who buys a Skybox is a fully qualified RF engineer - you just want a box that does the job.
Ergo, some of them don't even know they need AV. The good thing is that now virtually all boxes come pre-installed with some anti-virus, but it's still not explained to the end user why they need it (although that starts to improve) so when the short license expires they don't renew.
It's a combination of doom-overload (not the game:-), ignorance and basic product deficiencies.
All IMHO, of course, but I've seen if often enough. 3 months ago they spent a fortune on a new PC and now it needs money again for some license thingy - no. And presto..
I'm glad you consider yourself as a representative user:-).
I'd agree with you for those who grew up on a command line (hell, I can even remember rubber cup 300 baud modems), but I've seen enough people mass-mail multi-MB powerpoints to staff to know that it's not a universal given that bandwidth won't be affected.
For instance, those who presently download their once-a-minute MS and anti-virus updates from a central corporate server will now do this all online. Securityfocus has already observed that users withj modems no longer stand a chance to keep up with it all so even without doing anything useful you're hitting the Net with a lot of extra usage.
I mean, not every end user chooses to be infected, and it's not like it's easy to get a machine secured whilst online before it gets infected. I'm not quite sure that a warhead on the house is the best way to deal with a part of a botnet.
If you really want to take about liability you'll have to start with a company that sells you a car without brakes, thus creating a huge market for brakes, and is now starting to supply the brakes themselves. Whilst still leaving them out of the original car.
Replace car with "Windows" and brakes with "decent security" and all of a sudden they're wonderful and creating shareholder value and carry no liability for their actions whatsoever whilst charging to the hilt for the privilege. Maybe taking decent action against them may help - it's going to be cheaper than bombs unless some White House friends are in need of tax funds again and need some rebuilding projects to camouflage the handouts.
On the side of the marketing team someone could have been smarter and discussed this with police and city hall before they let it loose. Unknown electronic devices without a label on the back stating "it's ours, call this number" was possibly not the brightest idea.
On the side of the police someone could actually have been clever by investigating a device instead of trying to hog news coverage in their eagerness to show how wonderfully they were "protecting the public". Now they look like fools.
In short, neither side has exactly covered itself with glory here.
Actually, on the 'distracting hackers' front you may want to do some digging for Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit (DTK), even just for amusements' sake. AFAIK most people clued up now use LaBrea tar pits because it uses less resources and makes more of a mess at the transgressor end, but Fred came up with the idea of deliberately creating 'vulnerable' services, only they weren't/really/ vulnerable - the hacker wannabee was basically talking to a bunch of scripts pretending to be a flawed service.
The idea was to waste as much hacker time as possible, thus increasing the potential for detection and the assailant moving to another target. Neat idea IMHO.
The problem is not software or hardware and how you protect it - it's the end user.
You make a choice here: either you enable self management of the system, which opens the potential for socially engineering a user into doing something they shouldn't, or you close the box tightly and thus incur an administration overhead (which would annul the low costs of any OLPC machine) and/or lose the flexibility. The latter may be feasible with OLPC if you made it fixed purpose (i.e. set loadset with no deviation), but that strikes me as defeating the whole concept.
Look at most trojans and virus infections: they rely on the user doing something stupid, and they do so - with gusto. We got a new admin girl and the first thing she did when she got her machine was complain she couldn't install 'her' programs on it. On inspection she would have made the box a botnet zombie as well as a spam relay, all because the programs were 'cute'.
The same is happening with children. There are plenty of sites luring children with games, whilst surreptitiously probing the box for vulnerabilities through which to install malware - or it's made to look like another game so that the child will install it. And thanks to the carelessness in coding most of the "official" kid games, plenty of parents have set the child up with admin rights because the games won't work otherwise. And those are the ones that had at least the idea of creating separate accounts - plenty of machines just go live as administrator with parents and children just using "the computer".
Go ahead, fix the computer, unless you fix/educate the users at the same time you're still losing the battle.
Wasn't there some code that replaced images in a stream? I recall that being used at some hacker conference, could be entertaining:-). What do you use to firewall?
I'm asking because I'm toying with the idea of setting up something similar, but leave it open for Skype and maybe some sites like the BBC and Dilbert. In my opinion a WiFi port should never give access to an internal network without a VPN layer.
I use QuickOffice on a UIQ 3 interface - any chance of making an OpenOffice version? As ODF is now a standard it would be quite cool to have it supported..
Yes, but the same issue will help MS here too: Vista will be forced down the throat of new users by merit it the pre-install lock-in MS has been allowed to keep despite all these multiple monopoly convictions.
It won't get into my setup, but I have some code that only runs on Windows - not much, but just enough to force me to have a Win XP system around until I have time to set it up under a VM in Linux or migrate to an alternative.
I *love* the text prediction system. It was one of the main motives for me to switch over to OO as I often had to write reports which contained complex technical terms and foreign names. OO starts picking these things up after about the 2nd occurrence which dramatically reduces typos you'd have to correct afterwards (I'm otherwise pretty good apart from strange bits of dyslexia where I type 'teh' a lot instead of 'the' - I wonder if AutoCorrect doesn't actually enforce that problem).
Most of the work I did for my former company had to put into Word with incredibly convoluted style automation macros. To me it looked more like the IT department was creating work for themselves as nothing wouldn't have been achievable by just telling people how styles work, but we had to live with it (and the sodding hassle it created when Word got it all mixed up), so I wrote the content first in OO, then pumped it into Word. Even with that extra step it was significantly faster than doing it in Word simply because of the debugging (and I didn't have to battle the template macros:-).
Note that this is different from Autotext - I tend to zap most of the word list as it has an ugly habit of changing things you don't WANT to change. CaPiTaLiSaTiOn is another one - quite a few tech long words use it as component separator and that, of course, doesn't follow the rules MS wants you to follow so it had to go:-).
And there's that other argument (which is why I suspect MS is rather desperate to keep it out of corporate desktops): Outlook, Word and Excel are for quite a few people 'the computer' - Windows is just a path for them to get to that icon on their desktop. If you get them used to OO there's a significantly lower barrier to eventually get them off Windows altogether..
Remember, it's ELECTRONIC ink - that doesn't leak:-).
In all seriousness, though, I suspect you're right. Not only is the refresh rate of these displays low (so no use for B&W films:-), but the actual energy involved in a refresh is also lower so the overall potential to pick up EM is lower.
However, without anyone testing I would not assume to be right yet. Leave the chicken wire and the tin foil hat in place for now..
I know even telex is still making a tidy mint for some telcos (I think C&W still run a setup, even post Y2K where parts of the infrastructure needed upgrading).
Following that scenario it would give hard disks another two decades or so. Most likely better, smaller, more efficient (a 10MB disk used to be the size of a washing machine), but not yet abandoned..
As I don't know how it precisely works I'd be reluctant to put it on my machines, however useful it looks (usability is a big key in getting an app accepted). Worse, it's only for one narrow OS (WinXP SP2), and it install.Net code. Not very good credentials for security, so I think I'll give this one a miss..
There appears to be quite a disconnect between vision, sales and development at IBM.
Louis Gerstner performed more or less a miracle by getting these (technically extremely competent) people to actually work a bit together (in a fairly brutal way, read Who says elephants can't dance) but either the visionaries are getting too old at IBM (because new talent cannot reach the top without going native) or there's not enough stewardship from the top to contain the internal strife that holds the company back.
IBM has never had a problem doing good things technically, but I personally feel they wasted a Godawful time on Lotus. The user interface still sucks big time, and it's only saving grace was that it was so awkward it stopped virus infections dead in their tracks (OK, and inter-user crypto is better than MS Exchange because it actually exists:-).
If they had the guts to go Open Source all the way (for example, pick an Open Source replacement for Lotus and put resources behind it) they may do something good. At present it looks like everyone is just using corporate inertia to last a couple more years before it falls apart for good (classic example: looking at turnover instead of turnover trending).
The seniority of a board always plays a big role. I remember fighting an uphill battle in another biggie for a project that, at the time, was revolutionary and I was held back every step of the way by oldies who didn't want to rock the boat running a risk only a few years from their pension (it was, of course, called "not exposing the company to risk", forgetting the adage that "ships are safe in the harbour - but that's not what ships are for"). I only won this battle, btw, because I found one senior person heading for retirement in that club who didn't mind going out with a bang and we thus ended up building something that is still working almost 15 years later - and I left after that because I got sick and tired of having to explain the obvious time and time again.
That company needs help, but their Board will have to see that first. Not sure if they have another visionary around - doesn't look like it. If they can't shake off that corporate dullness at the top they'll die like that too. All IMHO, though, but the signs are all there.
Satellite comms is significantly more expensive than land based fiber and the upkeep of a ship isn't exactly trivial either so I'm not sure the economics of that idea would ever stack up..
Well, I wasn't suggesting *I* would (grin), but the potential exist, which is what makes what the RIAA is doing patently stupid (IMHO, of course). As for checksums - how do people look for a file? AFAIK by name, so the hack would probably start in the naming facility.
Slashdot Mirror
Weren't there also some problems with Cisco's legal claim to the name? I can't quite remember what it was but AFAIK they failed in both US and EU to adequately secure the name.
:-).
Thus, Cisco may be just hanging on for the nuisance factor. After all, SCO got away with it for years..
It's of course my personal opinion, but I think Cisco were trying it on and Steve Jobs called their bluff. And I think he'll get away with it as well, Cisco can claim as much as it wants but Apple has pretty much claimed the 'i' naming space. We've got 25 more letters to go
OK, other than NOT being MS driven and a bit more open, where is OpenID conceptually different from Passport? I may have missed something here but it's again single sign on which concentrates your online identity into a single point of failure.
So, it's more modern and has a little shiny "Open" sticker on the side, but the challenges are identical IMHO.
You could use that same argument for Arthur Andersen during the Enron case.
The key question is very simple: what makes them KNOWINGLY risk this, or (put another way) what are they hiding that would be worse when discovered knowingly and willingly destroying potential evidence?
In both cases (Enron and Microsoft) I had a real problem with accepting things of this magnitude as 'accidents'. Too convenient, and too much a feeling of even more skeletons present in the mass burial closet than were discovered. In both cases the questionable events were sustained far longer than could be explained away by it being mere stupidity. Organisational stupidity comes in short bursts, not in week long sustained efforts.
So I don't buy the 'accident' claims, not even for a second.
At the moment there are still alternative methods of access so the forcible removal of body parts is not happening yet (except for people carrying a donor codicil, but that's organ /trade/ and another story altogether). Under threat you can choose to give access.
:-). CERN has shown a sense of humo(u)r and put up a page matching the book against reality.
There are already scanners that check for things like body heat and (IMHO a more clever idea) a pulse in roughly the same way as a hospital finger pulse reader does it, but the pulse one has the problem that it's possible to pick up latent prints from the way it works (it's not a 'swipe' style scanner). But that too will be bypassed - it's the usual arms race.
You would be right with your millions vs. a few incidents (incidentally, also the same argument to put a terror threat into a reasonable perspective) if you consider that not everyone has data worth stealing except for your very identity. So you could say that the height of your presence on the food chain ought to directly correlate with an increased aversion to biometrics..
BTW, as a slight aside, the popping eyeball idea for bypassing biometrics was used in the "Angels and Demons" book by Dan Brown (better known for "The Davinci Code"
Thanks, that was really good :-). I'm still chuckling.
Groan. Here we go again..
I think Toshiba is breaking new ground with this phone and its release is likely to start a trend.
I most certainly hope not, for reasons stated below.
The need for security is actually higher for a mobile handset than for a laptop, as they get lost far more often.
The need for protecting an asset has little to do with the frequency or potential for loss, more with the information that would be lost or compromised (different facets with different ratings) and that is a very personal assessment. The Paris Hilton hack was very dangerous because her Sidekick contained personal numbers for people that have to fight hard as it is to have some sort of private life and security, but a Mr Average phone is not going to hold data of sufficient value to offer up irreplacable body parts for. You can replace a phone, you can replace numbers but you can't replace a cut off finger (given the likely conditions under which the amputation would occur you can give up any hope on re-attachment as well).
And despite the various comments about cutting off fingers and lifting fingerprints, have we seen much of that in the laptop world? No. Will it happen one day? Maybe.
In laptop world the fingerprint scanner is (a) a relative new device and (b) not working so well, so thankfully most people don't use it. Also, most laptops are removed without the users' knowledge because it's often important to have some time before the theft is discovered (in case of targeted theft) and (using Windows) breaking into the unencrypted device is just a matter of booting up from a CD.
Now imagine a world where biometrics are the ONLY way to gain access - at that point you will lose the option to give in under threat and provide a password - your finger WILL be used, with or without you inconveniently attached to it. It can get even worse: with passwords it requires on your collaboration so there's an interest in keeping you alive. With biometrics-only devices an assailant has the wonderful option of killing you first, then using your chopped off digit in the comfort of his own place with a nice cold beer. That's quite a handy option for them because it stops you from becoming a risk later.
So, with implementing biometrics I would ask the Clint Eastwood question: "Do you feel lucky?".
I don't think so. They don't buy "Windows", they buy "a PeeCee" that happens to use the Net and plays some games. Pretty much like not everyone who buys a Skybox is a fully qualified RF engineer - you just want a box that does the job.
:-), ignorance and basic product deficiencies.
Ergo, some of them don't even know they need AV. The good thing is that now virtually all boxes come pre-installed with some anti-virus, but it's still not explained to the end user why they need it (although that starts to improve) so when the short license expires they don't renew.
It's a combination of doom-overload (not the game
All IMHO, of course, but I've seen if often enough. 3 months ago they spent a fortune on a new PC and now it needs money again for some license thingy - no. And presto..
I'm glad you consider yourself as a representative user :-).
I'd agree with you for those who grew up on a command line (hell, I can even remember rubber cup 300 baud modems), but I've seen enough people mass-mail multi-MB powerpoints to staff to know that it's not a universal given that bandwidth won't be affected.
For instance, those who presently download their once-a-minute MS and anti-virus updates from a central corporate server will now do this all online. Securityfocus has already observed that users withj modems no longer stand a chance to keep up with it all so even without doing anything useful you're hitting the Net with a lot of extra usage.
Nope, won't be the same at all IMHO..
I mean, not every end user chooses to be infected, and it's not like it's easy to get a machine secured whilst online before it gets infected. I'm not quite sure that a warhead on the house is the best way to deal with a part of a botnet.
If you really want to take about liability you'll have to start with a company that sells you a car without brakes, thus creating a huge market for brakes, and is now starting to supply the brakes themselves. Whilst still leaving them out of the original car.
Replace car with "Windows" and brakes with "decent security" and all of a sudden they're wonderful and creating shareholder value and carry no liability for their actions whatsoever whilst charging to the hilt for the privilege. Maybe taking decent action against them may help - it's going to be cheaper than bombs unless some White House friends are in need of tax funds again and need some rebuilding projects to camouflage the handouts.
Yes, I'm a cynic. Live with it.
On the side of the marketing team someone could have been smarter and discussed this with police and city hall before they let it loose. Unknown electronic devices without a label on the back stating "it's ours, call this number" was possibly not the brightest idea.
On the side of the police someone could actually have been clever by investigating a device instead of trying to hog news coverage in their eagerness to show how wonderfully they were "protecting the public". Now they look like fools.
In short, neither side has exactly covered itself with glory here.
Actually, on the 'distracting hackers' front you may want to do some digging for Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit (DTK), even just for amusements' sake. AFAIK most people clued up now use LaBrea tar pits because it uses less resources and makes more of a mess at the transgressor end, but Fred came up with the idea of deliberately creating 'vulnerable' services, only they weren't /really/ vulnerable - the hacker wannabee was basically talking to a bunch of scripts pretending to be a flawed service.
The idea was to waste as much hacker time as possible, thus increasing the potential for detection and the assailant moving to another target. Neat idea IMHO.
Ah, the sheer pleasure of running a hose to where it matters bring tears of anticipation (VERY evil grin)
The problem is not software or hardware and how you protect it - it's the end user.
You make a choice here: either you enable self management of the system, which opens the potential for socially engineering a user into doing something they shouldn't, or you close the box tightly and thus incur an administration overhead (which would annul the low costs of any OLPC machine) and/or lose the flexibility. The latter may be feasible with OLPC if you made it fixed purpose (i.e. set loadset with no deviation), but that strikes me as defeating the whole concept.
Look at most trojans and virus infections: they rely on the user doing something stupid, and they do so - with gusto. We got a new admin girl and the first thing she did when she got her machine was complain she couldn't install 'her' programs on it. On inspection she would have made the box a botnet zombie as well as a spam relay, all because the programs were 'cute'.
The same is happening with children. There are plenty of sites luring children with games, whilst surreptitiously probing the box for vulnerabilities through which to install malware - or it's made to look like another game so that the child will install it. And thanks to the carelessness in coding most of the "official" kid games, plenty of parents have set the child up with admin rights because the games won't work otherwise. And those are the ones that had at least the idea of creating separate accounts - plenty of machines just go live as administrator with parents and children just using "the computer".
Go ahead, fix the computer, unless you fix/educate the users at the same time you're still losing the battle.
Wasn't there some code that replaced images in a stream? I recall that being used at some hacker conference, could be entertaining :-). What do you use to firewall?
I'm asking because I'm toying with the idea of setting up something similar, but leave it open for Skype and maybe some sites like the BBC and Dilbert. In my opinion a WiFi port should never give access to an internal network without a VPN layer.
I use QuickOffice on a UIQ 3 interface - any chance of making an OpenOffice version? As ODF is now a standard it would be quite cool to have it supported..
From all I've seen so far it's mislabelled. It's really a DOWNgrade, not an UPgrade :-).
Yes, but the same issue will help MS here too: Vista will be forced down the throat of new users by merit it the pre-install lock-in MS has been allowed to keep despite all these multiple monopoly convictions.
It won't get into my setup, but I have some code that only runs on Windows - not much, but just enough to force me to have a Win XP system around until I have time to set it up under a VM in Linux or migrate to an alternative.
I *love* the text prediction system. It was one of the main motives for me to switch over to OO as I often had to write reports which contained complex technical terms and foreign names. OO starts picking these things up after about the 2nd occurrence which dramatically reduces typos you'd have to correct afterwards (I'm otherwise pretty good apart from strange bits of dyslexia where I type 'teh' a lot instead of 'the' - I wonder if AutoCorrect doesn't actually enforce that problem).
:-).
:-).
Most of the work I did for my former company had to put into Word with incredibly convoluted style automation macros. To me it looked more like the IT department was creating work for themselves as nothing wouldn't have been achievable by just telling people how styles work, but we had to live with it (and the sodding hassle it created when Word got it all mixed up), so I wrote the content first in OO, then pumped it into Word. Even with that extra step it was significantly faster than doing it in Word simply because of the debugging (and I didn't have to battle the template macros
Note that this is different from Autotext - I tend to zap most of the word list as it has an ugly habit of changing things you don't WANT to change. CaPiTaLiSaTiOn is another one - quite a few tech long words use it as component separator and that, of course, doesn't follow the rules MS wants you to follow so it had to go
And there's that other argument (which is why I suspect MS is rather desperate to keep it out of corporate desktops): Outlook, Word and Excel are for quite a few people 'the computer' - Windows is just a path for them to get to that icon on their desktop. If you get them used to OO there's a significantly lower barrier to eventually get them off Windows altogether..
Remember, it's ELECTRONIC ink - that doesn't leak :-).
:-), but the actual energy involved in a refresh is also lower so the overall potential to pick up EM is lower.
In all seriousness, though, I suspect you're right. Not only is the refresh rate of these displays low (so no use for B&W films
However, without anyone testing I would not assume to be right yet. Leave the chicken wire and the tin foil hat in place for now..
I know even telex is still making a tidy mint for some telcos (I think C&W still run a setup, even post Y2K where parts of the infrastructure needed upgrading).
Following that scenario it would give hard disks another two decades or so. Most likely better, smaller, more efficient (a 10MB disk used to be the size of a washing machine), but not yet abandoned..
As I don't know how it precisely works I'd be reluctant to put it on my machines, however useful it looks (usability is a big key in getting an app accepted). Worse, it's only for one narrow OS (WinXP SP2), and it install .Net code. Not very good credentials for security, so I think I'll give this one a miss..
There appears to be quite a disconnect between vision, sales and development at IBM.
:-).
Louis Gerstner performed more or less a miracle by getting these (technically extremely competent) people to actually work a bit together (in a fairly brutal way, read Who says elephants can't dance) but either the visionaries are getting too old at IBM (because new talent cannot reach the top without going native) or there's not enough stewardship from the top to contain the internal strife that holds the company back.
IBM has never had a problem doing good things technically, but I personally feel they wasted a Godawful time on Lotus. The user interface still sucks big time, and it's only saving grace was that it was so awkward it stopped virus infections dead in their tracks (OK, and inter-user crypto is better than MS Exchange because it actually exists
If they had the guts to go Open Source all the way (for example, pick an Open Source replacement for Lotus and put resources behind it) they may do something good. At present it looks like everyone is just using corporate inertia to last a couple more years before it falls apart for good (classic example: looking at turnover instead of turnover trending).
The seniority of a board always plays a big role. I remember fighting an uphill battle in another biggie for a project that, at the time, was revolutionary and I was held back every step of the way by oldies who didn't want to rock the boat running a risk only a few years from their pension (it was, of course, called "not exposing the company to risk", forgetting the adage that "ships are safe in the harbour - but that's not what ships are for"). I only won this battle, btw, because I found one senior person heading for retirement in that club who didn't mind going out with a bang and we thus ended up building something that is still working almost 15 years later - and I left after that because I got sick and tired of having to explain the obvious time and time again.
That company needs help, but their Board will have to see that first. Not sure if they have another visionary around - doesn't look like it. If they can't shake off that corporate dullness at the top they'll die like that too. All IMHO, though, but the signs are all there.
Satellite comms is significantly more expensive than land based fiber and the upkeep of a ship isn't exactly trivial either so I'm not sure the economics of that idea would ever stack up..
Well, I wasn't suggesting *I* would (grin), but the potential exist, which is what makes what the RIAA is doing patently stupid (IMHO, of course). As for checksums - how do people look for a file? AFAIK by name, so the hack would probably start in the naming facility.
Grenade pin, anyone? Only one careful owner..
I've had a long debate with friends if this phone would be a killer or a dud. Without enabling other apps to run the whole debate is IMHO over.
Well done, it IS after all a market first. A NON-smart phone. A duh-phone..