None of these always-on systems track every word you say, because this would run your battery dry in no time. They all have just a low-power minimal voice-recognition in hardware that only recognizes the keywords and only then wake up and hand over control to the SoC itself for what you're actually saying.
Besides, if Big Brother wants to listen to your microphone he can just do that anyway, no need for such tricks. If you don't trust your networked microphone containing device not to listen to you, don't carry it to begin with. This is true for every fucking phone or tablet or computer.
Do you really think "they" would need you to turn the microphone on to listen to you if they want to listen to you? I mean, are you people actually thinking for moment before saying such things? If they want to use phones for audio mass surveillance they would be idiots to have to trick you into turning on the microphone first.
And then? "Damn, he tricked us by disabling Siri! What do we do now?!".
If you're carrying any connected device with a microphone, using voice recognition or not just does not make a trace of a difference anymore.
You mean instead of paying for every update that gets published as a new app because you couldn't charge for updates which meant either a new app or no updates or updates with no money earned.
Selling apps for a buck with free updates forever just doesn't work. Charging a buck a year may work.
I think there are two other points to consider: First, life and even intelligent life does not necessarily mean technology, or technology at an industrial scale. Maybe just THIS is very, very rare, with civilisations going this way separated by enormous gulfs of time and space. And maybe the universe is full of planets with aliens that have some sophisticated culture, but not at an technological scale that would lead to us being able to detect them.
Then there's the bottleneck of how long a species can sustain a lifestyle of full-scale industrial technology. Without forking out into space as soon as they can resources will be depleted very soon and then it's too late. Either that culture will end then or will (have to) become much more efficient and low-key, which again lowers the chances of us detecting anything.
I mean, one very useful aspect of thinking about this is thinking about what is going on here, not there. How long can we sustain this and what do we have to do to sustain it? Maybe we will learn how things tend to go with industrial-scale technological civilisations very quickly, even if too late...
There's an element of truth in that though. Not long ago someone getting some product delivered from China to his doorstep was unthinkable and something even the very rich could hardly afford. Today you can order it without even talking to someone and get it a few days later. It's all about volume and logistics. Hard to see why space should be different in the long run.
Earth has become a very small and limited place. Space is full of raw materials and energy, limitless amounts of them. It's definitely the new frontier and going to other places when the place they were was used up and overpopulated is exactly what people did since millions of years and what caused our species to spread over all the planet. Everyone who thinks that we will be limited to this rock just has no idea.
I thought this until I got a Kindle. Not staring into a lamp and not using a computer while reading is much better. You're reading a book and looking at friendly text and nothing else. Also the battery will be as you left it even days later. E-readers have their merits. Don't scoff at them.
He missed one option (in theory, he fell to it in practice): Human idiots being in control over humans. This is the classical solution to all problems and it has proven to be a big problem. Machines, this we haven't really tried yet.
We may prefer Artificial Intelligence over Natural Stupidity in the end.
No company with pre-orders of this magnitude can or should have cash problems. It's a bit like SpaceX: They have cornered the market for launches in the classes they can launch and are booked for years. This is not money that is already earned but it is the next thing close to that. If you have cash-flow problems in such a situation and if you do not look like a scam getting money for modest interest should be the most easy thing in the world.
But yes, people wanting to buy 200000 cars from them will be bad news for those companies who will NOT sell these 200000 cars then. These will not be additional cars, mostly. Almost all companies in this business apart from Tesla will HATE these numbers.
that BC is perfectly suited to outsource mining into orbit: Energy is cheap there and bitcoins are easily beamed back... A perfect product to manufacture in space. Lol.
Are Apple phones backdoored? I don't know, but what I do know is that the right people with the right gear can pull the keys off any piece of commodity hardware they can physically access and take to their labs.
So why is Mc Nutcase not talking about such things? Perhaps broadcasting the truth and the entire truth is not his primary agenda?
Of course you can pull the hardware encryption key off an iPhone if you invest the effort. Just that this key is just the key for this very iPhone. This does not give you a backdoor to iPhones. Just to this iPhone.
He's speaking the truth in so far that the security culture that the NSA created actually is an insecurity culture. Looking for zero day exploits and them keeping them secret to save them for their own use instead of instantly having the companies fix them means others can find and use them too. Inserting backdoors into widely used software for their own use means others can use them too. Getting a backdoor into Juniper devices fired back badly.
I'm sure some people can condition themselves to suppress their cravings. And if you want to live that way, go right ahead. But eating meat is an instinct inherited through evolution.
Statistically, as a tendency, yes. Categorically, for everyone, no. I know people who never liked meat. They just don't crave meat.
People are generally common, but they're not just all the same.
Well, maybe not this way, but don't you think there should be a way to have websites earn some money so that they can pay people to bring you the content you want to get without having to outright pay them? I mean, either that or you get only websites made by people in their spare time and out of his own pocket (and traffic stops being cheap as soon as lots of people start to like what you do) or websites that are being paid by companies that don't even tell you about it (and then dictate the content too).
Or paywalls, which always have the problem that you have to pay for something you don't know yet if it is worth what you pay for it. Well, or pay them from taxes and let the government serve the content to you for free. Ads are bad, but everything else may be even worse.
Of course individually you can just block the ads while others don't and so pay for your content with their sanity, so you can have your cake and eat it too. I would be quiet about it though since the more people you convince of that being a great idea the worse it will work.
(This does not mean I recommend against ad-blocking, I do it too since many years. We need to put pressure at the industry so it starts to think about handling this better. But just "no ads!!!" isn't going to add much sense to that problem. Can you imagine TV or radio with no ads? Who is paying for this then? The government? Freedom has a price. In Russia advertising has been outlawed for private TV. The people loved it. TV has become a bit one-sided though. The problem isn't ads, it's crappy ads, cheap ads and too many of them and relentless stalking. Ads need to be more expensive so we can have less of them and instead of tracking we need opt-in preferences.)
What adblock should do is blocking ALL ads and all tracking religiously (no exceptions, treat every ad or tracker as a bug to fix) and then instead inject own ads they sell. Limit that to one ad per page (none on pages that had no ads to begin with, on pages with only a single ad let this through), small, no tracking at all, no flash, no video, no sound. Deliver ads to devices based on rough location (as determined by the IP address) and the URL of the page, no more personalisation by tracking. Add an opt-in system with an account where users can voluntarily submit preferences for ads to get more relevant ads if they want to.
This would be revolutionary and could help to beat the online advertising business back on track. It would allow less (but more expensive) ads, more page views for websites, less bandwidth waste, and more honest and meaningful targeting. It would be rather a kind of "page sponsoring" than the firehose approach that we have now, but this doesn't have to be bad, for nobody.
I mean, things like trying to trick users into clicking on an ad by accident or devaluing your advertising by drowning it in a flickering sea of crap does neither help the users nor those who advertise or the websites themselves. Online advertising is being ABUSED and all but some scum companies suffer from it. Both websites and advertisers (that is the companies who want to show ads to people they think they have something to sell to) have to organize against that kind of abuse. Websites need to get much, much more selective about what they allow their content to be framed by and if they can't spend that kind of effort on it they have to outsource it.
And yes, someone has to do something drastic or we will never see things changing here, and everyone will suffer just longer from it. There is no real reason for advertising being a too dirty business, it's what made the press and radio and TV affordable and helped countless businesses to stay in business and customers find companies to buy things from.
You have no idea what the Soviet Union having the first satellite and the first man in orbit meant back then. Yes, the technology was about missiles, but the demonstration was about socialism versus capitalism and it was going to the moon that fixed that for good.
Nowadays you could get the impression that we're trying to win against idiots by out-idioting them. Never works.
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
The dust particles carried by the atmosphere there have the size of particles in cigarette smoke. Calling the atmosphere a "dirty vacuum" describes it quite nicely. You would be able to see a dust storm there and to measure it with instruments, but you wouldn't be able to even feel it.
As far as Science Fiction goes The Martian still is enough science to make the fiction palatable.
So make the EU outlaw asteroid mining... and give it the resources to police space. Good luck.
By the way, this is inevitable in the long run. Either we will die out or we will start to exploit resources in space. Earth is becoming too small for us fast. Space should be big enough for quite a while...
You replace that by preparing products for a virtual Steve you carry in your head. If Apple is an religion it won't die with its prophet. It won't be the same but as Apple's success shows it may still be good enough by a good margin.
But I'm looking forward to that. The car industry is so stuck in its ways that it just needs a healthy shock.
When Apple is planning for a few years still, they may do it right and come with an autonomous car and you won't buy it, you will just rent it when you need to get from A to B. The car itself then may be expensive but this way it may still be cheaper and more convenient (no parking, no caring for anything) than owning a cheaper car. Like a robot chauffeur you can summon to appear out of thin air when you need it. It may end up being not so much a money pit but a money mountain.
Or Apple may totally screw it up, but I have nothing against them trying to get it right.
Of course jailbreaking iOS puts it into some insecure state. Quite literally. Jailbreaking circumvents code signing for all code that runs on the device which means that every bit of code that makes its way onto the phone will happily run now. Also using the repositories means that you will install undocumented binary code from unknown people. Since you don't have the sources there is no way to check what this code does and since whoever wrote that code faces no risk when his code is discovered to be malware there's very little you can do after the fact.
This is less secure than a device that is not jailbroken.
I mean, do what you want to do by all means, but at least try to know what you're doing so you can correctly balance the risks and advantages you get by what you're doing.
We've lost that kind of 'slow down and make sure it's right' attitude that engineers really need to have. In this fast-paced road of cutting costs and letting the marketing group run the show, the pressure to get product out the door as quickly as possible no matter what is unstoppable for software in particular, but really almost anything that is able to be 'patched' later. Making consumers into your beta testers is douche-y enough, but doing it when lives are at stake should be punished as criminal and in an extremely harsh and public way.
As far as I know aerospace software is far away from what you describe. Of course you're right if you say that these things are a reason for problems, but THIS is very well understood and usually software for planes is nothing like a consumer product.
They screwed up, yes, but if they would be "punished as criminal and in an extremely harsh and public way" nobody would ever do anything useful anymore. The problems leading to this crash have to be analyzed and understood and then they have to make sure that the same thing can't happen again.
But of course: If this was due to someone not following procedures or messing around with maintenance this can (and will) have consequences. I'm also pretty sure that one or more people will lose their job over that.
But if you really think you can make shit never happen and things working 100% all the time by "hard punishment" you're just wrong.
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None of these always-on systems track every word you say, because this would run your battery dry in no time. They all have just a low-power minimal voice-recognition in hardware that only recognizes the keywords and only then wake up and hand over control to the SoC itself for what you're actually saying.
Besides, if Big Brother wants to listen to your microphone he can just do that anyway, no need for such tricks. If you don't trust your networked microphone containing device not to listen to you, don't carry it to begin with. This is true for every fucking phone or tablet or computer.
Do you really think "they" would need you to turn the microphone on to listen to you if they want to listen to you? I mean, are you people actually thinking for moment before saying such things? If they want to use phones for audio mass surveillance they would be idiots to have to trick you into turning on the microphone first.
And then? "Damn, he tricked us by disabling Siri! What do we do now?!".
If you're carrying any connected device with a microphone, using voice recognition or not just does not make a trace of a difference anymore.
You mean instead of paying for every update that gets published as a new app because you couldn't charge for updates which meant either a new app or no updates or updates with no money earned.
Selling apps for a buck with free updates forever just doesn't work. Charging a buck a year may work.
I think there are two other points to consider: First, life and even intelligent life does not necessarily mean technology, or technology at an industrial scale. Maybe just THIS is very, very rare, with civilisations going this way separated by enormous gulfs of time and space. And maybe the universe is full of planets with aliens that have some sophisticated culture, but not at an technological scale that would lead to us being able to detect them.
Then there's the bottleneck of how long a species can sustain a lifestyle of full-scale industrial technology. Without forking out into space as soon as they can resources will be depleted very soon and then it's too late. Either that culture will end then or will (have to) become much more efficient and low-key, which again lowers the chances of us detecting anything.
I mean, one very useful aspect of thinking about this is thinking about what is going on here, not there. How long can we sustain this and what do we have to do to sustain it? Maybe we will learn how things tend to go with industrial-scale technological civilisations very quickly, even if too late...
There's an element of truth in that though. Not long ago someone getting some product delivered from China to his doorstep was unthinkable and something even the very rich could hardly afford. Today you can order it without even talking to someone and get it a few days later. It's all about volume and logistics. Hard to see why space should be different in the long run.
Earth has become a very small and limited place. Space is full of raw materials and energy, limitless amounts of them. It's definitely the new frontier and going to other places when the place they were was used up and overpopulated is exactly what people did since millions of years and what caused our species to spread over all the planet. Everyone who thinks that we will be limited to this rock just has no idea.
Look at this if you have a few minutes: http://www.bradshawfoundation....
Petroleum is hydrogen and carbon. Both are abundant in space.
And exactly this is the problem: Education isn't happening. In fact it is more and more treated as a bad thing.
But you're right, education (and equal rights for women, and some social security) has proved to be the best birth control ever.
I thought this until I got a Kindle. Not staring into a lamp and not using a computer while reading is much better. You're reading a book and looking at friendly text and nothing else. Also the battery will be as you left it even days later. E-readers have their merits. Don't scoff at them.
He missed one option (in theory, he fell to it in practice): Human idiots being in control over humans. This is the classical solution to all problems and it has proven to be a big problem. Machines, this we haven't really tried yet.
We may prefer Artificial Intelligence over Natural Stupidity in the end.
No company with pre-orders of this magnitude can or should have cash problems. It's a bit like SpaceX: They have cornered the market for launches in the classes they can launch and are booked for years. This is not money that is already earned but it is the next thing close to that. If you have cash-flow problems in such a situation and if you do not look like a scam getting money for modest interest should be the most easy thing in the world.
But yes, people wanting to buy 200000 cars from them will be bad news for those companies who will NOT sell these 200000 cars then. These will not be additional cars, mostly. Almost all companies in this business apart from Tesla will HATE these numbers.
that BC is perfectly suited to outsource mining into orbit: Energy is cheap there and bitcoins are easily beamed back... A perfect product to manufacture in space. Lol.
Are Apple phones backdoored? I don't know, but what I do know is that the right people with the right gear can pull the keys off any piece of commodity hardware they can physically access and take to their labs.
So why is Mc Nutcase not talking about such things? Perhaps broadcasting the truth and the entire truth is not his primary agenda?
Of course you can pull the hardware encryption key off an iPhone if you invest the effort. Just that this key is just the key for this very iPhone. This does not give you a backdoor to iPhones. Just to this iPhone.
He's speaking the truth in so far that the security culture that the NSA created actually is an insecurity culture. Looking for zero day exploits and them keeping them secret to save them for their own use instead of instantly having the companies fix them means others can find and use them too. Inserting backdoors into widely used software for their own use means others can use them too. Getting a backdoor into Juniper devices fired back badly.
This is not new. Nobody wants to hear it though.
I'm sure some people can condition themselves to suppress their cravings. And if you want to live that way, go right ahead. But eating meat is an instinct inherited through evolution.
Statistically, as a tendency, yes. Categorically, for everyone, no. I know people who never liked meat. They just don't crave meat.
People are generally common, but they're not just all the same.
One could argue that this isn't anti-competitive behaviour but competitive behaviour. Which does not mean I like it, mind you.
Can you buy an Amazon Kindle in Apple stores? If not, is this "anti-competitive behaviour"? I would call it competitive behaviour.
Well, maybe not this way, but don't you think there should be a way to have websites earn some money so that they can pay people to bring you the content you want to get without having to outright pay them? I mean, either that or you get only websites made by people in their spare time and out of his own pocket (and traffic stops being cheap as soon as lots of people start to like what you do) or websites that are being paid by companies that don't even tell you about it (and then dictate the content too).
Or paywalls, which always have the problem that you have to pay for something you don't know yet if it is worth what you pay for it. Well, or pay them from taxes and let the government serve the content to you for free. Ads are bad, but everything else may be even worse.
Of course individually you can just block the ads while others don't and so pay for your content with their sanity, so you can have your cake and eat it too. I would be quiet about it though since the more people you convince of that being a great idea the worse it will work.
(This does not mean I recommend against ad-blocking, I do it too since many years. We need to put pressure at the industry so it starts to think about handling this better. But just "no ads!!!" isn't going to add much sense to that problem. Can you imagine TV or radio with no ads? Who is paying for this then? The government? Freedom has a price. In Russia advertising has been outlawed for private TV. The people loved it. TV has become a bit one-sided though. The problem isn't ads, it's crappy ads, cheap ads and too many of them and relentless stalking. Ads need to be more expensive so we can have less of them and instead of tracking we need opt-in preferences.)
What adblock should do is blocking ALL ads and all tracking religiously (no exceptions, treat every ad or tracker as a bug to fix) and then instead inject own ads they sell. Limit that to one ad per page (none on pages that had no ads to begin with, on pages with only a single ad let this through), small, no tracking at all, no flash, no video, no sound. Deliver ads to devices based on rough location (as determined by the IP address) and the URL of the page, no more personalisation by tracking. Add an opt-in system with an account where users can voluntarily submit preferences for ads to get more relevant ads if they want to.
This would be revolutionary and could help to beat the online advertising business back on track. It would allow less (but more expensive) ads, more page views for websites, less bandwidth waste, and more honest and meaningful targeting. It would be rather a kind of "page sponsoring" than the firehose approach that we have now, but this doesn't have to be bad, for nobody.
I mean, things like trying to trick users into clicking on an ad by accident or devaluing your advertising by drowning it in a flickering sea of crap does neither help the users nor those who advertise or the websites themselves. Online advertising is being ABUSED and all but some scum companies suffer from it. Both websites and advertisers (that is the companies who want to show ads to people they think they have something to sell to) have to organize against that kind of abuse. Websites need to get much, much more selective about what they allow their content to be framed by and if they can't spend that kind of effort on it they have to outsource it.
And yes, someone has to do something drastic or we will never see things changing here, and everyone will suffer just longer from it. There is no real reason for advertising being a too dirty business, it's what made the press and radio and TV affordable and helped countless businesses to stay in business and customers find companies to buy things from.
You have no idea what the Soviet Union having the first satellite and the first man in orbit meant back then. Yes, the technology was about missiles, but the demonstration was about socialism versus capitalism and it was going to the moon that fixed that for good.
Nowadays you could get the impression that we're trying to win against idiots by out-idioting them. Never works.
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
The dust particles carried by the atmosphere there have the size of particles in cigarette smoke. Calling the atmosphere a "dirty vacuum" describes it quite nicely. You would be able to see a dust storm there and to measure it with instruments, but you wouldn't be able to even feel it.
As far as Science Fiction goes The Martian still is enough science to make the fiction palatable.
So make the EU outlaw asteroid mining... and give it the resources to police space. Good luck.
By the way, this is inevitable in the long run. Either we will die out or we will start to exploit resources in space. Earth is becoming too small for us fast. Space should be big enough for quite a while...
You replace that by preparing products for a virtual Steve you carry in your head. If Apple is an religion it won't die with its prophet. It won't be the same but as Apple's success shows it may still be good enough by a good margin.
But I'm looking forward to that. The car industry is so stuck in its ways that it just needs a healthy shock.
When Apple is planning for a few years still, they may do it right and come with an autonomous car and you won't buy it, you will just rent it when you need to get from A to B. The car itself then may be expensive but this way it may still be cheaper and more convenient (no parking, no caring for anything) than owning a cheaper car. Like a robot chauffeur you can summon to appear out of thin air when you need it. It may end up being not so much a money pit but a money mountain.
Or Apple may totally screw it up, but I have nothing against them trying to get it right.
Of course jailbreaking iOS puts it into some insecure state. Quite literally. Jailbreaking circumvents code signing for all code that runs on the device which means that every bit of code that makes its way onto the phone will happily run now. Also using the repositories means that you will install undocumented binary code from unknown people. Since you don't have the sources there is no way to check what this code does and since whoever wrote that code faces no risk when his code is discovered to be malware there's very little you can do after the fact.
This is less secure than a device that is not jailbroken.
I mean, do what you want to do by all means, but at least try to know what you're doing so you can correctly balance the risks and advantages you get by what you're doing.
We've lost that kind of 'slow down and make sure it's right' attitude that engineers really need to have. In this fast-paced road of cutting costs and letting the marketing group run the show, the pressure to get product out the door as quickly as possible no matter what is unstoppable for software in particular, but really almost anything that is able to be 'patched' later. Making consumers into your beta testers is douche-y enough, but doing it when lives are at stake should be punished as criminal and in an extremely harsh and public way.
As far as I know aerospace software is far away from what you describe. Of course you're right if you say that these things are a reason for problems, but THIS is very well understood and usually software for planes is nothing like a consumer product.
They screwed up, yes, but if they would be "punished as criminal and in an extremely harsh and public way" nobody would ever do anything useful anymore. The problems leading to this crash have to be analyzed and understood and then they have to make sure that the same thing can't happen again.
But of course: If this was due to someone not following procedures or messing around with maintenance this can (and will) have consequences. I'm also pretty sure that one or more people will lose their job over that.
But if you really think you can make shit never happen and things working 100% all the time by "hard punishment" you're just wrong.