> Skilled developers will work around this ad push into a users own computer.
You mean only until each and every webpage is encrypted and digitally signed and won't display if any content is altered by an end user via a blob of binary code in every web browser.
The Internet is becoming just like Cable TV or (shudder) late 90s AOL.
Ummm. It's not a "death tax." It is not money that is double taxed. It's a tax against the income your benificiaries receive. You can't give infinite money to your children when you are alive without them paying taxes on it, because it's income to them. Just like game show or lottery winnings. There should be no difference in the transfer of assets to children after you are dead. They should pay taxes on those assets at standard rates without getting a basis adjustment at the time of your death. Which brings the purchase price of all assets their value at your death, rather than the actual price you paid for them.
The term "Death Tax" is a complete lie. It's just a "reduced" income tax to those receiving the assets.
It covers the business models of Apple, Facebook, Google, Linked-In, etc. and IoT makers of how we are all *product* and we can expect our personal data to be treated as expendable. Much like a rancher is not concerned as long as the whole herd is not killed off. Because the companies are not responsible for it in any way. So they also rush vulnerable IoT devices to market, since no user can sue the. It's all outlined in the terms of service.
It's the book I hand to non-techie users, so they get a clue of what is going on.
Spoiler: Facebook appears to be the worst offender.
The solution is bundle publications for a fixed price per month. Texture sells access to about 200 magazines for $10/month on phones and tablets, but not on the web.
Of course, this works much like the much derided Cable TV bundle. Don't think of it as a TV bundle. Think of it as Netflix for newspapers. The monthly costs are spread across enough content that purchasers do not feel ripped off even if they only read a subset of the offerings.
The ISP will respond as China has. By watching, locating and then crippling IP traffic that *they* determine is a VPN traffic.
This will then create an arms race between new VPN protocols and ISPs. But since the ISP controls the access of the VPN to other nodes they can just look for traffic patterns that they've identified as a VPN traffic (which will became a violation of the customers terms of service) and block it or better yet flip a few random bits to make it slow or fail randomly.
When the duopoly makes VPNs a violation of the terms of service unless you pay EXTRA $$$ (Hello Business Customers! Cha Ching!) you'll have to pay EXTRA to be allowed to use a VPN. Oh you, want the VPN to be fast? That will also cost extra.
Deep packet inspection is cheap enough that when tied with contract law the loss of Network Neutrality will allow ISPs who are in Duopoly or Monopoly markets to do what ever they want to those "locked in" customers and the content providers that want access to those customers.
Actually, you don't have a choice to not use Facebook. They and Google track you all over the Internet via various free developer libraries (like Google Fonts and Analytics) and Like and plus buttons.
And your shadow Facebook profile created in colaboration with all YOUR RELATIONS THAT DO USE Facebook makes you just as targetable as Facebook users, except you are even more expensive "product" because you do not use Facebook.
There must be regulation for both ISPs with regional oligopolies and Big Tech TRACKING networks. There is no "Free Market," there never has been. It's a lmyth like Santa Claus told to the gullible.
So when a thief steals an Amazon package from your doorstep. Tears open the package a block away and then finds nothing that can be resold or used by themselves but take it anyway. That's not stealing in your definition?
Nope. Sorry. Better you stick with the "copying is not theft" argument.
Stealing based on the personal value of the theft between owner and thief is still stealing. And the previous property owner is the loser.
Public Service Message: It's the Holiday's!!!! DO NOT have packages delivered to your home. Even if you are there most delivery people will NOT ring the doorbell, so if you live in area with some population density you can kiss those packages goodbye!
Amazon seems to want only deliver to their Lockers now. So their delivery people do not ring doorbells.
So now all the local over-the-air media companies can combine while your local monopoly cable company or telco will be able to only give you *fast* access to their chosen monopolists.
Welcome to FREEDOM! Freedom from choice in local over-the-air media. Where every channel is Clear Channel. And freedom from the choice of a neutral open Internet where access is the same no matter what site you are using. Where instead all your propaganda is provided by the highest bidder.
Welcome to the Cable Televisation of the Internet.
Old books (not connected via monopolist Internet access or over-the-air media) are looking better and better.
Odds are you already have an "always listening microphone" with you right now, your smartphone.
Alexa, Google Home and whatever Microsoft is selling are really just stationary extended beacons for your smartphone likely already has all those features plus it's a complete tagging and tracking system of your whereabouts and what your current interests are.
Home microphone/speaker systems are just a little spackle to fill in one of the few remaining nitches for the surveillance industrial complex.
Most of us now are all simply cows with tracking collars being targeted and milked.
Except most of the harmed never signed any agreement that includes FORCED ARBITRATION in their relations with Equifax, because the harmed are NOT Equifax customers. That means that all effected US citizens who are not Equifax customers CAN sue directly or via class action.
The issue will be showing that you were damaged specifically by Equifax's negligence. They will likely defend themselves via all the reports of the similar losses of the same and similar personal data via other corporations also piss poor security practices.
It will be very hard for any specific individual or class to show losses specific to Equifax. Sure , you may be able to show identity theft and losses because of it, but was that specifically because of Equifax? Good luck proving that.
Equifax certainly does deserve the "Corporate Death Penalty." But there are many ways for them to avoid it, followed by a fresh coat of paint and likely a new name. Just watch....
Today there is no such thing as a responsible corporate citizen. There probably never was.
Arthur Andersen LLP Accounting/Consulting known as "Anderson" at the time of their demise. Once a member of the "Big 5" Accounting firms They surrendered their operating license and certifications after being found criminally liable in the Enron debacle. So in reality they really committed honorable suicide rather than be executed.
Sorry, I did misspell their name in original post.
We can only wish EquiFax would do something similarly honorable for losing 143 milion financial identities. None of their real customers "the banks and credit score relying business" should ever use them again..... but that's unlikely to happen as their "customers" do not care as the damage was not done to them. Only "the product" (you, me and 143 million others) were damaged and that is always a forgivable sin in business as long as the "customer" is not effected.
He's correct when the company does not maintain their Internet facing platform. Which is exactly what Equifax did.
I guess they decided to save money in IT. And perhaps had poorly qualified personnel. Because management doesn't understand IT, so it must be "easy" and something that should be cheap.
Equifax says: "Breaches are a cost of business!" Sorry, non-customer that we lost all of your data and our incompetence will cost you for years to come!!!
Given the vast negative effects of this breach Equifax should be given the "Corporate Death Penalty" like Anderson Accounting. Their continued attempts at 'deflection" will hopefully fail.
Any company that takes this deal has even less control over their data. And you can bet prices will go up up up after Larry has got most of his cows (um... customers?) corralled into the new reinforced pen.
DESQView was pretty crude compared to 1988 Sunview and definitely X11 visually. Also the Sun386i could run CAD/CAM and other graphical DOS programs on the full 19" CRT at resolutions about 4x of a PC of the time.
DOS CAD/CAM software cost about 15% of "real Workstation" versions back then, so that was a definite plus.
I remember SunOS on the Sun386i. It was the first usable x86 based GUI (Sunview) or X Window system way back in 1988 that ran DOS and later Windows 3.x in virtual windows. Back then there was no usable MS Windows or SPARC yet.
When Sun announced SPARC in 1989 and put all their "wood behind a one arrowhead" with Solaris 2 we moved on. Solaris 2 was real POS for the first 7 years.
By the mid-90s there were the various BSDs and stable Linux. It was cheaper/faster/better to use x86 hardware except for corner cases particularly if you where running 7/24 services on the Internet. It was also a lot easier for knowledgeable people to use Open Source and fix it themselves than cry to a vendor in the middle of the night and HOPE they could provide a timely fix. They usually could not.
Once AMD 64-bit x86 chips were available there was no need for SPARC or Solaris for general use cases unless you were locked into the Sun or Oracle ecosystems.
After the Dotcom crash Sun was the walking dead because management couldn't figure out how to re-invent it without pissing off existing locked in customers and thus killing off their existing revenue streams even faster. So they tried a lot of half measures that did little to obtain new hardware customers while old ones slowly migrated away.
Things that use protocols like Z-Wave for home automation are pretty secure. They become insecure when a smart hub interfaces to the Internet usually through a cloud service.
Once SmartThings, Alexa or Google can talks to the devices all bets are off! But a Z-Wave network within a home with a edge router (probably running OpenWRT or LEDE) that accepts credentials inbound from the Internet is pretty hard to breach if properly set up with a VPN.
And there is no cloud. Just client access controlled at the edge.
Of course, that requires some knowledge on the consumer's part. Likely, at the minimum the ability to set up a port forward.
Alas, as a device maker, it's better to sell false security and collect all the meta data. It makes it a lot easier to sell to the Consumers Overlooking Working Security aka "cows."
I know the crackers think of them as "cows" like a cattle owner does. Something to round up, corral and slaughter.
James Burke (creator of the "The Day The Universe Changed") covered a lot of the issues with methane back in a 1990 TV program called "After the Warming:"
which the farming and petroleum industry worked vigorously to discredit because both create or leak large amounts of methane into the environment as side-effects/externalities/pollution of their profit making businesses.
Looking up info on that program now provides more links to FUD spun by industry groups than accurate information. There are errors in this now 27 year old program, but the basic points are sound.
Organizations never want to pay for the externalities, negative side-effects and pollution their activities create. That will have to change or we'll need to get off this planet before we are buried in externalities.
That is not anti-business. That's a call for responsible enterprises that properly resolve the externalities they create.
It's not incompetence by the administrators. They cannot fix a binary blob of vulnerable proprietary code.
24 years after Windows 3.0 with Trumpet tcp/ip stack Windows continues to be the easiest platform to attack successfully. This will not change until Microsoft becomes financially responsible for their poor security design.
I worked at an ISP for many years. We always used open source software, so we could fix issues ourselves. That was a hell of a lot better than waiting on hold for support that likely does not have a solution yet.
While customers using infected MS Windows systems were our #1 support tar pit.
On the Internet, Microsoft Windows is unsafe for any need.
So you think that every road should be a toll road where the owner that road can discriminate on who can use that road or crowd out those that won't pay the latest toll?
The free market does not work where a monopoly, duopoly, or a small oligopoly exists. The players will simply set prices and policies in the same way that gas stations watch each others prices across the street from each other.
This is why utilities are all regulated to prevent the purposeful discrimination and market distortions created by rent seekers seeking maximum advantage.
I've been in the ISP business also. Net Neutrality is a good thing for everyone except the toll road owners.
This story is so old and happens so often that it isn't news. That it continues is very frustrating for anyone who has been in the Internet industry since the Internet became popular around the release of Windows 3.1.
Windows is impossible to secure. I'm sure that if I bother to search a few darker spots of the net I will find current working unpatched Windows "total takeover" exploits.
The only good news appears to be that it used to take years rather than only 9 months for Microsoft to respond with effective patches.
Until Microsoft can be held responsible for the losses associated with using their software none of this will ever change. There is a very good reason that most Internet startups do NOT use Windows on their customer facing servers. It is just not maintainable.
Open source isn't perfectly secure, but at least knowledgeable persons can debug and patch it much, much faster than 9 months.
Microsoft usually ignores or spends a long time fixing severe bugs or design issues which can kill any business dumb enough to adopt Windows even with all kinds of regularly ineffective "3rd party protection."
Apple is better than Microsoft, but still weak in so many areas that it is also a non-starter for Internet facing servers.
Here is a simple test: If you need to add Anti-virus software or added firewalls you are using an insecure operating system unfit for use on the Internet.
The only platform that you can still get the hood open now is Linux. I personally prefer Arch Linux or OpenWRT depending on the hardware and expected use for a project.
But even with Linux you need to choose carefully as vendors work to close even the many products built upon Linux. Just buying hardware with Linux doesn't mean it's open enough to be useful for example: Android as generally sold. AOSP is the exception.
If you want to intro someone to "old skool" look at the Raspberry Pi platform or OpenWRT. NOTE: even those have proprietary components and BLOBs of proprietary binary only code in almost ALL circumstances.
General consumer computers like Windows PCs and Macs are becoming like current cars with less and less access with each new generation. You can work on them yourself less and less. This is driven by both manufacturers wanting more control particularly as advances in CPU power have slowed and government regulations that lock down what were previously tweak-able components like WiFi router hardware.
Right now the most interesting stuff is in "do it yourself" IoT devices. But you better "do it yourself" rather than simply buy it. Otherwise it is likely "ownable" by someone other than you straight out of the box or ALREADY owned by the manufacturer who is spying on you using it. And given that there are no monetary or legal penalties for the complete lack of security this is unlikely to change regardless of various government solicited reports.
Dementia is not just memory loss. It is also cognitive decline, mis-remembering and at times hallucinations.
IoT only works in the "dementia use case" when the patient can remember what to do when a light flashes, the pill door opens or some other device alert occurs. And as the patient declines and there are fewer and fewer "cognitive enough" periods, these systems will not produce the expected reaction from the patient. And after a while (a pretty short while actually) the patient won't know and won't care. After that another human is necessary to make sure things happen at the correct time. This won't change until the smart AI assistant robots arrive.
The promise of the current generation of IoT gadgets like GPS tracking watches, motion/occupancy detectors, remotely controlled door locks, switches that monitor the refrigerator door to automated pill dispensers are only useful during a pretty short transition period between self-care and a locked memory care assisted living campus.
Companies selling these IoT devices for this use case are really selling false hope.
I've seen other posts here that suggest that the afflicted should be allowed to commit suicide. But very few now actually commit suicide before they are already too far gone to be considered legally competent. Because you can't be competent when you can't remember what happened a minute ago.
Dementia patients don't even notice they aren't remembering or thinking properly unless someone or the physical universe points it out. Then the general reaction is likely frustration or anger, because what they think is going on is not.
Look at the documentary on singer Glen Campbell called "Glen Campbell... I'll Be Me." to get an idea of what dementia is like.
Pure Capitalism over time only exacerbates inequality for all but a very few who accumulate the vast majority of capital. And given that "corporations are immortal people" with less liability than real people, capital accumulated by all means fair or foul will simply flow to such entities that never are forced to disperse that capital at death unlike real "people." In addition, multi-national immortal corporations will play arbitrage games with income, finance, currency, futures, derivatives, employment, externalities, and property to maximize their returns across the world by gaming various separately governed regions against each other while propagandizing that they are "making the world better" without ever revealing the real trade-offs and consequences of their deliberate actions to the populations of the regions they operate across or the "shareholders of planet earth"
.
It's more complex than that and a post is inadequate to fully explain all the issues. But capitalism without regulation and checks on accumulation is and will create a guaranteed dystopia of corporate kings, their goons and human serfs given the changes in law that have accelerated since the Reagan Administration.
.
This is what happens when the only responsibility of a corporation is to provide the best return to shareholders and executives.
Slashdot Mirror
> Skilled developers will work around this ad push into a users own computer.
You mean only until each and every webpage is encrypted and digitally signed and won't display if any content is altered by an end user via a blob of binary code in every web browser.
The Internet is becoming just like Cable TV or (shudder) late 90s AOL.
Ummm. It's not a "death tax." It is not money that is double taxed. It's a tax against the income your benificiaries receive. You can't give infinite money to your children when you are alive without them paying taxes on it, because it's income to them. Just like game show or lottery winnings. There should be no difference in the transfer of assets to children after you are dead. They should pay taxes on those assets at standard rates without getting a basis adjustment at the time of your death. Which brings the purchase price of all assets their value at your death, rather than the actual price you paid for them.
The term "Death Tax" is a complete lie. It's just a "reduced" income tax to those receiving the assets.
There is now a slightly old book out there called:
Future Crimes: Everything is Connected. Everyone is Vulnerable.
https://www.amazon.com/Marc-Go...
It covers the business models of Apple, Facebook, Google, Linked-In, etc. and IoT makers of how we are all *product* and we can expect our personal data to be treated as expendable. Much like a rancher is not concerned as long as the whole herd is not killed off. Because the companies are not responsible for it in any way. So they also rush vulnerable IoT devices to market, since no user can sue the. It's all outlined in the terms of service.
It's the book I hand to non-techie users, so they get a clue of what is going on.
Spoiler: Facebook appears to be the worst offender.
The solution is bundle publications for a fixed price per month. Texture sells access to about 200 magazines for $10/month on phones and tablets, but not on the web.
See:
https://www.texture.com/
Of course, this works much like the much derided Cable TV bundle. Don't think of it as a TV bundle. Think of it as Netflix for newspapers. The monthly costs are spread across enough content that purchasers do not feel ripped off even if they only read a subset of the offerings.
Here is the list of magazines Texture offers:
https://www.texture.com/all-ti...
Texture magazines are somewhat searchable. There are highlights and even some daily news.
What we don't know with Texture is how all the various publishers are being compensated from the monthly subscriptions fees readers are providing.
I won't pay $2 for a magazine on Google, but I will pay $10/month for access to over 200 magazines. It keeps the rest of family happy too.
The ISP will respond as China has. By watching, locating and then crippling IP traffic that *they* determine is a VPN traffic.
This will then create an arms race between new VPN protocols and ISPs. But since the ISP controls the access of the VPN to other nodes they can just look for traffic patterns that they've identified as a VPN traffic (which will became a violation of the customers terms of service) and block it or better yet flip a few random bits to make it slow or fail randomly.
When the duopoly makes VPNs a violation of the terms of service unless you pay EXTRA $$$ (Hello Business Customers! Cha Ching!) you'll have to pay EXTRA to be allowed to use a VPN. Oh you, want the VPN to be fast? That will also cost extra.
Deep packet inspection is cheap enough that when tied with contract law the loss of Network Neutrality will allow ISPs who are in Duopoly or Monopoly markets to do what ever they want to those "locked in" customers and the content providers that want access to those customers.
Actually, you don't have a choice to not use Facebook. They and Google track you all over the Internet via various free developer libraries (like Google Fonts and Analytics) and Like and plus buttons.
And your shadow Facebook profile created in colaboration with all YOUR RELATIONS THAT DO USE Facebook makes you just as targetable as Facebook users, except you are even more expensive "product" because you do not use Facebook.
There must be regulation for both ISPs with regional oligopolies and Big Tech TRACKING networks. There is no "Free Market," there never has been. It's a lmyth like Santa Claus told to the gullible.
So when a thief steals an Amazon package from your doorstep. Tears open the package a block away and then finds nothing that can be resold or used by themselves but take it anyway. That's not stealing in your definition?
Nope. Sorry. Better you stick with the "copying is not theft" argument.
Stealing based on the personal value of the theft between owner and thief is still stealing. And the previous property owner is the loser.
Public Service Message: It's the Holiday's!!!! DO NOT have packages delivered to your home. Even if you are there most delivery people will NOT ring the doorbell, so if you live in area with some population density you can kiss those packages goodbye!
Amazon seems to want only deliver to their Lockers now. So their delivery people do not ring doorbells.
So now all the local over-the-air media companies can combine while your local monopoly cable company or telco will be able to only give you *fast* access to their chosen monopolists.
Welcome to FREEDOM! Freedom from choice in local over-the-air media. Where every channel is Clear Channel. And freedom from the choice of a neutral open Internet where access is the same no matter what site you are using. Where instead all your propaganda is provided by the highest bidder.
Welcome to the Cable Televisation of the Internet.
Old books (not connected via monopolist Internet access or over-the-air media) are looking better and better.
Odds are you already have an "always listening microphone" with you right now, your smartphone.
Alexa, Google Home and whatever Microsoft is selling are really just stationary extended beacons for your smartphone likely already has all those features plus it's a complete tagging and tracking system of your whereabouts and what your current interests are.
Home microphone/speaker systems are just a little spackle to fill in one of the few remaining nitches for the surveillance industrial complex.
Most of us now are all simply cows with tracking collars being targeted and milked.
Except most of the harmed never signed any agreement that includes FORCED ARBITRATION in their relations with Equifax, because the harmed are NOT Equifax customers. That means that all effected US citizens who are not Equifax customers CAN sue directly or via class action.
The issue will be showing that you were damaged specifically by Equifax's negligence. They will likely defend themselves via all the reports of the similar losses of the same and similar personal data via other corporations also piss poor security practices.
It will be very hard for any specific individual or class to show losses specific to Equifax. Sure , you may be able to show identity theft and losses because of it, but was that specifically because of Equifax? Good luck proving that.
Equifax certainly does deserve the "Corporate Death Penalty." But there are many ways for them to avoid it, followed by a fresh coat of paint and likely a new name. Just watch....
Today there is no such thing as a responsible corporate citizen. There probably never was.
Arthur Andersen LLP Accounting/Consulting known as "Anderson" at the time of their demise. Once a member of the "Big 5" Accounting firms They surrendered their operating license and certifications after being found criminally liable in the Enron debacle. So in reality they really committed honorable suicide rather than be executed.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sorry, I did misspell their name in original post.
We can only wish EquiFax would do something similarly honorable for losing 143 milion financial identities. None of their real customers "the banks and credit score relying business" should ever use them again..... but that's unlikely to happen as their "customers" do not care as the damage was not done to them. Only "the product" (you, me and 143 million others) were damaged and that is always a forgivable sin in business as long as the "customer" is not effected.
A single word makes all the difference.
He's correct when the company does not maintain their Internet facing platform. Which is exactly what Equifax did.
I guess they decided to save money in IT. And perhaps had poorly qualified personnel. Because management doesn't understand IT, so it must be "easy" and something that should be cheap.
Equifax says: "Breaches are a cost of business!" Sorry, non-customer that we lost all of your data and our incompetence will cost you for years to come!!!
Given the vast negative effects of this breach Equifax should be given the "Corporate Death Penalty" like Anderson Accounting. Their continued attempts at 'deflection" will hopefully fail.
Yes, sir... may I please have another?
Any company that takes this deal has even less control over their data. And you can bet prices will go up up up after Larry has got most of his cows (um... customers?) corralled into the new reinforced pen.
DESQView was pretty crude compared to 1988 Sunview and definitely X11 visually. Also the Sun386i could run CAD/CAM and other graphical DOS programs on the full 19" CRT at resolutions about 4x of a PC of the time.
DOS CAD/CAM software cost about 15% of "real Workstation" versions back then, so that was a definite plus.
They also made great trader workstations.
I remember SunOS on the Sun386i. It was the first usable x86 based GUI (Sunview) or X Window system way back in 1988 that ran DOS and later Windows 3.x in virtual windows. Back then there was no usable MS Windows or SPARC yet.
When Sun announced SPARC in 1989 and put all their "wood behind a one arrowhead" with Solaris 2 we moved on. Solaris 2 was real POS for the first 7 years.
By the mid-90s there were the various BSDs and stable Linux. It was cheaper/faster/better to use x86 hardware except for corner cases particularly if you where running 7/24 services on the Internet. It was also a lot easier for knowledgeable people to use Open Source and fix it themselves than cry to a vendor in the middle of the night and HOPE they could provide a timely fix. They usually could not.
Once AMD 64-bit x86 chips were available there was no need for SPARC or Solaris for general use cases unless you were locked into the Sun or Oracle ecosystems.
After the Dotcom crash Sun was the walking dead because management couldn't figure out how to re-invent it without pissing off existing locked in customers and thus killing off their existing revenue streams even faster. So they tried a lot of half measures that did little to obtain new hardware customers while old ones slowly migrated away.
Things that use protocols like Z-Wave for home automation are pretty secure. They become insecure when a smart hub interfaces to the Internet usually through a cloud service.
Once SmartThings, Alexa or Google can talks to the devices all bets are off! But a Z-Wave network within a home with a edge router (probably running OpenWRT or LEDE) that accepts credentials inbound from the Internet is pretty hard to breach if properly set up with a VPN.
And there is no cloud. Just client access controlled at the edge.
Of course, that requires some knowledge on the consumer's part. Likely, at the minimum the ability to set up a port forward.
Alas, as a device maker, it's better to sell false security and collect all the meta data. It makes it a lot easier to sell to the Consumers Overlooking Working Security aka "cows."
I know the crackers think of them as "cows" like a cattle owner does. Something to round up, corral and slaughter.
Socalizing with other human beings is what Facebook and Tinder are for. ;-)
James Burke (creator of the "The Day The Universe Changed") covered a lot of the issues with methane back in a 1990 TV program called "After the Warming:"
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11...
which the farming and petroleum industry worked vigorously to discredit because both create or leak large amounts of methane into the environment as side-effects/externalities/pollution of their profit making businesses.
Looking up info on that program now provides more links to FUD spun by industry groups than accurate information. There are errors in this now 27 year old program, but the basic points are sound.
Organizations never want to pay for the externalities, negative side-effects and pollution their activities create. That will have to change or we'll need to get off this planet before we are buried in externalities.
That is not anti-business. That's a call for responsible enterprises that properly resolve the externalities they create.
Windows is not safely usable on the Internet.
It's not incompetence by the administrators. They cannot fix a binary blob of vulnerable proprietary code.
24 years after Windows 3.0 with Trumpet tcp/ip stack Windows continues to be the easiest platform to attack successfully. This will not change until Microsoft becomes financially responsible for their poor security design.
I worked at an ISP for many years. We always used open source software, so we could fix issues ourselves. That was a hell of a lot better than waiting on hold for support that likely does not have a solution yet.
While customers using infected MS Windows systems were our #1 support tar pit.
On the Internet, Microsoft Windows is unsafe for any need.
Honey Pots are pretty much your only defense if MS Windows is being used. It's not an issue of whether it will be cracked, it will.
This security team used the most effective countermeasures given that the base operating system their organizaton was using is unsecurable.
So you think that every road should be a toll road where the owner that road can discriminate on who can use that road or crowd out those that won't pay the latest toll?
The free market does not work where a monopoly, duopoly, or a small oligopoly exists. The players will simply set prices and policies in the same way that gas stations watch each others prices across the street from each other.
This is why utilities are all regulated to prevent the purposeful discrimination and market distortions created by rent seekers seeking maximum advantage.
I've been in the ISP business also. Net Neutrality is a good thing for everyone except the toll road owners.
This story is so old and happens so often that it isn't news. That it continues is very frustrating for anyone who has been in the Internet industry since the Internet became popular around the release of Windows 3.1.
Windows is impossible to secure. I'm sure that if I bother to search a few darker spots of the net I will find current working unpatched Windows "total takeover" exploits.
The only good news appears to be that it used to take years rather than only 9 months for Microsoft to respond with effective patches.
Until Microsoft can be held responsible for the losses associated with using their software none of this will ever change. There is a very good reason that most Internet startups do NOT use Windows on their customer facing servers. It is just not maintainable.
Open source isn't perfectly secure, but at least knowledgeable persons can debug and patch it much, much faster than 9 months.
Microsoft usually ignores or spends a long time fixing severe bugs or design issues which can kill any business dumb enough to adopt Windows even with all kinds of regularly ineffective "3rd party protection."
Apple is better than Microsoft, but still weak in so many areas that it is also a non-starter for Internet facing servers.
Here is a simple test: If you need to add Anti-virus software or added firewalls you are using an insecure operating system unfit for use on the Internet.
The only platform that you can still get the hood open now is Linux. I personally prefer Arch Linux or OpenWRT depending on the hardware and expected use for a project.
But even with Linux you need to choose carefully as vendors work to close even the many products built upon Linux. Just buying hardware with Linux doesn't mean it's open enough to be useful for example: Android as generally sold. AOSP is the exception.
If you want to intro someone to "old skool" look at the Raspberry Pi platform or OpenWRT. NOTE: even those have proprietary components and BLOBs of proprietary binary only code in almost ALL circumstances.
General consumer computers like Windows PCs and Macs are becoming like current cars with less and less access with each new generation. You can work on them yourself less and less. This is driven by both manufacturers wanting more control particularly as advances in CPU power have slowed and government regulations that lock down what were previously tweak-able components like WiFi router hardware.
Right now the most interesting stuff is in "do it yourself" IoT devices. But you better "do it yourself" rather than simply buy it. Otherwise it is likely "ownable" by someone other than you straight out of the box or ALREADY owned by the manufacturer who is spying on you using it. And given that there are no monetary or legal penalties for the complete lack of security this is unlikely to change regardless of various government solicited reports.
Dementia is not just memory loss. It is also cognitive decline, mis-remembering and at times hallucinations.
IoT only works in the "dementia use case" when the patient can remember what to do when a light flashes, the pill door opens or some other device alert occurs. And as the patient declines and there are fewer and fewer "cognitive enough" periods, these systems will not produce the expected reaction from the patient. And after a while (a pretty short while actually) the patient won't know and won't care. After that another human is necessary to make sure things happen at the correct time. This won't change until the smart AI assistant robots arrive.
The promise of the current generation of IoT gadgets like GPS tracking watches, motion/occupancy detectors, remotely controlled door locks, switches that monitor the refrigerator door to automated pill dispensers are only useful during a pretty short transition period between self-care and a locked memory care assisted living campus.
Companies selling these IoT devices for this use case are really selling false hope.
I've seen other posts here that suggest that the afflicted should be allowed to commit suicide. But very few now actually commit suicide before they are already too far gone to be considered legally competent. Because you can't be competent when you can't remember what happened a minute ago.
Dementia patients don't even notice they aren't remembering or thinking properly unless someone or the physical universe points it out. Then the general reaction is likely frustration or anger, because what they think is going on is not.
Look at the documentary on singer Glen Campbell called "Glen Campbell... I'll Be Me." to get an idea of what dementia is like.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com...
And while watching think about how applicable IoT is to him.
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It's more complex than that and a post is inadequate to fully explain all the issues. But capitalism without regulation and checks on accumulation is and will create a guaranteed dystopia of corporate kings, their goons and human serfs given the changes in law that have accelerated since the Reagan Administration.
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This is what happens when the only responsibility of a corporation is to provide the best return to shareholders and executives.