17 years ago, the Internet was a very different place, Slashdot hadn't been sold off nearly as many times, 6-digit uids were almost unheard of, and there was actually some kind of geek culture around here that influenced others.
And all I remember of the 9-11 coverage on Slashdot was thinking "Oh, for fuck's sake, if I wanted that, I'd go on a news site or research it myself, I want to read about SOMETHING ELSE" like I always did on Slashdot - the stuff nobody else thought important, posted about, was niche to my interests, etc.
I never understood why a website with a prescribed niche should jump on a current news story that everyone else is covering, using the same links everyone else was - it was literally to get more page-views.
When shit like that happens, after I've read the initial reports, I split my reading between "Hey, new update on that news story" and "Holy fuck, can someone just talk about ANYTHING else because this is pissing me off that we're giving it so much attention and everywhere I turn we're talking about it again".
The one before that was Princess Diana dying (for UK users... fuck that was impossible to avoid for about 9 months).
Hint: 17 years on and you're still talking about 9-11. Who won their permanent fame through that, irreparably harming the reputation of security services and military (it took you HOW long to find him when the whole world was looking for him?), and permanently inscribing fear of terrorism into every policy, procedure, rulebook, law, emergency scenario, panic, and rumour? And how? By people not shutting up about it and giving them their intention.
Here's how I would have liked a civilised country to respond to such things via headlines:
- Terrorist act on WTC. - Other news. - Other news. - Ten years of other news. - Terrorist responsible for WTC attacks killed. - Other news. - Other news.
Precisely because of places like Slashdot responding as they did, for as long as they did, and constantly re-invoking the demons, we have the world we live in today. I'm not at all sure that's a good thing given that terrorism is hardly new.
I have to say... I haven't yet seen a single Apple design feature that I actually like. Apple aren't "design". They're "designer". That is, they're all mouth, charge big money, for something basic or impractical or just stupid.
Design is about function just as much as it is about aesthetics and I can't find a single Apple feature, gadget, hardware or accessory that... well, functions better than anything else. Sometimes it's even hard to point out something *satisfactory*. Even the boxes things are packaged in drive me mad (who in their right mind makes a trapezoidal box for a large expensive flat item that only tessellates if you turn half of them upside-down?)
And, yes, I manage hundreds of Apple devices as part of my job (not my choice, I made the disclaimer when I took them over that I thought it was a big mistake of theirs, they realised it themselves within a matter of a year and are now backpedalling and moving AWAY from everything Apple).
Honestly, I can't find a single feature on an Apple device -
software or hardware - that I thought "that's pretty cool" when I first saw it. Nothing. Power buttons are un-feelable and yet on the rear of the devices, the stupid keyboards, the horrible mice, the packaging, the cabling, the layout for phone and tablet screens, no batteries, no expansion capability, everything about them just annoys me.
Even their "design" book where they show off Apple design? It's a white cover with a white spine with white writing on it so you can't read what it is when it's sitting on a bookshelf in normal lighting.
They are "designer", not "design", which means you're paying through the nose for shite, rather than have moments of "wow, look at that, isn't that cool how that pulls out, works, joins to this, has been put together, etc. and still works really well".
You seem overly confident that they are just intercepting unencrypted DNS queries to replace them with an internal IP, rather than... well... just blocking anything to anything other than the internal IPs.
I don't know what shit networks you've been on, but on anything I've ever used with public-facing Wifi, DNS tricks will do nothing like you suggest.
Literally, you get firewalled down to the internal IP address ranges and redirected to them constantly, until you pay/sign up/log in, when you then have Internet access.
If you're being portalled, but can access any IP outside the portal's IP range, then they're doing something drastically wrong that just about every Wifi manufacturer does right without even bothering to try (e.g. everything from home router's guest networks, those "free Wifi for other customers of the same network" deals, public Wifi in cafes, shops, schools, landmarks, etc.)
Gosh if only this website was full of people who could operate a search engine, using a single, easily-copied keyword to discover the answer.
It's Google's home video-streaming device. Press Chromecast button in compatible app, it finds Chromecast devices on your wireless network, which show the content out over their HDMI.
Why would you take money from someone that you have literally zero information on if you then handing over a valuable product of your own in exchange?
Especially when any fraudulent / stolen money will just be sucked out of your account with no explanation without any way for you to know where it came from? Whether that's a Bitcoin double-spend or a bank anti-fraud measure, it makes no difference.
Cashless is not only practical (I live as-close-as-dammit to cashless as it's possible to be, and cash plays such a little part in my life that it's consigned to a jar of coins in my house and a small cache of coins in the car... one just a dumping ground used for "anything" to get rid of it, and the other for paying parking - I'd PAY people the former to get rid of the latter so I could park and pay without needing cash.) it's much more sensible.
In the UK, we have things like PingIt, which is a bank account with a unique number just for it, which sort-of ties to a mobile phone number (but there are other checks). I can PingIt to buy everything from Bitcoin to paying my tax to shopping online, including giving a friend a tenner or a random third-party on a sales site some manner of payment. We just need to know each other's phone numbers. Paypal has something similar.
And though they won't "find me" just by that information alone (they would literally have nothing more than my mobile phone number), there's a trail the police could follow so other people DO accept it as payment, which they wouldn't your anonymised currency.
Think of this: You sell, say, a car. Some guy "pays you". He takes the car. You get a note from the bank the next morning that the money is not yours so they took it back. Or the Bitcoin forked at the wrong time and your transaction wasn't real. What do you do? Do you ever accept that payment method ever again? I'm guessing no. You just lost your car because of it, and that'll be sold four more times in similar dodgy transactions before it's ever picked up on a camera. No different to being paid in fake-notes.
At least if you have SOMETHING to tell police, who have a way to trace back, they might be able to do something about it. And if it's "official", then you have a way to prove losses / damages in court, which will be recognised as such.
Cashless is sensible. Anonymous cash really is not. Unless... quite literally... you don't want to be able to trace fraud, ever.
And most of the population of the developed world are majority-cashless already. Even developing nations have such things. It just makes much more sense. Not perfect, by any means. Open to abuse by dictatorial governments, of course. But anonymous cash systems are vulnerable to a lot simpler, more common, and a lot more prevalent crimes than "government stealing / tracing all my money" which you have no real defence against anyway - if they want to do that, they have a billion options to do just that that don't care what technology you used.
P.S. I have bought things from random-people on the Internet for the last 25 years and most of it wasn't cash. Everything from eBay to Gumtree, paying friends for meals to donating to artists in the street, using Paypal, PingIt and even Bitcoin. And any number of similar services. I haven't used a cheque in decades (and I was mostly paid in them at one point).
I currently have ZERO coins or notes in my wallet.
Nobody cares about your use-cases, because they are catered-for, or not an issue. But everyone would care about your use-cases in your "ideal" anonymised world. Because then you would have NO WAY to trust the other people paying you, ever, and it would be a minefield of fraud to sell anything.
I waited 30 years after reading, as a kid, that all the future money would be "credits" on some central account, accessible at a tap by authorised people. Every comic book, sci-fi movie, future-prediction TV science show, everything.
Finally it's here and people are whining. Now, yes, ideally it would be zero-fee and not run by two major corporations (American Express hardly counts outside of America, I've literally never seen anyone use one), but pre-pay credit cards are so cheap as to be cheaper than banking rates for personal customers nowadays (free bank accounts are rapidly becoming a thing of the past and never let you do all the useful stuff anyway).
Now, finally, we don't have to carry little tokens that are produced at great expense, and copied en-masse, to represent things that don't actually exist. We can just go straight to using a number that's traceable, accountable, recordable, etc. Whether the bank has all its gold stolen or not I really don't care. My account says so-much-money and that's what I want back, guaranteed by law in my country.
And it saves me having to carry change, get the right note, update all my coins every 10 years when they change the designs (in my country in the last 10 years they've changed the 10-pound, 5-pound notes and the 1 pound coin at least and that 10 years might even encompass the 2 pound coin, I forget).
To be honest, cash has been dead to me for a while.
I have a wallet with cards in. I have backup cards. I have pre-payment cards. And I can buy pre-loaded cards in minutes using anything from Bitcoin to Amazon vouchers.
I have a handful of high-value coins in the car to pay for parking (because we STILL haven't worked out how to pay for parking in my country - either convoluted, per-car-park SMS-based pissing about, or cash! Where are the card-readers? Where's the national chain? Where's the "pay-by-Oyster"? Useless people!) and to put a coin into shopping trolleys that are locked together.
Everything else... if it's notes I spend it as soon as I can or bank it if it's a lot. For coins, I stick them in a jar which my friends and I use for lunch or whatever else we need it for.
It's about time we just ditched the concept of cash entirely. There is no redeeming feature of it that isn't vastly outweighed by the cost of making and handling it.
Allow me to provide you an answer using intelligence including reasoning which any current AI would be impossible to answer in the same manner.
The dress is blue/black. Simple colour measurements on the original image determine this quite conclusively as does the purchaser and manufacturers of the dress.
However, depending on the individual perception of the detection devices in question, and their associated processing of nearby stripy colours, some people perceive it as one, other or both of the above depending on the time given and whether they've "heard" that it's a particular colour dress in advance.
Equally, some colour-blind people will see entirely different colour combinations in the same image, which is not perfectly representative of the original dress anyway given that it's effectively a false-colour reproduction made on a cheap smartphone CCD.
The day an AI can return "Answer A, Answer A&B, and Answer Z which you forgot to list in the possibilities", and reason their way through it, you can say we have AI.
Artificial intelligence isn't like natural intelligence at all.
Natural STUPIDITY, yes.
Nobody with a brain believes that a bankrupt businessman or politician is capable of telling the truth, and certainly not when they're making promises that don't affect themselves one bit.
To be honest, my bugbear is taht AI was always a misnomer, because it's not intelligent at all, precisely because of things like this. There is no line of thinking that leads it to believe that a 3D turtle is a rifle - if you asked it to tell you WHY it was a rifle, and it could pick out features on the image that look like a rifle from a certain angle, yes, you could claim it was intelligent. But it can't do that. It's all just random junk and statistics, with heuristic (human-written) rules governing it. And the scariest bit - the attackers probably have more understanding how it interprets data than the people who created it.
It's not intelligence to act without being able to provide reasoning. Trump-supporters and AI both have that inability in common.
It is, of course, the age-old archaelogical question - should we learn now and disturb things, leave it alone so we can learn in the future? There are entire sciences that handle that every single day.
To be honest, I don't think you have to be as careful as you make out. A flash drive in the 50's would have been perfectly readable, especially if someone KNEW that it was fragile / one-of-a-kind. It wouldn't take much to determine power lines, and some suitable minimum power necessary to make it operate. From there, the BIG problem would really be speaking to it quickly enough. Your oscilloscopes would show the data being sent but it would be hard to talk back at the same kind of data rates with older technology.
The only "amazing" thing to not understand would be the compactness, the arrangement, the low-power requirements, etc. i.e. how was it actually made, not what does it do / what does it hold / how do we talk to it.
Ignoring the absolute bollocks that the story is anyway, alien devices could easily be studied safely, so long as we knew to take care. Scans, and tests, and microscopes, and all kinds of things could be deployed without affecting the function of pretty much anything we encountered (sure, there might be an alien tech that doesn't take kindly to X-Rays or something, but they would have to compensate for that in their own handling so it would be quite obvious that it WAS being shielded, etc. presumably).
What wouldn't be understood is how they were made, the communication protocols involved, and what kind of device it was (who in the 50's would suspect that a USB stick was a data storage device?).
But you wouldn't have to break much at all, and what you did break would literally be "sample-size" portions for your own understanding.
Nobody with a brain is just going to plug shit in without seeing what it would do first. Especially not if it belonged to another civilisation and has any remote chance of being considered "military" (why are aliens ALWAYS just "random strangers" and not military scouting parties? I'd personally expect any first-landers to be just as heavily militarised as you would expect to land on a strange planet of unknown beings without any fear of reprisal for doing so - and that would mean tech that they couldn't steal from you and use against you too).
Nobody really cares about the logging, so long as there's an option to have "normal" logging if that's what you want.
But the logging has almost nothing to do with NOT NEEDING to use the logs. The problems mentioned with systemd are not "I couldn't find a line that dovecot was saying" but services literally not starting up, boots not completing, and even things like random variations on that (which is worse than not booting at all).
I've seen such things in the wild, and even had them happen on simple systemd package upgrades, or changing the underlying hardware of the machine resulting in non-boots (which in this day and age is just wrong... it should at least still boot to a point you can fix it even if there's some storage or something it doesn't recognise). It's not unheard of to just start booting and get a black screen and nothing else after the bootloader, etc.
We're not concerned about "when it works". Then, we don't have a problem. We're concerned about fixing "when it doesn't". Where moving / sending the logs to a machine that can then read them, only to find that they aren't that helpful, is a lot of faff.
It's 20+ years behind in some areas and nowhere near being any kind of replacement for anything.
The domain stuff... literally years away for any level of completeness or reliability despite being "worked on" since 2009 and before then. Hell, you can only just about trust Samba to run as a secondary. I wouldn't want to be in charge of a Samba-only AD tree (which still needs Windows tools to manage it!). And then you may as well just use Samba and the various OS clients that let you integrate to the AD tree for authentication anyway, and who cares what OS it's on?
ReactOS is nothing more than a toy, you couldn't do anything serious with it, and you couldn't even use it as a desktop replacement even if you were willing to make all kinds of compromises.
There's no way that people are going to look at Windows 10 and ReactOS and decide to run ReactOS instead. It would be less hassle just to move everything to Raspberry Pi, that's how incomplete things are.
ReactOS needed huge amounts of development over 10 years ago, it's not received it in the meantime. Even Wine is pretty much dead in practical terms, and yet that's had tons more developer time spent on it, and nobody would use either in earnest or in preference to just running a different OS entirely.
FreeDOS was a success, but it took 25 years to get the equivalent of DOS up and running and it's still an incredibly niche product - nobody is going to be running DOS as an OS like they used to, not in this day and age. BIOS-reset disks to make closed-source firmware update tools not require an MS-DOS licence? Sure. Desktop OS again? Never.
ReactOS is a much more complex task and hasn't come anywhere near close, and is suffering an even worse fate because of that.
If you could have had the current state of ReactOS, back when Windows 2000 was appearing, then you might have had the impetus to compete and make it viable. Coming to this point 20 years too late means that they can never do anything but play catch-up. It's a toy, an "emulation" almost, a niche OS. It's never going to be able to do anything useful, certainly not to mainstream computer users.
Hell, it doesn't even have full Win16/Win32 compatibility yet, and they are already dead and buried for the most part.
People's time would be better spent either running "real" Windows in a VM (and hence development effort into QEmu, Xen, etc.) or moving whatever ancient-Windows-thing they want to use to something else entirely.
As far as I see, ReactOS is like making a Win3.1/WinNT emulator, even if that's not technically accurate. And Wine does a much better job of that (and that's even less technically accurate). And the uses of such are vanishingly small anyway.
If you want a non-Windows desktop replacement, I would suggest investing into the Linux DE's and distros. Nowadays there's no reason to be running Windows.
I speak as someone who used a Linux desktop exclusively for 10 years (while managing Windows networks with thousands of clients for a living), who licensed Crossover Office for many of those years, who still uses only LibreOffice for every document, and who has 50:50 split of Linux:Windows VM's even in my workplace (where I manage all the IT). I quite get wanting independence of Windows, but ReactOS isn't it.
Currently I'm on Windows 7 (because it came with the machine) with VMWare and dozens of VMs to allow me to do "real work" on the same machine without having to faff about. I deploy 8.1 in work (made to look identical to 7, have no problems with it at all). I trialled 10 and decided against it for now, but there's no reason I couldn't put the same changes into 10 and make it look like 7 against and carry on regardless. I write cross-platform software in C that works on all the major OS.
But with that kind of competition, ReactOS has no place at all and won't without literal decades more of developer investment.
The ISS is as germy as one would expect such an environment to be, in line with most of the predictions and hopes of the scientists involved, given it's history and cleanliness.
I realise that doesn't have the snap of "super-germy" but it is, at least, vaguely accurate.
I come up with a Nigerian TV channel, or nothing at all relevant, depending on what keywords I add.
Thus I can only believe this compounds my problem - available on obscure and hidden away services that are almost impossible to find even when you have a hint, but not visible on the main content players for actual purchase.
Swap that situation around, and several middle-men could see a lot more of my money.
Okay, I'm a "legitimate content" person. I don't pirate. I see no point - I earn good money, I have enough spare to pay for what I actually want, which gives me titles I can play where/when I want to, and for which I don't have to worry about viruses, huge downloads, being marked by my ISP, or whatever.
I know, everyone does it, but I'm one of those odd people who just pays for my stuff. In fact, for the stuff I like, I've often paid several times over over the years. I have Amazon Prime so I get their Instant Video, and I have Google Play for a load of other things. I don't do Netflix as I don't see what they add for me and even with a friend's Netflix in the same house, I see no reason to use it.
But... this is my problem. If I want to watch it, I want to watch it. Every ad in front of the thing I paid for is an abomination. Every restriction on device, etc. is a pain in the butt. And every time you don't have the content I want, it's even more frustrating. I'm often standing in front of a online store, wanting to give them money, for maybe the crappiest old movie that's available everywhere and easily for free and I can't because it's not on offer for that service.
Two things pop to mind. Aliens: Special Edition. I love it. I'd love to have it on either the Google or Amazon account. But you can't. You can have Aliens. You can have boxset which include Aliens (but which you can only tell the version of by the runtime, and it's not Special Edition). You can have Alien: Director's Cut. But you can't have Aliens: Special Edition. Go into a shop, however, and that's all they sell, even in the boxsets.
Another is an old sitcom from the 1970's called The Two of Us. It's UK-specific but so is a lot of the content I buy and the online stores don't have a problem obtaining or selling it. But they released one series on DVD only, nothing else, and then never released the second series (despite it being listed as a pre-release item on Amazon for 8 years now and various dates promised). I can't find either online.
Now, I'm sure if I really Google hard, I could come up with somewhere selling the first as an online streaming movie, and I could download the latter in a minute via a torrent, I'm sure. But... I'd quite like to own them legitimately and on two of the largest services in the world today. And I can't. It's simply not possible.
Until the media industry gets together to make a rights consortium that can handle such things so that all the relevant players can licence content properly, and that the same levels of content are available across services, it's really just wasting my time and money. I'm literally trying to give them money for products they already have, but they have no interest in taking it, no way to gauge my interest, no way for me to give feedback.
By contrast, all the top line of Google Play Movies / TV and most of the stuff I see on Amazon Instant Video I have absolutely zero interest in. Literally I have stopped looking, because it's all just "latest cinema release", six months later, at premium prices, advertised only at the rental prices, that I wouldn't want to watch if they were free to do so anyway.
Given the amount of tech involved, I don't get why it's so hard to tap into a licensing database, of official content, allowing me to buy anything and everything that's ever been digitised, while recompensing all those people involved fairly, via any service I like, and to actually make sensible recommendations based on what I like to buy.
To be honest, it's totally worked against them. I just stopped watching movies instead.
When these things are sitting in datacentres, corporate networks, or any of a thousand other legitimate places, they can be managed by a remote support person via the network even if they can't even boot (e.g. BIOS access, switching to PXE booting and re-imaging and then restoring to normal operation, debugging, etc.).
It's a legitimate feature, which is used by lots of places that want such a feature. However, what it's doing ENABLED BY DEFAULT is another question entirely, as it is listening to the network, running even when the main processor isn't inside an OS yet, and able to have full remote control of the PC in question.
Servers and corporate client machines have had this or similar iLO technology for decades. You can't just waste time walking to every machine with a suspected fault, when you're running thousands of machines across dozens of sites.
But from a consumer point of view, it would be as simple as a "disable" option in the UEFI/BIOS, and defaulting to "off" for retail sales. Because in those circumstances, there is no reason to need such options, they will never be utilised, and they will always be likely to be compromised in the same way that IME is able to be compromised at the moment.
What you say also works on the assumption that batteries will also be able to accept that charge (i.e. not already fully charged) in order to act as a sink for that spare energy.
Once you charge the batteries up, you only get a trickle of losses being consumed and all that spare electric just sits on the grid still.
There's a reason that things like water pumps are used to pump water uphill above reservoirs in times of surplus - because it's a constant sink whether or not you bother to re-capture that water later on.
I love the way that someone "realises" that it's not as easy as everyone in the field has been saying for decades but somehow this is an "oh, wow, we never would have guessed" moment.
The Sun is indeed an enormous source of energy, throwing out spikes of flame hundreds of times larger than the Earth itself.
However... a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny pittance of that energy is directed towards us at any one time.
A tiny pittance of that makes it through the atmosphere (and any external capture/retransmission has the same kind of efficiency loss associated with it unless we start living in space entirely), a tiny pittance of that strikes the ground.
We then have relatively expensive devices utilising relatively unusual materials to try to capture a small pittance of that energy into some usable form. This isn't viable everywhere, takes up huge tracts of land (the only way to make the pittance viable), and then has to be transported to where you use it (I'm basically discounting small solar installs which may be able to power extremely remote homes in favourable locations but generally do nothing in terms of overall contribution).
Most of this technology is subsidised to defend against international fines for CO2 emission, etc. and hence actually is ironically just a way to stop countries being fined for destroying the earth by letting them pay people to melt down rare metals, put them into oil-based plastics and strap them to people's roofs in order to generate a pittance of relatively unclean and in-heavy-need-of-filtering energy, and then rewarding them by giving them money from... well... tax basically.
Though you can make solar panels, and though they can produce electricity, and though SOME places can use that to save on electricity costs, there isn't very much at all.
Allow me to describe every solar product I've used and its efficiency:
- a solar calculator, amazing, 70's tech, works perfectly, but people just put batteries in them still because "solar-only" is a pain in the butt to guarantee at the moment you need it. - solar lighting, etc. Literally pound-shop items, work well but often contain just an ordinary AA rechargeable cell which dies within six months. That's if they ever get to charge enough during the day to light more than an hour of night, even for LED ones. Large shed-lighting installations have similar problems. - At least three workplaces (schools) with huge roofs covered with solar panels, connected to displays that tell you what they are generating. Ironically, just one relatively idle server (needed on 24/7 to provide service) could not be run from the power it generates, and I'm not even including cooling, redundancy, efficiency losses etc. Last estimate - it would take 30-40 years to pay for itself based on the REAL generation numbers, even with an bi-annual service to clean the panels, etc. (which costs money). - A handful of friends who lived in houses with "solar water heating". I'm repeatedly told "don't ask" when I question them about it. - That's about it.
I'm sure there are places on Earth that can utilise solar-power. Those places are generally hot, and far from major centers of population, and have to transport energy in and don't have local stations of other kinds to make it. Where it works, it's subsidised, or to counteract pollution fines (which generally fail to take account of the process by which those technologies are manufactured - i.e. it's like asking China to burn coal to send you electricity, and then saying you're being green because it's not YOU burning the coal...).
The Sun is the ultimate source of basically all our energy.
You can put wind turbines in the sea, solar panels on roofs, and do everything you practically can. The fact is that it all comes from the Sun. Which is fusion. And which we can collect only a pittance of a pittance of a pittance of a pittance.
So just stop faffing about, and recreate its energy source here on Earth, avoid all those transmission losses, fancy devices, and faffing with middle-men and use the same energy directly without destroying habitat, literally sucking heat out of the air, and mining and producing items that each wouldn
Such things need not only a standard, but an open standard, that evolves but maintains backwards compatibility. You don't want to push an update to the control software that stops your systems from doing what they've always done and have years of programming to do on your schedule, etc.
And then you need a reason. I quite like having a remote control to my Christmas lights, that's all well and good. Saves me having to clamber under the tree. But everything else? I can live without it being gadgetised at great expense.
The problem is that I can't think of a use case. People try all kinds of lines out on me, and I can't see the use of them. "You could turn your heating on from the ride home if you're early!" Or I could save myself several hundred and just do it when I get home. "You could open your front door remotely!" Why? Anything delivered needs a signature or could just be left somewhere safe anyway. "You could get the dryer to know its wet out and decide to dry your clothes for you!". And I just can't think when that would ever happen, or that it would ever happen when you actually needed it, or that it wouldn't happen when you actually DIDN'T want to do it.
All the home automation stuff is really just nice toys. That's about it. As a massive geek, I can't justify it past that.
If they were dollar-each throwaway items, certified to standards, able to control mains devices, be wired into the existing plug leads so you don't lose "normal" control of the devices, etc. then, sure. But I still can't see past the gimmick to an actual use case that would justify it.
Though it would be nice to know "Did I leave the heating on by mistake?" remotely, I can't see that it will ever be cheap enough and yet reliable enough to get to that level of detail, and certainly it will never be standardised enough that it would just work like that.
And the second you introduce "control" features on a published standard, you better hope your implementation is kept up to date because for sure people are going to have fun hacking it remotely.
"Sorry, we don't issue security patches for your washing machine any more" is not only a worst nightmare, it's actually a potential reality. It was laughable when monitors started to come with driver CD's (despite being EDID etc.), let alone household appliances.
I think it would take legislation along the lines of smart meter standardisation, where a device has to advertise its power requirements and "importance" in order to be supplied power, and then it can be instructed to shutdown if there are brownouts, etc. And that's a long way off.
Slashdot Mirror
9-11 was 17 years ago.
17 years ago, the Internet was a very different place, Slashdot hadn't been sold off nearly as many times, 6-digit uids were almost unheard of, and there was actually some kind of geek culture around here that influenced others.
And all I remember of the 9-11 coverage on Slashdot was thinking "Oh, for fuck's sake, if I wanted that, I'd go on a news site or research it myself, I want to read about SOMETHING ELSE" like I always did on Slashdot - the stuff nobody else thought important, posted about, was niche to my interests, etc.
I never understood why a website with a prescribed niche should jump on a current news story that everyone else is covering, using the same links everyone else was - it was literally to get more page-views.
When shit like that happens, after I've read the initial reports, I split my reading between "Hey, new update on that news story" and "Holy fuck, can someone just talk about ANYTHING else because this is pissing me off that we're giving it so much attention and everywhere I turn we're talking about it again".
The one before that was Princess Diana dying (for UK users... fuck that was impossible to avoid for about 9 months).
Hint: 17 years on and you're still talking about 9-11. Who won their permanent fame through that, irreparably harming the reputation of security services and military (it took you HOW long to find him when the whole world was looking for him?), and permanently inscribing fear of terrorism into every policy, procedure, rulebook, law, emergency scenario, panic, and rumour? And how? By people not shutting up about it and giving them their intention.
Here's how I would have liked a civilised country to respond to such things via headlines:
- Terrorist act on WTC.
- Other news.
- Other news.
- Ten years of other news.
- Terrorist responsible for WTC attacks killed.
- Other news.
- Other news.
Precisely because of places like Slashdot responding as they did, for as long as they did, and constantly re-invoking the demons, we have the world we live in today. I'm not at all sure that's a good thing given that terrorism is hardly new.
I have to say... I haven't yet seen a single Apple design feature that I actually like. Apple aren't "design". They're "designer". That is, they're all mouth, charge big money, for something basic or impractical or just stupid.
Design is about function just as much as it is about aesthetics and I can't find a single Apple feature, gadget, hardware or accessory that... well, functions better than anything else. Sometimes it's even hard to point out something *satisfactory*. Even the boxes things are packaged in drive me mad (who in their right mind makes a trapezoidal box for a large expensive flat item that only tessellates if you turn half of them upside-down?)
And, yes, I manage hundreds of Apple devices as part of my job (not my choice, I made the disclaimer when I took them over that I thought it was a big mistake of theirs, they realised it themselves within a matter of a year and are now backpedalling and moving AWAY from everything Apple).
Honestly, I can't find a single feature on an Apple device -
software or hardware - that I thought "that's pretty cool" when I first saw it. Nothing. Power buttons are un-feelable and yet on the rear of the devices, the stupid keyboards, the horrible mice, the packaging, the cabling, the layout for phone and tablet screens, no batteries, no expansion capability, everything about them just annoys me.
Even their "design" book where they show off Apple design? It's a white cover with a white spine with white writing on it so you can't read what it is when it's sitting on a bookshelf in normal lighting.
They are "designer", not "design", which means you're paying through the nose for shite, rather than have moments of "wow, look at that, isn't that cool how that pulls out, works, joins to this, has been put together, etc. and still works really well".
You seem overly confident that they are just intercepting unencrypted DNS queries to replace them with an internal IP, rather than... well... just blocking anything to anything other than the internal IPs.
I don't know what shit networks you've been on, but on anything I've ever used with public-facing Wifi, DNS tricks will do nothing like you suggest.
Literally, you get firewalled down to the internal IP address ranges and redirected to them constantly, until you pay/sign up/log in, when you then have Internet access.
If you're being portalled, but can access any IP outside the portal's IP range, then they're doing something drastically wrong that just about every Wifi manufacturer does right without even bothering to try (e.g. everything from home router's guest networks, those "free Wifi for other customers of the same network" deals, public Wifi in cafes, shops, schools, landmarks, etc.)
Gosh if only this website was full of people who could operate a search engine, using a single, easily-copied keyword to discover the answer.
It's Google's home video-streaming device. Press Chromecast button in compatible app, it finds Chromecast devices on your wireless network, which show the content out over their HDMI.
Back at you:
Why would you take money from someone that you have literally zero information on if you then handing over a valuable product of your own in exchange?
Especially when any fraudulent / stolen money will just be sucked out of your account with no explanation without any way for you to know where it came from? Whether that's a Bitcoin double-spend or a bank anti-fraud measure, it makes no difference.
Cashless is not only practical (I live as-close-as-dammit to cashless as it's possible to be, and cash plays such a little part in my life that it's consigned to a jar of coins in my house and a small cache of coins in the car... one just a dumping ground used for "anything" to get rid of it, and the other for paying parking - I'd PAY people the former to get rid of the latter so I could park and pay without needing cash.) it's much more sensible.
In the UK, we have things like PingIt, which is a bank account with a unique number just for it, which sort-of ties to a mobile phone number (but there are other checks). I can PingIt to buy everything from Bitcoin to paying my tax to shopping online, including giving a friend a tenner or a random third-party on a sales site some manner of payment. We just need to know each other's phone numbers. Paypal has something similar.
And though they won't "find me" just by that information alone (they would literally have nothing more than my mobile phone number), there's a trail the police could follow so other people DO accept it as payment, which they wouldn't your anonymised currency.
Think of this: You sell, say, a car. Some guy "pays you". He takes the car. You get a note from the bank the next morning that the money is not yours so they took it back. Or the Bitcoin forked at the wrong time and your transaction wasn't real. What do you do? Do you ever accept that payment method ever again? I'm guessing no. You just lost your car because of it, and that'll be sold four more times in similar dodgy transactions before it's ever picked up on a camera. No different to being paid in fake-notes.
At least if you have SOMETHING to tell police, who have a way to trace back, they might be able to do something about it. And if it's "official", then you have a way to prove losses / damages in court, which will be recognised as such.
Cashless is sensible. Anonymous cash really is not. Unless... quite literally... you don't want to be able to trace fraud, ever.
And most of the population of the developed world are majority-cashless already. Even developing nations have such things. It just makes much more sense. Not perfect, by any means. Open to abuse by dictatorial governments, of course. But anonymous cash systems are vulnerable to a lot simpler, more common, and a lot more prevalent crimes than "government stealing / tracing all my money" which you have no real defence against anyway - if they want to do that, they have a billion options to do just that that don't care what technology you used.
P.S. I have bought things from random-people on the Internet for the last 25 years and most of it wasn't cash. Everything from eBay to Gumtree, paying friends for meals to donating to artists in the street, using Paypal, PingIt and even Bitcoin. And any number of similar services. I haven't used a cheque in decades (and I was mostly paid in them at one point).
I currently have ZERO coins or notes in my wallet.
Nobody cares about your use-cases, because they are catered-for, or not an issue. But everyone would care about your use-cases in your "ideal" anonymised world. Because then you would have NO WAY to trust the other people paying you, ever, and it would be a minefield of fraud to sell anything.
Good.
I waited 30 years after reading, as a kid, that all the future money would be "credits" on some central account, accessible at a tap by authorised people. Every comic book, sci-fi movie, future-prediction TV science show, everything.
Finally it's here and people are whining. Now, yes, ideally it would be zero-fee and not run by two major corporations (American Express hardly counts outside of America, I've literally never seen anyone use one), but pre-pay credit cards are so cheap as to be cheaper than banking rates for personal customers nowadays (free bank accounts are rapidly becoming a thing of the past and never let you do all the useful stuff anyway).
Now, finally, we don't have to carry little tokens that are produced at great expense, and copied en-masse, to represent things that don't actually exist. We can just go straight to using a number that's traceable, accountable, recordable, etc. Whether the bank has all its gold stolen or not I really don't care. My account says so-much-money and that's what I want back, guaranteed by law in my country.
And it saves me having to carry change, get the right note, update all my coins every 10 years when they change the designs (in my country in the last 10 years they've changed the 10-pound, 5-pound notes and the 1 pound coin at least and that 10 years might even encompass the 2 pound coin, I forget).
To be honest, cash has been dead to me for a while.
I have a wallet with cards in. I have backup cards. I have pre-payment cards. And I can buy pre-loaded cards in minutes using anything from Bitcoin to Amazon vouchers.
I have a handful of high-value coins in the car to pay for parking (because we STILL haven't worked out how to pay for parking in my country - either convoluted, per-car-park SMS-based pissing about, or cash! Where are the card-readers? Where's the national chain? Where's the "pay-by-Oyster"? Useless people!) and to put a coin into shopping trolleys that are locked together.
Everything else... if it's notes I spend it as soon as I can or bank it if it's a lot. For coins, I stick them in a jar which my friends and I use for lunch or whatever else we need it for.
It's about time we just ditched the concept of cash entirely. There is no redeeming feature of it that isn't vastly outweighed by the cost of making and handling it.
Easy.
Allow me to provide you an answer using intelligence including reasoning which any current AI would be impossible to answer in the same manner.
The dress is blue/black. Simple colour measurements on the original image determine this quite conclusively as does the purchaser and manufacturers of the dress.
However, depending on the individual perception of the detection devices in question, and their associated processing of nearby stripy colours, some people perceive it as one, other or both of the above depending on the time given and whether they've "heard" that it's a particular colour dress in advance.
Equally, some colour-blind people will see entirely different colour combinations in the same image, which is not perfectly representative of the original dress anyway given that it's effectively a false-colour reproduction made on a cheap smartphone CCD.
The day an AI can return "Answer A, Answer A&B, and Answer Z which you forgot to list in the possibilities", and reason their way through it, you can say we have AI.
Artificial intelligence isn't like natural intelligence at all.
Natural STUPIDITY, yes.
Nobody with a brain believes that a bankrupt businessman or politician is capable of telling the truth, and certainly not when they're making promises that don't affect themselves one bit.
To be honest, my bugbear is taht AI was always a misnomer, because it's not intelligent at all, precisely because of things like this. There is no line of thinking that leads it to believe that a 3D turtle is a rifle - if you asked it to tell you WHY it was a rifle, and it could pick out features on the image that look like a rifle from a certain angle, yes, you could claim it was intelligent. But it can't do that. It's all just random junk and statistics, with heuristic (human-written) rules governing it. And the scariest bit - the attackers probably have more understanding how it interprets data than the people who created it.
It's not intelligence to act without being able to provide reasoning. Trump-supporters and AI both have that inability in common.
It is, of course, the age-old archaelogical question - should we learn now and disturb things, leave it alone so we can learn in the future? There are entire sciences that handle that every single day.
To be honest, I don't think you have to be as careful as you make out. A flash drive in the 50's would have been perfectly readable, especially if someone KNEW that it was fragile / one-of-a-kind. It wouldn't take much to determine power lines, and some suitable minimum power necessary to make it operate. From there, the BIG problem would really be speaking to it quickly enough. Your oscilloscopes would show the data being sent but it would be hard to talk back at the same kind of data rates with older technology.
The only "amazing" thing to not understand would be the compactness, the arrangement, the low-power requirements, etc. i.e. how was it actually made, not what does it do / what does it hold / how do we talk to it.
Ignoring the absolute bollocks that the story is anyway, alien devices could easily be studied safely, so long as we knew to take care. Scans, and tests, and microscopes, and all kinds of things could be deployed without affecting the function of pretty much anything we encountered (sure, there might be an alien tech that doesn't take kindly to X-Rays or something, but they would have to compensate for that in their own handling so it would be quite obvious that it WAS being shielded, etc. presumably).
What wouldn't be understood is how they were made, the communication protocols involved, and what kind of device it was (who in the 50's would suspect that a USB stick was a data storage device?).
But you wouldn't have to break much at all, and what you did break would literally be "sample-size" portions for your own understanding.
Nobody with a brain is just going to plug shit in without seeing what it would do first. Especially not if it belonged to another civilisation and has any remote chance of being considered "military" (why are aliens ALWAYS just "random strangers" and not military scouting parties? I'd personally expect any first-landers to be just as heavily militarised as you would expect to land on a strange planet of unknown beings without any fear of reprisal for doing so - and that would mean tech that they couldn't steal from you and use against you too).
This is one of those false arguments, though.
Nobody really cares about the logging, so long as there's an option to have "normal" logging if that's what you want.
But the logging has almost nothing to do with NOT NEEDING to use the logs. The problems mentioned with systemd are not "I couldn't find a line that dovecot was saying" but services literally not starting up, boots not completing, and even things like random variations on that (which is worse than not booting at all).
I've seen such things in the wild, and even had them happen on simple systemd package upgrades, or changing the underlying hardware of the machine resulting in non-boots (which in this day and age is just wrong... it should at least still boot to a point you can fix it even if there's some storage or something it doesn't recognise). It's not unheard of to just start booting and get a black screen and nothing else after the bootloader, etc.
We're not concerned about "when it works". Then, we don't have a problem. We're concerned about fixing "when it doesn't". Where moving / sending the logs to a machine that can then read them, only to find that they aren't that helpful, is a lot of faff.
Not a chance.
It's 20+ years behind in some areas and nowhere near being any kind of replacement for anything.
The domain stuff... literally years away for any level of completeness or reliability despite being "worked on" since 2009 and before then. Hell, you can only just about trust Samba to run as a secondary. I wouldn't want to be in charge of a Samba-only AD tree (which still needs Windows tools to manage it!). And then you may as well just use Samba and the various OS clients that let you integrate to the AD tree for authentication anyway, and who cares what OS it's on?
ReactOS is nothing more than a toy, you couldn't do anything serious with it, and you couldn't even use it as a desktop replacement even if you were willing to make all kinds of compromises.
There's no way that people are going to look at Windows 10 and ReactOS and decide to run ReactOS instead. It would be less hassle just to move everything to Raspberry Pi, that's how incomplete things are.
ReactOS needed huge amounts of development over 10 years ago, it's not received it in the meantime. Even Wine is pretty much dead in practical terms, and yet that's had tons more developer time spent on it, and nobody would use either in earnest or in preference to just running a different OS entirely.
FreeDOS was a success, but it took 25 years to get the equivalent of DOS up and running and it's still an incredibly niche product - nobody is going to be running DOS as an OS like they used to, not in this day and age. BIOS-reset disks to make closed-source firmware update tools not require an MS-DOS licence? Sure. Desktop OS again? Never.
ReactOS is a much more complex task and hasn't come anywhere near close, and is suffering an even worse fate because of that.
If you could have had the current state of ReactOS, back when Windows 2000 was appearing, then you might have had the impetus to compete and make it viable. Coming to this point 20 years too late means that they can never do anything but play catch-up. It's a toy, an "emulation" almost, a niche OS. It's never going to be able to do anything useful, certainly not to mainstream computer users.
Hell, it doesn't even have full Win16/Win32 compatibility yet, and they are already dead and buried for the most part.
People's time would be better spent either running "real" Windows in a VM (and hence development effort into QEmu, Xen, etc.) or moving whatever ancient-Windows-thing they want to use to something else entirely.
As far as I see, ReactOS is like making a Win3.1/WinNT emulator, even if that's not technically accurate. And Wine does a much better job of that (and that's even less technically accurate). And the uses of such are vanishingly small anyway.
If you want a non-Windows desktop replacement, I would suggest investing into the Linux DE's and distros. Nowadays there's no reason to be running Windows.
I speak as someone who used a Linux desktop exclusively for 10 years (while managing Windows networks with thousands of clients for a living), who licensed Crossover Office for many of those years, who still uses only LibreOffice for every document, and who has 50:50 split of Linux:Windows VM's even in my workplace (where I manage all the IT). I quite get wanting independence of Windows, but ReactOS isn't it.
Currently I'm on Windows 7 (because it came with the machine) with VMWare and dozens of VMs to allow me to do "real work" on the same machine without having to faff about. I deploy 8.1 in work (made to look identical to 7, have no problems with it at all). I trialled 10 and decided against it for now, but there's no reason I couldn't put the same changes into 10 and make it look like 7 against and carry on regardless. I write cross-platform software in C that works on all the major OS.
But with that kind of competition, ReactOS has no place at all and won't without literal decades more of developer investment.
Or.
The ISS is as germy as one would expect such an environment to be, in line with most of the predictions and hopes of the scientists involved, given it's history and cleanliness.
I realise that doesn't have the snap of "super-germy" but it is, at least, vaguely accurate.
Exactly my thought.
I come up with a Nigerian TV channel, or nothing at all relevant, depending on what keywords I add.
Thus I can only believe this compounds my problem - available on obscure and hidden away services that are almost impossible to find even when you have a hint, but not visible on the main content players for actual purchase.
Swap that situation around, and several middle-men could see a lot more of my money.
Okay, I'm a "legitimate content" person. I don't pirate. I see no point - I earn good money, I have enough spare to pay for what I actually want, which gives me titles I can play where/when I want to, and for which I don't have to worry about viruses, huge downloads, being marked by my ISP, or whatever.
I know, everyone does it, but I'm one of those odd people who just pays for my stuff. In fact, for the stuff I like, I've often paid several times over over the years. I have Amazon Prime so I get their Instant Video, and I have Google Play for a load of other things. I don't do Netflix as I don't see what they add for me and even with a friend's Netflix in the same house, I see no reason to use it.
But... this is my problem. If I want to watch it, I want to watch it. Every ad in front of the thing I paid for is an abomination. Every restriction on device, etc. is a pain in the butt. And every time you don't have the content I want, it's even more frustrating. I'm often standing in front of a online store, wanting to give them money, for maybe the crappiest old movie that's available everywhere and easily for free and I can't because it's not on offer for that service.
Two things pop to mind. Aliens: Special Edition. I love it. I'd love to have it on either the Google or Amazon account. But you can't. You can have Aliens. You can have boxset which include Aliens (but which you can only tell the version of by the runtime, and it's not Special Edition). You can have Alien: Director's Cut. But you can't have Aliens: Special Edition. Go into a shop, however, and that's all they sell, even in the boxsets.
Another is an old sitcom from the 1970's called The Two of Us. It's UK-specific but so is a lot of the content I buy and the online stores don't have a problem obtaining or selling it. But they released one series on DVD only, nothing else, and then never released the second series (despite it being listed as a pre-release item on Amazon for 8 years now and various dates promised). I can't find either online.
Now, I'm sure if I really Google hard, I could come up with somewhere selling the first as an online streaming movie, and I could download the latter in a minute via a torrent, I'm sure. But... I'd quite like to own them legitimately and on two of the largest services in the world today. And I can't. It's simply not possible.
Until the media industry gets together to make a rights consortium that can handle such things so that all the relevant players can licence content properly, and that the same levels of content are available across services, it's really just wasting my time and money. I'm literally trying to give them money for products they already have, but they have no interest in taking it, no way to gauge my interest, no way for me to give feedback.
By contrast, all the top line of Google Play Movies / TV and most of the stuff I see on Amazon Instant Video I have absolutely zero interest in. Literally I have stopped looking, because it's all just "latest cinema release", six months later, at premium prices, advertised only at the rental prices, that I wouldn't want to watch if they were free to do so anyway.
Given the amount of tech involved, I don't get why it's so hard to tap into a licensing database, of official content, allowing me to buy anything and everything that's ever been digitised, while recompensing all those people involved fairly, via any service I like, and to actually make sensible recommendations based on what I like to buy.
To be honest, it's totally worked against them. I just stopped watching movies instead.
Lights-out management.
When these things are sitting in datacentres, corporate networks, or any of a thousand other legitimate places, they can be managed by a remote support person via the network even if they can't even boot (e.g. BIOS access, switching to PXE booting and re-imaging and then restoring to normal operation, debugging, etc.).
It's a legitimate feature, which is used by lots of places that want such a feature. However, what it's doing ENABLED BY DEFAULT is another question entirely, as it is listening to the network, running even when the main processor isn't inside an OS yet, and able to have full remote control of the PC in question.
Servers and corporate client machines have had this or similar iLO technology for decades. You can't just waste time walking to every machine with a suspected fault, when you're running thousands of machines across dozens of sites.
But from a consumer point of view, it would be as simple as a "disable" option in the UEFI/BIOS, and defaulting to "off" for retail sales. Because in those circumstances, there is no reason to need such options, they will never be utilised, and they will always be likely to be compromised in the same way that IME is able to be compromised at the moment.
What you say also works on the assumption that batteries will also be able to accept that charge (i.e. not already fully charged) in order to act as a sink for that spare energy.
Once you charge the batteries up, you only get a trickle of losses being consumed and all that spare electric just sits on the grid still.
There's a reason that things like water pumps are used to pump water uphill above reservoirs in times of surplus - because it's a constant sink whether or not you bother to re-capture that water later on.
I love the way that someone "realises" that it's not as easy as everyone in the field has been saying for decades but somehow this is an "oh, wow, we never would have guessed" moment.
Like, it's not fucking rocket science, is it? :-)
Correct.
I manage several hundred of them, however.
I'm sorry... Apple's hardware is the GOOD bit?
Fuck...
1) Blatant slashvertisement. Seriously. Stop it.
2) "They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical."
If they can throttle the entirety of the Internet, except Netflix, they can certainly throttle all of ZT too.
The reason they don't:
It doesn't work as well as they promise.
Same for all the battery promises, etc. The tech "exists" but it's entirely impractical.
The Sun is indeed an enormous source of energy, throwing out spikes of flame hundreds of times larger than the Earth itself.
However... a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny pittance of that energy is directed towards us at any one time.
A tiny pittance of that makes it through the atmosphere (and any external capture/retransmission has the same kind of efficiency loss associated with it unless we start living in space entirely), a tiny pittance of that strikes the ground.
We then have relatively expensive devices utilising relatively unusual materials to try to capture a small pittance of that energy into some usable form. This isn't viable everywhere, takes up huge tracts of land (the only way to make the pittance viable), and then has to be transported to where you use it (I'm basically discounting small solar installs which may be able to power extremely remote homes in favourable locations but generally do nothing in terms of overall contribution).
Most of this technology is subsidised to defend against international fines for CO2 emission, etc. and hence actually is ironically just a way to stop countries being fined for destroying the earth by letting them pay people to melt down rare metals, put them into oil-based plastics and strap them to people's roofs in order to generate a pittance of relatively unclean and in-heavy-need-of-filtering energy, and then rewarding them by giving them money from... well... tax basically.
Though you can make solar panels, and though they can produce electricity, and though SOME places can use that to save on electricity costs, there isn't very much at all.
Allow me to describe every solar product I've used and its efficiency:
- a solar calculator, amazing, 70's tech, works perfectly, but people just put batteries in them still because "solar-only" is a pain in the butt to guarantee at the moment you need it.
- solar lighting, etc. Literally pound-shop items, work well but often contain just an ordinary AA rechargeable cell which dies within six months. That's if they ever get to charge enough during the day to light more than an hour of night, even for LED ones. Large shed-lighting installations have similar problems.
- At least three workplaces (schools) with huge roofs covered with solar panels, connected to displays that tell you what they are generating. Ironically, just one relatively idle server (needed on 24/7 to provide service) could not be run from the power it generates, and I'm not even including cooling, redundancy, efficiency losses etc. Last estimate - it would take 30-40 years to pay for itself based on the REAL generation numbers, even with an bi-annual service to clean the panels, etc. (which costs money).
- A handful of friends who lived in houses with "solar water heating". I'm repeatedly told "don't ask" when I question them about it.
- That's about it.
I'm sure there are places on Earth that can utilise solar-power. Those places are generally hot, and far from major centers of population, and have to transport energy in and don't have local stations of other kinds to make it. Where it works, it's subsidised, or to counteract pollution fines (which generally fail to take account of the process by which those technologies are manufactured - i.e. it's like asking China to burn coal to send you electricity, and then saying you're being green because it's not YOU burning the coal...).
The Sun is the ultimate source of basically all our energy.
You can put wind turbines in the sea, solar panels on roofs, and do everything you practically can. The fact is that it all comes from the Sun. Which is fusion. And which we can collect only a pittance of a pittance of a pittance of a pittance.
So just stop faffing about, and recreate its energy source here on Earth, avoid all those transmission losses, fancy devices, and faffing with middle-men and use the same energy directly without destroying habitat, literally sucking heat out of the air, and mining and producing items that each wouldn
Precisely.
Such things need not only a standard, but an open standard, that evolves but maintains backwards compatibility. You don't want to push an update to the control software that stops your systems from doing what they've always done and have years of programming to do on your schedule, etc.
And then you need a reason. I quite like having a remote control to my Christmas lights, that's all well and good. Saves me having to clamber under the tree. But everything else? I can live without it being gadgetised at great expense.
The problem is that I can't think of a use case. People try all kinds of lines out on me, and I can't see the use of them. "You could turn your heating on from the ride home if you're early!" Or I could save myself several hundred and just do it when I get home. "You could open your front door remotely!" Why? Anything delivered needs a signature or could just be left somewhere safe anyway. "You could get the dryer to know its wet out and decide to dry your clothes for you!". And I just can't think when that would ever happen, or that it would ever happen when you actually needed it, or that it wouldn't happen when you actually DIDN'T want to do it.
All the home automation stuff is really just nice toys. That's about it. As a massive geek, I can't justify it past that.
If they were dollar-each throwaway items, certified to standards, able to control mains devices, be wired into the existing plug leads so you don't lose "normal" control of the devices, etc. then, sure. But I still can't see past the gimmick to an actual use case that would justify it.
Though it would be nice to know "Did I leave the heating on by mistake?" remotely, I can't see that it will ever be cheap enough and yet reliable enough to get to that level of detail, and certainly it will never be standardised enough that it would just work like that.
And the second you introduce "control" features on a published standard, you better hope your implementation is kept up to date because for sure people are going to have fun hacking it remotely.
"Sorry, we don't issue security patches for your washing machine any more" is not only a worst nightmare, it's actually a potential reality. It was laughable when monitors started to come with driver CD's (despite being EDID etc.), let alone household appliances.
I think it would take legislation along the lines of smart meter standardisation, where a device has to advertise its power requirements and "importance" in order to be supplied power, and then it can be instructed to shutdown if there are brownouts, etc. And that's a long way off.
Hey, look at it this way.
We'd be good entertainment. They'll have a good laugh if nothing else.
"Open Source your remains"
Eek. Can I at least GPL them? But then, I hear that licence is cancerous...