The issue is not that dark forces will be able to monitor your vehicle without your knowledge, it's that once the capability is common, you simply won't be able to get a license (car or driver) or insurance, without clicking "YES" to ALLOW MONITORING on the contractual EULAs. So you can't object - you agreed to it.
... unless there's a sue-able multi-billion dollar corporation behind it. Even then, big automakers are barely able to afford recalls and liability suits now - a major wrongful death suit from a errant self-driving car will take out a smaller firm or make their insurance impossible to pay.
Same thoughts apply to hardening exploitable code. If it's common to old and new OS and easily fixed (vulnerability is lessened) then it probably should be updated.
The interesting question is: should an OS vendor be able to sell a later generation of OS as "more secure" than a previous one as a feature to induce users to migrate to it, (clearly Microsoft's position on Win 8.1 vs Win 7 ) or does it have a responsibility to make all released product as reasonably secure as it can based on what it knows to and define features as capabilities, performance, etc outside of security? I think it's fair for Microsoft to tout improvements like more secure kernel design or other elements that are core architectural advantages of a new OS (which cannot reasonably be replicated in earlier versions) but limiting fixes to common libraries, present in old and new OS, which have been found to be insecure, that could be patched for minimal effort in the old OS, to create an artificial distinction between old and new is not a security feature difference, it's a churlish forcing function. Win 8.1 is not better on security than Win 7 if the part of that difference depends on selectively responding to vulnerabilities. Ironically, toward the end of it's life, XP got better support than Vista, because a Vista was a short-lived, poorly received follow-on that was quickly succeeded by Win 7. I'll predict that 3 years from now, after Win Next (9.0 or what ever) has been shipping for a while, the install base of Win 7 will still be far higher than that of Win 8.x and support (Microsoft and 3rd party drivers/apps) will be much better for Win 7 than it will be for Win 8.x. No doubt Microsoft will say it's most secure OS at that time will be Win 9.x but if it stopped providing critical patches to the second most popular OS way back in 2014, there's going to be trouble. (Anybody want to bet Microsoft at some point will be providing patches to vulnerabilities in Win 7 that they DON'T bother to do for Win 8.x because no one will care about "Vista-Next" anymore?)
If you ever had a situation where your ISP connection was faster than local routing/networking gear, then you either have some kind of fantastic high bandwidth fiber ISP connection and you've cheaped-out on the quality of your infrastructure gear (very slow equipment) or you have a normal ISP connection and you got REALLY cheap about the quality of your infrastructure gear. (which is almost impossible unless you're using ~10MB stuff from the last century) You internal network wireless/wired should always be much faster than your ISP.
Simple solution: Any serious University with applicants into any science-based degree program should no longer accept Wyoming high school certificates as meaningful and should require applicants from that state to test out to verify that they have a proper background to enter the program. When the climate deniers who run the Wyoming establishment start having their offspring turned away and stigmatized by Ivy League and other prominent schools, watch that curriculum change back to accurate science rather quickly.
.. but I assume questions were given before it occurred. I would have like to have asked RMS, what happened to his assertion hat source code transparency will protect us from very bad code, because many people's eyes are on it. But everybody could look at OpenSSL source for years and see the potential for Heartbleed and it never got caught until it was too late.
The network owner can and should be able to set the terms of service for access to their network and if you don't like a root CA being placed on your system, don't use that network get their own network -that is, a mobile WAN hotspot or adapter assuming these are independently owned devices. Ones owned by the school should be subject to the school's requirements.
I think a) I like the beta, please do it asap b) It's not there yet but keep working on it, but don't turn it on now. c) It's an abomination. Do not use it ever. d) I don't read Slashdot you insensitive clod.
If c) greatly exceeds the sum of a) and b) responses don't do it. All d) votes, for obvious reasons, don't count.
SSD solutions that are far too expensive to be relevant for most individuals or even corporations are nothing new.
You can get an mSATA or M2 small ~32-64GB SSD drive (which many motherboards have direct attach slots for now) for about $60. If you use that as your boot / OS system / critical-app drive and get a slow multi-TB spindle HDD drive for your bulk load-and-save storage you'll get huge improvement in your startup/shutdown times and general system operation while still having cheap mass media. Is that far too expensive?
As Dr FrankNfurter says in RHPS "I didn't build him for YOU!!!" It's amusing whenever new datacenter/server technology gets posted on/. that half the posts evaluate the proposed product in terms of how affordable/practical/useful it would be to them in their little client desktop or notebook. All of these Intel drives are intended for server (or at least technical workstation ) use, so they need to be evaluated by ROI they give a business doing high-throughput work. If you think they have great stats but are too expensive, maybe you are not the intended market.
The hemispheric disaster has not happened yet. But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly. How bad things are after that is still up for debate, but reactor 4 is a clear and present danger.
... when some foreign visitor sends a strongly encrypted message they the Russian authorities find difficult or impossible to decrypt. If this were a typical Russian citizen, this would probably merit a visit from some representative of the authorities who will persuade you that the encryption is a bad idea based on bad consequences if you don't. In the case of the international attendees, one assumes the Russians will not able to do this quite so casually. But they will probably be pretty obsessed with those visitors...
Slashdot technorati will dump all over this, but the only truly open ecosystem in user-purchasable computing available today is x86 from Intel and AMD. All others esp ARM based platforms (except for -albeit interesting- toys like Raspberry Pi) are vertically integrated closed systems that you have to explicitly defeat the original vendors efforts to keep them closed to use in non-approved ways and in many cases (eg Apple IOS devices) are virtually impossible to reload a different OS on. This is deliberate and the anomaly of x86 is a result of a series of happy accidents and mistakes several vendors incl IBM made in created a monster they never wanted but have had to live with because it became such an unslayable monster. Let's hope it lives on so that in 2020 we're not all using closed hardware/software bricks that are totally at the mercy of vendors. (We'll just have to join hobbyist cliques of people who like to work on "vintage computers" from the early part of the century...)
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is not that dark forces will be able to monitor your vehicle without your knowledge, it's that once the capability is common, you simply won't be able to get a license (car or driver) or insurance, without clicking "YES" to ALLOW MONITORING on the contractual EULAs. So you can't object - you agreed to it.
... how can you argue that at all, let alone suggest it has a gender bias?
... unless there's a sue-able multi-billion dollar corporation behind it. Even then, big automakers are barely able to afford recalls and liability suits now - a major wrongful death suit from a errant self-driving car will take out a smaller firm or make their insurance impossible to pay.
Same thoughts apply to hardening exploitable code. If it's common to old and new OS and easily fixed (vulnerability is lessened) then it probably should be updated.
The interesting question is: should an OS vendor be able to sell a later generation of OS as "more secure" than a previous one as a feature to induce users to migrate to it, (clearly Microsoft's position on Win 8.1 vs Win 7 ) or does it have a responsibility to make all released product as reasonably secure as it can based on what it knows to and define features as capabilities, performance, etc outside of security?
I think it's fair for Microsoft to tout improvements like more secure kernel design or other elements that are core architectural advantages of a new OS (which cannot reasonably be replicated in earlier versions) but limiting fixes to common libraries, present in old and new OS, which have been found to be insecure, that could be patched for minimal effort in the old OS, to create an artificial distinction between old and new is not a security feature difference, it's a churlish forcing function. Win 8.1 is not better on security than Win 7 if the part of that difference depends on selectively responding to vulnerabilities.
Ironically, toward the end of it's life, XP got better support than Vista, because a Vista was a short-lived, poorly received follow-on that was quickly succeeded by Win 7. I'll predict that 3 years from now, after Win Next (9.0 or what ever) has been shipping for a while, the install base of Win 7 will still be far higher than that of Win 8.x and support (Microsoft and 3rd party drivers/apps) will be much better for Win 7 than it will be for Win 8.x. No doubt Microsoft will say it's most secure OS at that time will be Win 9.x but if it stopped providing critical patches to the second most popular OS way back in 2014, there's going to be trouble. (Anybody want to bet Microsoft at some point will be providing patches to vulnerabilities in Win 7 that they DON'T bother to do for Win 8.x because no one will care about "Vista-Next" anymore?)
If you ever had a situation where your ISP connection was faster than local routing/networking gear, then you either have some kind of fantastic high bandwidth fiber ISP connection and you've cheaped-out on the quality of your infrastructure gear (very slow equipment) or you have a normal ISP connection and you got REALLY cheap about the quality of your infrastructure gear. (which is almost impossible unless you're using ~10MB stuff from the last century) You internal network wireless/wired should always be much faster than your ISP.
...or monitored mode (where all traffic is spoofed to a Chinese gov't collection site)?
Boy, and I'd always heard it was a lot harder than that to get an unlocked phone
Simple solution: Any serious University with applicants into any science-based degree program should no longer accept Wyoming high school certificates as meaningful and should require applicants from that state to test out to verify that they have a proper background to enter the program. When the climate deniers who run the Wyoming establishment start having their offspring turned away and stigmatized by Ivy League and other prominent schools, watch that curriculum change back to accurate science rather quickly.
.. but I assume questions were given before it occurred. I would have like to have asked RMS, what happened to his assertion hat source code transparency will protect us from very bad code, because many people's eyes are on it. But everybody could look at OpenSSL source for years and see the potential for Heartbleed and it never got caught until it was too late.
In a big storage server, that could amount to few kilos, perhaps
One person's adware / malware is another's vital revenue stream.
The network owner can and should be able to set the terms of service for access to their network and if you don't like a root CA being placed on your system, don't use that network get their own network -that is, a mobile WAN hotspot or adapter assuming these are independently owned devices. Ones owned by the school should be subject to the school's requirements.
I think
a) I like the beta, please do it asap
b) It's not there yet but keep working on it, but don't turn it on now.
c) It's an abomination. Do not use it ever.
d) I don't read Slashdot you insensitive clod.
If c) greatly exceeds the sum of a) and b) responses don't do it. All d) votes, for obvious reasons, don't count.
It's no coincidence they're going to rename it the Chrometer
and Google can't grab information from your Nest, the unit will shutdown your furnace until you get that connection back up.
SSD solutions that are far too expensive to be relevant for most individuals or even corporations are nothing new.
You can get an mSATA or M2 small ~32-64GB SSD drive (which many motherboards have direct attach slots for now) for about $60. If you use that as your boot / OS system / critical-app drive and get a slow multi-TB spindle HDD drive for your bulk load-and-save storage you'll get huge improvement in your startup/shutdown times and general system operation while still having cheap mass media. Is that far too expensive?
As Dr FrankNfurter says in RHPS "I didn't build him for YOU!!!" It's amusing whenever new datacenter/server technology gets posted on /. that half the posts evaluate the proposed product in terms of how affordable/practical/useful it would be to them in their little client desktop or notebook. All of these Intel drives are intended for server (or at least technical workstation ) use, so they need to be evaluated by ROI they give a business doing high-throughput work. If you think they have great stats but are too expensive, maybe you are not the intended market.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Well you can't argue with that, but certainly a whole industry would argue with your assertion.
The hemispheric disaster has not happened yet. But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
How bad things are after that is still up for debate, but reactor 4 is a clear and present danger.
...from becoming a hemispheric disaster..
Even the laughable freeze-the-ground-around-it plan seems to have been hatched to mollify Olympic commission voters who still gave Japan the 2020 games as the 'safe' choice over Istanbul and Madrid.
Do they think they will be cheaper or more capable or exceed Elon Musk's company by any metric in 5 years?
... when some foreign visitor sends a strongly encrypted message they the Russian authorities find difficult or impossible to decrypt. If this were a typical Russian citizen, this would probably merit a visit from some representative of the authorities who will persuade you that the encryption is a bad idea based on bad consequences if you don't. In the case of the international attendees, one assumes the Russians will not able to do this quite so casually. But they will probably be pretty obsessed with those visitors...
Slashdot technorati will dump all over this, but the only truly open ecosystem in user-purchasable computing available today is x86 from Intel and AMD. All others esp ARM based platforms (except for -albeit interesting- toys like Raspberry Pi) are vertically integrated closed systems that you have to explicitly defeat the original vendors efforts to keep them closed to use in non-approved ways and in many cases (eg Apple IOS devices) are virtually impossible to reload a different OS on.
This is deliberate and the anomaly of x86 is a result of a series of happy accidents and mistakes several vendors incl IBM made in created a monster they never wanted but have had to live with because it became such an unslayable monster. Let's hope it lives on so that in 2020 we're not all using closed hardware/software bricks that are totally at the mercy of vendors. (We'll just have to join hobbyist cliques of people who like to work on "vintage computers" from the early part of the century...)
A real city with real people that's doing cutting edge tech not just a bunch of expensive suburbs like the valley, Fantastic cheap place to be.