I've had a couple of times where I've had it turned on and, yes, you sort of "forget" that it's doing things for you.
Now I'm inherently distrusting of automated controls (I've worked in IT far too long) so my testing of them with a new car I got earlier in the year, the first I've had with such unnecessary "features" because they now come as standard, was extremely distrusting and careful. Hell, I've tested the electronic handbrake dozens of times just to reassure myself that it does what it's supposed to and I can hope to rely on it in an emergency.
But cruise control scares the shit out of me. I can't control the speed at which it accelerates to the target speed (if you slow for traffic and then resume, it appears to accelerate much faster than necessary to get back to speed). And, when driving long distances, it's too tempting to be complacent.
I have to turn it off and stop myself getting lazy, and I'm someone who doesn't answer phones while driving (handsfree or not), doesn't have anything in my windscreen (none of this satnav above the wheel shite), will tell passengers to shut up so I can concentrate on tricky junctions, etc. Not because I get distracted, but because driving takes priority over anything else.
And this is a feature with acceleration, one that won't stop if the driver passes out (no fancy hand-on-the-steering-wheel sensors on my car), and no lane-control / steering options. Literally it will just keep going forward even if I do nothing.
As such, my use of it is absolutely minimal. But self-driving cars? That just scares the crap out of me that those people are on the road and not properly driving.
a) Do you think it's worse than "naturally" breeding a monoculture of cattle, fruit (bananas, etc.) for farming? Because that's been going on for THOUSANDS of years. b) We don't have hundreds of years of experience with plastic. Or many oil derivatives. Or electromagnetism in devices held next to your head. And yet all the same scaremongering bollocks applies to those too. When it comes to that quantum mechanics is only 100 years old, really, and do you whine that we might be destroying the universe by tinkering with things that are in your computer processors, etc.?
Seriously, rather than knee-jerk, listen to these people. People who have been in science all their lives, performing hundreds or thousands of controlled experiments (including in "the real world", experiments are not all done in the labs) and cannot find a single, verifiable (even if unexplained), repeatable, negative effect from these things.
And there's a reason. It's nothing more than we've been doing for MILLENNIA via "natural" processes (like making horses shag donkeys, or literally gluing one half of one apple tree onto a completely different species of apple tree to form hybrids). Do you complain about pedigree dogs or thoroughbred horses? They are ALL, by definition, genetically engineered to be hybrids that wouldn't have occurred in nature.
And they create monocultures vulnerable to being wiped out by a single disease or pest and if you want to breed one that's "immune"... good luck doing that in the lifetime of that species before they are entirely wiped out and the planet starts starving.
You can be against GM, that's fine. Campaign for open information on it. Make them mark their products. But honestly suggesting they're going to fuck up life in general is like implying that the LHC is going to destroy the universe. And it makes you sound just as stupid.
If you can't solve PRETTY CRITICAL AND OBVIOUS technical and societal problems in one go, don't bother getting on the news crowing about it being the next big thing until you've solved them.
I cite every battery technology story for the last 20 years which claimed to do amazing things and then never made it to market because they just didn't scale at all.
Get a product equivalent to - but slightly better - than the cheap, easy mass-produced way - even at ENORMOUS expense - and you could be onto something. Creating a wheel made of wood doesn't make it a useful invention even if it's innovative, non-patented previously, green-friendly, etc.
This is what "I don't understand the problem" looks like.
The stress on that rubber when it's going in all directions is phenomenal. You're then going to expect it to drive at 70mph forward for hours at a time.
It's "cool" but it's totally impractical and unworkable. Conventional rubber tyre inner tubes are covered with a real tyre (made of steel, rubber and all kinds of layers) for a reason - the inner rubber is intensely fragile and doesn't take kindly to exposure and/or to lots of movement. It certainly won't take kindly to you sliding over stones laterally.
You are literally going to pop your tyres every few hundred miles of use. And as others have pointed out the complexities involved (in braking a tyre like that under extreme stress - 70mph to standing - it's just going to want to slip) mean that it's expensive, untested and impractical beyond belief.
And, I'm sorry, but this doesn't solve parking problems. It creates them. Idiots can park this in a space next to a conventional car making it almost impossible to get back out with a standard steering setup. Until everyone parks sideways, for the cost of a couple of inches of parking space each, it's just liable to misuse.
And I bet this "invention", brought to market and passing safety tests, will a) never appear, b) cost more than you could ever get by shrinking parking spaces by that fraction of space that it "saves".
1) How many email addresses would you like at my domain? I sign up for every service with a unique email and use fake junk names to sign up for junk that forces me, then consign those aliases to the blacklist.
It's quite simple (and, yes, I've started my own business, been self-employed, and started up the IT in and supported dozens of schools and other places - tuition centres with 4 kids, charities, etc. - from zero or one computer to 1000+ computers over the last 15 years).
You can manage your computers. Or not.
If you want to have a home PC run your business, that's ALWAYS been the price you pay. You don't get domain joining, which means no user management, no RDP, no Bitlocker, no Hyper-V and a million and one other things.
That's fine for a shop which only needs one PC. Or a single user. Or a guy working from home.
But the second you move from "guy working from home" (in whatever sense) to "business involving > 1 people", it's quickly limiting.
If the machine is that critical that you can't afford for Windows 10 to upgrade you willy-nilly and without consent, you need to manage it. How you do that is up to you.
Hire a consultant to set it up once for you and then just forget it, adding a user once in a blue moon and not caring about permissions. Set up file sharing and one-click backups from one of those external hard drives. Whatever. But it's not a managed system. And when something upgrades or breaks, precisely because you don't have an IT guy - even a once-a-month or one-off-visit guy - you're going to be screwed.
That's a choice a lot of places take. Hell, I've seen SCHOOLS managed like that (usually not for very long, I used to specialise in "recoup" recovery and support for schools after disasters, staff losses, budget cuts, etc. - I literally would take on schools with "zero" in the IT budget except my fee [so no new machines, no buying expensive software to solve the problem, etc.] and if I didn't save you at least as much as my fee cost, by setting things up properly, sorting out your licensing, providing free alternatives, etc. over the first year, I would lower the prices to the point that I did. I never once had to lower the prices, and never had a customer argue about it).
But if you're using unmanaged computers, they are unmanaged. You're always going to have this, and have had this in the past. It doesn't matter the OS, the hardware or the setup, you're using unmanaged systems. Running your business like this is no different if it's Windows 10 Home or Windows 95, let's be honest.
A managed system of any size, and I've dealt with schools with 40 pupils and one computer that did everything (including Terminal Services for the kids thin-clients on the same machine as the admin, finance, etc. for the entire school), requires a domain or similar construct to do the simplest of things (like allow a user to log in at two different places and get the same settings). I've seen domains with literally 2 client computers and 5 users. And I'm talking precisely about things like solicitor's offices (those people can REALLY afford a proper IT setup given their data retention obligations and the importance of their access to email, law archive sites, etc.), family businesses, the guy with a single shopfront, etc.
If your system is unmanaged, then you either have to manage it yourself (i.e. install the utilities that block the 10 upgrades), or get someone to do that for you. No matter the OS (I've deployed LikeWise Open and Samba domains, too, it's not hard) or number of computers.
Would you have a telephone in a business that you didn't know how to operate and/or that no-one would come out to fix for you if it broke? Then why do the same for your accounting, your stock control, your stock ordering, your customer emails, etc.? Whether that's a one-page spreadsheet and a copy of Chrome or a full install of Sage or whatever, the principle is the same. Get support (manage your machines!) or do it yourself, or suffer.
If it's honestly not important enough to backup properly, have someone else have a login (if you're ill or whatever), or do things like put a firewall between it and the Internet, then sure, you're unmanaged for a r
There's a huge difference between a security update to keep people safe on their supported copy of Windows, and forcing an upgrade from one still-supported operating system to an entirely different supported operating system.
That's not for the benefit of the users, or the people attacked by botnets. It's literally just a marketing ploy to say how high Windows 10 deployments are.
They could have pushed the SECURITY patches that Windows 7/8/8.1 has issued for it and FORCED those - much fewer people would have cared because it would have broken much less.
Pretty much every software supplier I deal with was caught off-guard and asked us to stop Windows 10 deployment until they could support it. We were doing that anyway, but to suddenly jump OS is not the same as making sure people patch that obvious Windows flaw that's had a security patch out for EVERY version of Windows.
This business you have... does it not run at least a server with a domain? I wouldn't expect Enterprise Windows but anything business-critical I'd expect a server, backups, etc. even if not full redundancy.
Then, it's just a matter of joining the domain and never seeing the upgrades.
No car that I've owned in the last 20 years (owned cars even if my wife had to drive them), including models made from 30-5 years ago, not one had that.
Literally, it's only since I've had a 2015 model that I've ever had it on a car I've owned or driven.
Marrying your first cousin in legal in the UK. Always has been.
Europe taking immigrants from outside Europe? Not really a Brexit issue, not directly. We will still have the same problem.
And swarms flooding in? The population is barely around predictions of the same made in the 1970's. We're not "swarmed" anywhere. At all. But observer bias, and all that.
But what really shows me I'm wasting my time is that you've linked to an anti-Muslim article as an example of why Britain should get out of the EU on the basis that "immigrants are Muslim" and "Muslims are trouble" (paraphrasing, but that's basically your gist right?)
There must be a modern equivalent (I can't even be bothered to Google it) where you can just "ring" Google or Siri or Cortana.
I'd be hard-pushed to imagine that isn't already out there, especially given Google Voice.
That function could easily do time-telling or weather forecast or data searches for you without anything more than a computer doing an "OK Google" at the other end and reading back the response like their smartphones do.
One of the experiments JUST about to be performed and analysed - what happens with fire in zero gravity.
Literally never tested properly before and we're having trouble predicting how it would operate and whether the fire equipment would even operate properly on a zero-gravity fire.
The fact is that there's still a ton of shit we DON'T know about living in space. "Muscle degradation" - easy to say, everyone knows it happens in space - but how much, to what extent, affecting who, long-term damage, etc. is still being studied.
And the media-posturing shit not only serves a purpose (encouraging kids into the profession - guess how long police officers spend doing school assemblies, etc.?) but is a tiny minority of what happens. Pretty much the schedule of an astronaut is full on from waking to sleeping.
But don't let me stop you. You get fired off to Jupiter on an untested ship with a fire suppression system that you can't even be sure will do anything. You won't be missed.
1) I had the full driving lessons and test not long ago (about 8 years now, I didn't learn to drive until much later than normal). No, we were never told to put it into gear when parking. Turn the wheels towards the curb on a hill, yes, handbrake, yes, gear, no. It's not taught nowadays except on automatic-only tests.
Additionally, out of all the people I know, ONLY older people use the gearbox as a brake. Handbrakes are seen as the optional part to them (whereas I'm the other way round and was taught that handbrake mattered, gear did not), and often they will park with it in gear and not apply the handbrake at all. It's surprisingly common. One FAMILY I know had a car with a completely non-functional handbrake for years - it drove me insane whenever I drove it. And they always left it in gear, so I had to always knock it out of gear (gearstick waggle on startup procedure), at which point the visibly-applied handbrake did nothing and the car would roll (jolt, actually, because I foot-brake even if it's not technically necessary) before I could start any further procedure.
2) Lots of handbrakes are electronic nowadays. Literally just a switch that can go wrong and not apply and you not notice until you're out of the car. I'm a VERY careful driver. Check my previous post about this on this article. It can still happen.
3) The point is that they thought they had put it into park. The only part they omitted is the handbrake. And some people were basically taught - by their parents or instructors - that gear mattered and not handbrake. So they "Park" it but don't handbrake and - bam - someone dies because it wasn't actually in Park as they thought.
Yes, a careful driver should never roll. But it's not part of the teaching now to do all these things every time. Hell, it's now "Mirror, Signal, Mirror, Manoeuvre" and my parents were only ever taught "Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre".
And I was also taught to never wrench a manual handbrake up without the button held down. Personally, I think that's a load of horseshit, but I humoured them. And never, not even on my test, did I depress the clutch when starting an engine. It's just not necessary in Neutral and I was never told to, never did. Yet my new car insists on it before it will start and it's uncomfortable to me because I'm not used to it.
There's a lot of habit in car-driving and a lot of bad teaching and a lot of it can slip past driving tests. Nobody's claiming that this was anyone's fault but his own, but you should also fix the bugs with your car.
Technically do you ever really "die"? There's so much bacteria and other things running around in the body, it's more like you get recycled.
Nothing goes to waste, but it's just not "you" any more. Stick a body in a sterile atmosphere and come back to teeming life using whatever resources it can for as long as it can, even if that's moulds or bacteria or mites or whatever. Isn't there something like thousands of mites per square foot of the body skin alone?
Technically every story about the future is made-up.
However, I just said "watch". That means "Observe and/or see if I'm right".
Higher education is funded by foreign students paying to study at a UK university. That's much harder if the EU students can't live here automatically but have to go through any kind of process. Those people teaching them are also, a vast proportion, non-UK citizens (with leave to remain). Their lives just got harder too, especially if they are sending taxed money home.
The problem is that 48% of "people" didn't believe that. If 48% of people didn't like broccoli, would we just stop eating it across the world? That's far too low a "minority" to base a huge decision on, and so quickly and completely into a one-way journey.
The people bearing the costs of the NHS, education and business are - everyone. Immigrants included.
Please tell this to every speeder, red-light runner, drink-driver, dickhead on their phone, etc. Right down to those dickheads that cut in at the last minute after 800 yds of warning signs.
Because whenever I do, I get a load of abuse. Everyone up in arms about speed cameras, speed "traps" (they can't "trap" you if you're fucking speeding in the first place, no matter where they site their camera/detector), etc. all the damn time.
Obviously because "everyone does it", it's automatically less dangerous.
As someone who drives a car with an electronic handbrake, it eludes me as to why that feature, which auto-releases when I pull away (DANGEROUS!), and auto-applies when I've braked manually on a hill until the car pulls forward, does NOT automatically apply when the engine is off entirely.
I got out of my car on my drive (fortunately quite flat) after driving a friend to my house. They were in the car and I parked, pulled the handbrake (really a switch) and got out. And the car rolled away. Maybe I didn't pull it properly, or maybe I tapped a pedal on the way out, but for whatever reason it decided to let me get out of the car without the parking brake on without a warning.
Fortunately, I was only half-out so I was able to jump in and press the footpedal as it rolled away but I spent the next afternoon doing nothing but testing it, on hills and other scenarios. It totally destroyed what little trust I'd built in that feature (I hate unnecessary electronic systems anyway, but I was getting "used" to that to help on hill-starts, etc.).
My question is why? Why does it apply for pointless situations that you always have been used to having to manually doing something (hillstarts), but not when the engine has just been switched off, the driver unbuckled, the door just opened. If you WANT to tow it, it would be a cinch to push the button down deliberately for a second (which indicates definite intention to release the brake), but why would you not auto-apply in the ONE situation that you need to.
I tested it and I can even double-lock the car and it will still let it roll away and not apply the brake. The only "warning" is lack of a brake symbol on the dash.
Useless fecking features, check. Critical safety feature that's obviously going to be needed once the driver gets used to the automatic system, nah, we'll just leave that out.
Now I just have to go back to when I first learned to drive and pause, hands hovering over the wheel, for a second before I open the door in case there's something I did that didn't take effect. It shouldn't be necessary.
Still convinced that I pressed the damn button, though, because I could not replicate that roll-away, but if there's an automatic system like that, it's the work of a second to make it infinitely safer with a simple update.
And yet the population of Britain hasn't grown that much past projections since 1970.
Under EU employment law, we actually DO discriminate on language skills. That's another "absolute bollocks" rumour. Doctors and qualified medical professionals - and especially those from outside the UK - are required to sit tests or demonstrate competency on this exact requirement, in fact. The EU does not affect that at all, and certainly the French would be up in arms against such a law first as they are much more protective of their language.
Agreed on the welfare support, however, but that's not a problem that Brexit fixes. As you say, many other EU countries do just what we need to do.
But if a migrant worker can do a qualified or professional job, pay tax, get paid and still have enough send enough home, who the hell are we to get in their way or say they shouldn't be in the country? Freeloaders, yes, but again, why are "British" freeloaders okay but "EU" ones not? Get rid of them all by changing welfare criteria.
It's possible the UK will recognise my girlfriend as a citizen, but it's by no means guaranteed. The guarantee that existed as an EU member is gone. That affects career decisions. If she gets offered a job back in her home country, it's going to be taken account of. The problem, again, is not the EU or lack of it. It's the complete lack of any official statement, or clear process, to solve the problem.
You could announce THIS SECOND that all current workers in certain sectors would be given permanent leave to remain. But they haven't. Such confusion is going to lose workers as offers change each side of the Channel in the next two years.
Delay, confusion and uncertainty is what we've voted for, over stability, clarity and ALWAYS still having the option of negotiating or leaving at a later date. Exiting is - for the next generation at least - a one way trip.
I can't share the exact quote with you, but my girlfriend is a Dr in a London hospital department. Her lab basically tells you if you have cancer if you are one of the millions of people who live in or around London.
In her department, which requires high-end medically-skilled professionals, her boss posted after Brexit. The basic gist was "Don't worry, everyone, your cancer diagnosis will still be safe in the hands of our department consisting almost entirely of Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, Greek,...... personnel for the time being".
Throughout the NHS the picture is the same. Majority EU and then Non-UK workers. Or universities. Almost all the major universities have majority non-UK lecturers and professors (which actually means something here - a professor is a much higher grade of personnel than in the US, you'll be incredibly lucky to meet a professor outside of academia).
And it's not just as simple as "things will carry on". My girlfriend came over as an EU citizen. She has "leave to remain", so she can stay and live and work in the UK. But to get permanent citizenship, she would have to marry or go through a lengthy immigration process (including a stupid test asking questions about kings and queens that I, as a natural Brit, would be baffled by). Coming out of the EU could revoke that leave to remain. Nobody's sure at the moment and we only have two years to work that out.
If that's taken away, or the paperwork involved in heinous, or even if the process that's required is overwhelmed by all the EU people working in the UK suddenly applying to stay here, then you have quite a situation that is an awful lot of effort to sit through. And they are already disgusted and feeling unwanted because of the Brexit vote.
It's like a state voting itself out of the USA. Imagine how you'd feel as the out-of-state worker who's just been voted against, made to feel unwelcome, contemplating being in a "foreign" state, and may have to jump through all kinds of hoops to carry on your normal life that you've had for YEARS.
We're going to lose an awful lot of talent, from students coming to our universities to the lecturers teaching them, from the waitresses on minimum wages to the doctors earning a fortune. And there's no way that it will become a zero-paperwork process for any of the above, which just adds costs and hassle.
We're now basically a foreign country. If you're American you may not understand that - do you have automatic right to live in any other country in the world? Because before the vote, we have had that guaranteed for decades. We can just up sticks, go to Sweden and start up a life like anyone else, without even bothering with paperwork or visas.
We've (potentially) just thrown that in the bin, which means a lot of people who found that convenient and wanted to live in Britain are now unwelcome and may be forced to leave, or put under such scrutiny that they decide to go to one of the other dozens of countries just 30 miles away, where they don't have any of that hassle.
Watch the NHS, education, and the large businesses. They're all about to suffer, even if they don't immediately collapse.
Not that the postman or delivery drivers don't just lob things over my fence if they can't find a place to put it already, but a drone trying to navigate into people's property, identifying a door or entrance and that it's the correct one (hard enough for humans where large shared houses are concerned), and getting a way to leave it somewhere without dropping it on the cat, smashing into the patio, or having a small child run straight into its blades because of the novelty of the thing? It's a huge task.
To be honest, once you're there it's really just a matter of texting the delivery recipient and getting them to come out and collect the parcel from a box on the side of the van anyway (and you can at least check they have a right to it by making them swipe the original payment card or similar before it will release).
If they aren't in, does it really matter beyond leaving it or taking it away and coming back later if the process is automated? The reason delivery hours are so useless is because those are the working hours of the people doing the delivering. An autonomous system that can text you and say "Are you going to be in in 20 minutes to collect your parcel?" and assuming a default no without a reply, or allow you to accept or reschedule will actually bring it to you WHILE YOU'RE AT HOME at any time of the day or not, at your convenience, even if there's a last minute change.
Pissing about trying to land drones on people's doorsteps from a mobile van full of parcels is really just a waste of parcel space in comparison, let alone the sheer hassle. You can barely fly a decent sized drone in most cities anyway, you can't fly it over people's heads, you can't fly it near buildings, etc. (P.S. There are REASONS for that - I've built drones with schoolchildren and you can do surprising damage with even the most sturdy of drones). Programming dozens of them to deliver any kind of sizeable parcel while moving around the city full of people (Skyscrapers? What are you going to do, land on their balconies?)? It's insane.
Automated delivery vehicle, sure. We're 99% of the way there. Just build an electric van with auto-drive and satnav and a "bank dropbox" on the back with a credit card reader to open it up. Secure. Existing tech. Practical works.
Drones running around neighbourhoods trying to drop parcels like a human? Not even close.
But in the entire EU, for instance, linking such data to anything else - including date of birth, or facebook profile, etc. instantly takes it out of the "it's just public data" into it's "protected data".
And in the EU - under our data protection laws that the US currently refuse to abide by causing all sorts of problems with cloud services - this breach would cost you MILLIONS of dollars. Literally, a hospital was fined hundreds of thousands for losing a handful of medical records that they COULDN'T prove were encrypted when they were put onto a disc for transfer (that was then lost in the post). Get that? A huge fine for not being able to reasonable prove the disc was encrypted before you sent it?
The "solution" that the summary is looking for? Proper data protection laws like everyone else has.
Literally, I work in schools. I can be PERSONALLY liable if data leaks out that includes, say, a child's name and the class they are in , or their date of birth, or their latest exam score. It's all classed as "personal data" and thus, if held on a computer, subject to the Data Protection Act and, as such, if the leak is due to an ability to disprove it was any minor failing on my part, I can be held liable myself. Let alone the company I work for. Let alone if you're just slack and don't follow best practice.
That's how you stop that shit leaking out. You enforce the damn laws.
Literally, have been > this close to having an unrelated member of staff sacked because they ignored the IT user agreement with regards to this and typed in some kid's names and dates of births on a website registered in Panama (i.e. not subject to EU Data Protection). As it was, there was a massive fuss, full backup from my superiors all the way to the top, immediate cessation of use of the service, and complete audit of what services we use along with every-staff warning. Are we a multi-national? Nope, we're a small prep school (ages 5-13). Did data actually get out or get made public? Nope. Did the potential legal consequences scare the shit out of the school leadership? Absolutely.
Is this the norm in Europe? Yes. You can find any number of cases and "it was a rogue employee" just doesn't cut it as a defence any more.
But America won't respect that we have to do this with any data on our people, so we can't use your cloud services for many things AT ALL, you won't provide guarantees that you'll follow EU law while in the EU (Google have, OneCloud have, but others - e.g. iCloud - had not last time I checked - this is why AWS has so many European centres). And you keep asking us for full personal data for flying to America and refuse to secure that in anywhere near the same fashion.
Data protection is something to take seriously. But in a country where your SSN is this magic secret number that can be abused to do powerful things, it's shocking that they still haven't learned that.
Hey, you weren't using FAT32 support in Windows were you? It's a useless feature, right? We'll just patch that out so your USB sticks no longer work, and you can't just open devices that people use.
Sure, only the occasional granddad and IT department will be affected, but you can just buy another OS that does FAT32, right?
The answer: BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT AND PAID FOR IT. And then it was removed. That's a breach of the sales contract. And if you didn't punish it, quite literally companies would take every advantage they could and disable every device you have every couple of years "because you can just buy the new OS, right?".
1) Yes. They do. And point versions are normally fine. When they are updated. But take OpenSSL as an example - numerous programs broke when they had to change the way the library worked. And if something breaks the ABI, the shared library stops and the program needs a rewrite. This does happen all the time.
2) No, maybe not "crash" in the programmer sense. But it will refuse to load, error out, the function won't be found by dlopen or similar. To the user, that's all pretty much the same thing. Take a Windows game and upgrade the library to a non-compatible version. It just stops working, errors out, or falls over itself into an error handler that only the developer can fix.
3) Nope. You think that. It's just not that simple. Manage a network or similar and see. Windows will bodge it by keeping old copies of DLL's around in a cache for particular programs but still be using them (insecure much?) and they can be a bitch to discover which particular version it's decided to use for a particular program. Linux et al pretty much have a "get the updated library" mentality (which is correct, but just breaks "working" programs from the user point of view). If you really want to prove this to yourself, install multiple copies of Cygwin and then see what happens to your programs that use it.
4) I don't WANT to do any of those things. Nobody does. But the reason those kinds of things occur, the reason that hundreds of games in my library have their own copies of SDL libraries and similar or are statically compiled is not because those people want to. It's because that's how you get things to work for your users with the least amount of hassle.
It's not MY security nightmare. It's OURS until we learn to deal with it differently. Our bodge at the moment is to keep old copies of libraries around silently and not tell anyone (happens even on Linux if the shared library is in use, even if only for a limited period of time until certain applications restart). That's not secure. The alternative is break existing user programs in ways that users cannot fix (Sorry, no, you can't do your banking / gaming / browsing until we release a new version). That's not acceptable either, but it is why many developers of non-security-critical programs choose not to do that.
The solution is not as clear cut as you make out, especially when new versions of libraries do anything more than just add features and put in compatibility layers for older functions. The second you deprecate, you've broken userspace. The second you introduce an element to a structure, you've broken userspace. The second you write a new way of doing things without providing a 100% backwards compatible legacy function emulation, you've broken userspace.
That might be acceptable on a closed system with on-hand developers. It's not out there in the real world, especially where people do business or are charging customers for it.
I'm not saying there's a solution. In fact, I'm saying you're blinkered to think that either way is a real-world viable solution. The problem is that we have no alternative and have to choose between "Program may be insecure" or "Program won't work next week without warning".
Because when your program crashes / errors / doesn't work because someone updated the library that it depends on, it looks like you're the idiot.
Because when your program does that because the library isn't installed, or the dependencies were wrongly specified, or API changed (because the old one was declared unfixable without a change of API because of, say, a security issue?), or whatever reason, you get the blame. Have you seen the vitriol you can get as a developer on, say, Steam, because your program needs a certain DirectX DLL and the user has to run the "official" DirectX installer all over again like they did for hundreds of other games. Or.NET. Or even audio DLL's.
And if you upgrade the library, it can break other programs on the same machine and if you don't upgrade, you can break the expectations of new programs or propagate security flaws.
Sure, it's a lovely idea that we get a perfect static API and shared libraries the same on every machine and architecture, but it's a pipe dream. And when you include certain OS into the mix, shared libraries quickly become a nightmare (e.g. Windows DLL hell such as Cygwin still has, etc.). Or are we supposed to compile against a shared library on Linux and a static on Windows?
In the end, sometimes the only way to do these things without getting 500 users on the first day of software release all complaining about install the Visual C++ DLL's yet again, or not working on a fresh system because it needs all the dependencies installing, etc. is to statically compile. Which, for 99% of programs which aren't security critical (Games? Are you going to open a "malicious" savegame?), is the only sensible way to go.
The problem is that shared libraries have no sense of versioning or backwards compatibility and little auto-resolution of dependencies without someone, somewhere literally writing out a list. And, even then, the list of dependencies sucked in might be far too much just because you include support for, say, OGG, MP3 and whatever where most people only care about MP3 but - bam - "apt-get install" automatically brings in dozens of libraries that aren't necessary, potentially giving you more problems than you started with.
The program is that the developer gets the blame for the distribution, installer, third-parties or even just lack of user common sense when it comes to shared libraries.
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Cruise control scares the crap out of me.
I've had a couple of times where I've had it turned on and, yes, you sort of "forget" that it's doing things for you.
Now I'm inherently distrusting of automated controls (I've worked in IT far too long) so my testing of them with a new car I got earlier in the year, the first I've had with such unnecessary "features" because they now come as standard, was extremely distrusting and careful. Hell, I've tested the electronic handbrake dozens of times just to reassure myself that it does what it's supposed to and I can hope to rely on it in an emergency.
But cruise control scares the shit out of me. I can't control the speed at which it accelerates to the target speed (if you slow for traffic and then resume, it appears to accelerate much faster than necessary to get back to speed). And, when driving long distances, it's too tempting to be complacent.
I have to turn it off and stop myself getting lazy, and I'm someone who doesn't answer phones while driving (handsfree or not), doesn't have anything in my windscreen (none of this satnav above the wheel shite), will tell passengers to shut up so I can concentrate on tricky junctions, etc. Not because I get distracted, but because driving takes priority over anything else.
And this is a feature with acceleration, one that won't stop if the driver passes out (no fancy hand-on-the-steering-wheel sensors on my car), and no lane-control / steering options. Literally it will just keep going forward even if I do nothing.
As such, my use of it is absolutely minimal. But self-driving cars? That just scares the crap out of me that those people are on the road and not properly driving.
a) Do you think it's worse than "naturally" breeding a monoculture of cattle, fruit (bananas, etc.) for farming? Because that's been going on for THOUSANDS of years.
b) We don't have hundreds of years of experience with plastic. Or many oil derivatives. Or electromagnetism in devices held next to your head. And yet all the same scaremongering bollocks applies to those too. When it comes to that quantum mechanics is only 100 years old, really, and do you whine that we might be destroying the universe by tinkering with things that are in your computer processors, etc.?
Seriously, rather than knee-jerk, listen to these people. People who have been in science all their lives, performing hundreds or thousands of controlled experiments (including in "the real world", experiments are not all done in the labs) and cannot find a single, verifiable (even if unexplained), repeatable, negative effect from these things.
And there's a reason. It's nothing more than we've been doing for MILLENNIA via "natural" processes (like making horses shag donkeys, or literally gluing one half of one apple tree onto a completely different species of apple tree to form hybrids). Do you complain about pedigree dogs or thoroughbred horses? They are ALL, by definition, genetically engineered to be hybrids that wouldn't have occurred in nature.
And they create monocultures vulnerable to being wiped out by a single disease or pest and if you want to breed one that's "immune"... good luck doing that in the lifetime of that species before they are entirely wiped out and the planet starts starving.
You can be against GM, that's fine. Campaign for open information on it. Make them mark their products. But honestly suggesting they're going to fuck up life in general is like implying that the LHC is going to destroy the universe. And it makes you sound just as stupid.
If you can't solve PRETTY CRITICAL AND OBVIOUS technical and societal problems in one go, don't bother getting on the news crowing about it being the next big thing until you've solved them.
I cite every battery technology story for the last 20 years which claimed to do amazing things and then never made it to market because they just didn't scale at all.
Get a product equivalent to - but slightly better - than the cheap, easy mass-produced way - even at ENORMOUS expense - and you could be onto something. Creating a wheel made of wood doesn't make it a useful invention even if it's innovative, non-patented previously, green-friendly, etc.
This is what "I don't understand the problem" looks like.
The stress on that rubber when it's going in all directions is phenomenal. You're then going to expect it to drive at 70mph forward for hours at a time.
It's "cool" but it's totally impractical and unworkable. Conventional rubber tyre inner tubes are covered with a real tyre (made of steel, rubber and all kinds of layers) for a reason - the inner rubber is intensely fragile and doesn't take kindly to exposure and/or to lots of movement. It certainly won't take kindly to you sliding over stones laterally.
You are literally going to pop your tyres every few hundred miles of use. And as others have pointed out the complexities involved (in braking a tyre like that under extreme stress - 70mph to standing - it's just going to want to slip) mean that it's expensive, untested and impractical beyond belief.
And, I'm sorry, but this doesn't solve parking problems. It creates them. Idiots can park this in a space next to a conventional car making it almost impossible to get back out with a standard steering setup. Until everyone parks sideways, for the cost of a couple of inches of parking space each, it's just liable to misuse.
And I bet this "invention", brought to market and passing safety tests, will a) never appear, b) cost more than you could ever get by shrinking parking spaces by that fraction of space that it "saves".
1) How many email addresses would you like at my domain? I sign up for every service with a unique email and use fake junk names to sign up for junk that forces me, then consign those aliases to the blacklist.
2) They ASK? How d
It's quite simple (and, yes, I've started my own business, been self-employed, and started up the IT in and supported dozens of schools and other places - tuition centres with 4 kids, charities, etc. - from zero or one computer to 1000+ computers over the last 15 years).
You can manage your computers. Or not.
If you want to have a home PC run your business, that's ALWAYS been the price you pay. You don't get domain joining, which means no user management, no RDP, no Bitlocker, no Hyper-V and a million and one other things.
That's fine for a shop which only needs one PC. Or a single user. Or a guy working from home.
But the second you move from "guy working from home" (in whatever sense) to "business involving > 1 people", it's quickly limiting.
If the machine is that critical that you can't afford for Windows 10 to upgrade you willy-nilly and without consent, you need to manage it. How you do that is up to you.
Hire a consultant to set it up once for you and then just forget it, adding a user once in a blue moon and not caring about permissions. Set up file sharing and one-click backups from one of those external hard drives. Whatever. But it's not a managed system. And when something upgrades or breaks, precisely because you don't have an IT guy - even a once-a-month or one-off-visit guy - you're going to be screwed.
That's a choice a lot of places take. Hell, I've seen SCHOOLS managed like that (usually not for very long, I used to specialise in "recoup" recovery and support for schools after disasters, staff losses, budget cuts, etc. - I literally would take on schools with "zero" in the IT budget except my fee [so no new machines, no buying expensive software to solve the problem, etc.] and if I didn't save you at least as much as my fee cost, by setting things up properly, sorting out your licensing, providing free alternatives, etc. over the first year, I would lower the prices to the point that I did. I never once had to lower the prices, and never had a customer argue about it).
But if you're using unmanaged computers, they are unmanaged. You're always going to have this, and have had this in the past. It doesn't matter the OS, the hardware or the setup, you're using unmanaged systems. Running your business like this is no different if it's Windows 10 Home or Windows 95, let's be honest.
A managed system of any size, and I've dealt with schools with 40 pupils and one computer that did everything (including Terminal Services for the kids thin-clients on the same machine as the admin, finance, etc. for the entire school), requires a domain or similar construct to do the simplest of things (like allow a user to log in at two different places and get the same settings). I've seen domains with literally 2 client computers and 5 users. And I'm talking precisely about things like solicitor's offices (those people can REALLY afford a proper IT setup given their data retention obligations and the importance of their access to email, law archive sites, etc.), family businesses, the guy with a single shopfront, etc.
If your system is unmanaged, then you either have to manage it yourself (i.e. install the utilities that block the 10 upgrades), or get someone to do that for you. No matter the OS (I've deployed LikeWise Open and Samba domains, too, it's not hard) or number of computers.
Would you have a telephone in a business that you didn't know how to operate and/or that no-one would come out to fix for you if it broke? Then why do the same for your accounting, your stock control, your stock ordering, your customer emails, etc.? Whether that's a one-page spreadsheet and a copy of Chrome or a full install of Sage or whatever, the principle is the same. Get support (manage your machines!) or do it yourself, or suffer.
If it's honestly not important enough to backup properly, have someone else have a login (if you're ill or whatever), or do things like put a firewall between it and the Internet, then sure, you're unmanaged for a r
There's a huge difference between a security update to keep people safe on their supported copy of Windows, and forcing an upgrade from one still-supported operating system to an entirely different supported operating system.
That's not for the benefit of the users, or the people attacked by botnets. It's literally just a marketing ploy to say how high Windows 10 deployments are.
They could have pushed the SECURITY patches that Windows 7/8/8.1 has issued for it and FORCED those - much fewer people would have cared because it would have broken much less.
Pretty much every software supplier I deal with was caught off-guard and asked us to stop Windows 10 deployment until they could support it. We were doing that anyway, but to suddenly jump OS is not the same as making sure people patch that obvious Windows flaw that's had a security patch out for EVERY version of Windows.
This business you have... does it not run at least a server with a domain? I wouldn't expect Enterprise Windows but anything business-critical I'd expect a server, backups, etc. even if not full redundancy.
Then, it's just a matter of joining the domain and never seeing the upgrades.
This is a site for IT, still, yes?
No car that I've owned in the last 20 years (owned cars even if my wife had to drive them), including models made from 30-5 years ago, not one had that.
Literally, it's only since I've had a 2015 model that I've ever had it on a car I've owned or driven.
Marrying your first cousin in legal in the UK. Always has been.
Europe taking immigrants from outside Europe? Not really a Brexit issue, not directly. We will still have the same problem.
And swarms flooding in? The population is barely around predictions of the same made in the 1970's. We're not "swarmed" anywhere. At all. But observer bias, and all that.
But what really shows me I'm wasting my time is that you've linked to an anti-Muslim article as an example of why Britain should get out of the EU on the basis that "immigrants are Muslim" and "Muslims are trouble" (paraphrasing, but that's basically your gist right?)
There must be a modern equivalent (I can't even be bothered to Google it) where you can just "ring" Google or Siri or Cortana.
I'd be hard-pushed to imagine that isn't already out there, especially given Google Voice.
That function could easily do time-telling or weather forecast or data searches for you without anything more than a computer doing an "OK Google" at the other end and reading back the response like their smartphones do.
One of the experiments JUST about to be performed and analysed - what happens with fire in zero gravity.
Literally never tested properly before and we're having trouble predicting how it would operate and whether the fire equipment would even operate properly on a zero-gravity fire.
The fact is that there's still a ton of shit we DON'T know about living in space. "Muscle degradation" - easy to say, everyone knows it happens in space - but how much, to what extent, affecting who, long-term damage, etc. is still being studied.
And the media-posturing shit not only serves a purpose (encouraging kids into the profession - guess how long police officers spend doing school assemblies, etc.?) but is a tiny minority of what happens. Pretty much the schedule of an astronaut is full on from waking to sleeping.
But don't let me stop you. You get fired off to Jupiter on an untested ship with a fire suppression system that you can't even be sure will do anything. You won't be missed.
1) I had the full driving lessons and test not long ago (about 8 years now, I didn't learn to drive until much later than normal). No, we were never told to put it into gear when parking. Turn the wheels towards the curb on a hill, yes, handbrake, yes, gear, no. It's not taught nowadays except on automatic-only tests.
Additionally, out of all the people I know, ONLY older people use the gearbox as a brake. Handbrakes are seen as the optional part to them (whereas I'm the other way round and was taught that handbrake mattered, gear did not), and often they will park with it in gear and not apply the handbrake at all. It's surprisingly common. One FAMILY I know had a car with a completely non-functional handbrake for years - it drove me insane whenever I drove it. And they always left it in gear, so I had to always knock it out of gear (gearstick waggle on startup procedure), at which point the visibly-applied handbrake did nothing and the car would roll (jolt, actually, because I foot-brake even if it's not technically necessary) before I could start any further procedure.
2) Lots of handbrakes are electronic nowadays. Literally just a switch that can go wrong and not apply and you not notice until you're out of the car. I'm a VERY careful driver. Check my previous post about this on this article. It can still happen.
3) The point is that they thought they had put it into park. The only part they omitted is the handbrake. And some people were basically taught - by their parents or instructors - that gear mattered and not handbrake. So they "Park" it but don't handbrake and - bam - someone dies because it wasn't actually in Park as they thought.
Yes, a careful driver should never roll. But it's not part of the teaching now to do all these things every time. Hell, it's now "Mirror, Signal, Mirror, Manoeuvre" and my parents were only ever taught "Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre".
And I was also taught to never wrench a manual handbrake up without the button held down. Personally, I think that's a load of horseshit, but I humoured them. And never, not even on my test, did I depress the clutch when starting an engine. It's just not necessary in Neutral and I was never told to, never did. Yet my new car insists on it before it will start and it's uncomfortable to me because I'm not used to it.
There's a lot of habit in car-driving and a lot of bad teaching and a lot of it can slip past driving tests. Nobody's claiming that this was anyone's fault but his own, but you should also fix the bugs with your car.
Technically do you ever really "die"? There's so much bacteria and other things running around in the body, it's more like you get recycled.
Nothing goes to waste, but it's just not "you" any more. Stick a body in a sterile atmosphere and come back to teeming life using whatever resources it can for as long as it can, even if that's moulds or bacteria or mites or whatever. Isn't there something like thousands of mites per square foot of the body skin alone?
Technically every story about the future is made-up.
However, I just said "watch". That means "Observe and/or see if I'm right".
Higher education is funded by foreign students paying to study at a UK university. That's much harder if the EU students can't live here automatically but have to go through any kind of process. Those people teaching them are also, a vast proportion, non-UK citizens (with leave to remain). Their lives just got harder too, especially if they are sending taxed money home.
The problem is that 48% of "people" didn't believe that. If 48% of people didn't like broccoli, would we just stop eating it across the world? That's far too low a "minority" to base a huge decision on, and so quickly and completely into a one-way journey.
The people bearing the costs of the NHS, education and business are - everyone. Immigrants included.
Please tell this to every speeder, red-light runner, drink-driver, dickhead on their phone, etc. Right down to those dickheads that cut in at the last minute after 800 yds of warning signs.
Because whenever I do, I get a load of abuse. Everyone up in arms about speed cameras, speed "traps" (they can't "trap" you if you're fucking speeding in the first place, no matter where they site their camera/detector), etc. all the damn time.
Obviously because "everyone does it", it's automatically less dangerous.
As someone who drives a car with an electronic handbrake, it eludes me as to why that feature, which auto-releases when I pull away (DANGEROUS!), and auto-applies when I've braked manually on a hill until the car pulls forward, does NOT automatically apply when the engine is off entirely.
I got out of my car on my drive (fortunately quite flat) after driving a friend to my house. They were in the car and I parked, pulled the handbrake (really a switch) and got out. And the car rolled away. Maybe I didn't pull it properly, or maybe I tapped a pedal on the way out, but for whatever reason it decided to let me get out of the car without the parking brake on without a warning.
Fortunately, I was only half-out so I was able to jump in and press the footpedal as it rolled away but I spent the next afternoon doing nothing but testing it, on hills and other scenarios. It totally destroyed what little trust I'd built in that feature (I hate unnecessary electronic systems anyway, but I was getting "used" to that to help on hill-starts, etc.).
My question is why? Why does it apply for pointless situations that you always have been used to having to manually doing something (hillstarts), but not when the engine has just been switched off, the driver unbuckled, the door just opened. If you WANT to tow it, it would be a cinch to push the button down deliberately for a second (which indicates definite intention to release the brake), but why would you not auto-apply in the ONE situation that you need to.
I tested it and I can even double-lock the car and it will still let it roll away and not apply the brake. The only "warning" is lack of a brake symbol on the dash.
Useless fecking features, check.
Critical safety feature that's obviously going to be needed once the driver gets used to the automatic system, nah, we'll just leave that out.
Now I just have to go back to when I first learned to drive and pause, hands hovering over the wheel, for a second before I open the door in case there's something I did that didn't take effect. It shouldn't be necessary.
Still convinced that I pressed the damn button, though, because I could not replicate that roll-away, but if there's an automatic system like that, it's the work of a second to make it infinitely safer with a simple update.
And yet the population of Britain hasn't grown that much past projections since 1970.
Under EU employment law, we actually DO discriminate on language skills. That's another "absolute bollocks" rumour. Doctors and qualified medical professionals - and especially those from outside the UK - are required to sit tests or demonstrate competency on this exact requirement, in fact. The EU does not affect that at all, and certainly the French would be up in arms against such a law first as they are much more protective of their language.
Agreed on the welfare support, however, but that's not a problem that Brexit fixes. As you say, many other EU countries do just what we need to do.
But if a migrant worker can do a qualified or professional job, pay tax, get paid and still have enough send enough home, who the hell are we to get in their way or say they shouldn't be in the country? Freeloaders, yes, but again, why are "British" freeloaders okay but "EU" ones not? Get rid of them all by changing welfare criteria.
It's possible the UK will recognise my girlfriend as a citizen, but it's by no means guaranteed. The guarantee that existed as an EU member is gone. That affects career decisions. If she gets offered a job back in her home country, it's going to be taken account of. The problem, again, is not the EU or lack of it. It's the complete lack of any official statement, or clear process, to solve the problem.
You could announce THIS SECOND that all current workers in certain sectors would be given permanent leave to remain. But they haven't. Such confusion is going to lose workers as offers change each side of the Channel in the next two years.
Delay, confusion and uncertainty is what we've voted for, over stability, clarity and ALWAYS still having the option of negotiating or leaving at a later date. Exiting is - for the next generation at least - a one way trip.
I can't share the exact quote with you, but my girlfriend is a Dr in a London hospital department. Her lab basically tells you if you have cancer if you are one of the millions of people who live in or around London.
In her department, which requires high-end medically-skilled professionals, her boss posted after Brexit. The basic gist was "Don't worry, everyone, your cancer diagnosis will still be safe in the hands of our department consisting almost entirely of Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, Greek, ...... personnel for the time being".
Throughout the NHS the picture is the same. Majority EU and then Non-UK workers. Or universities. Almost all the major universities have majority non-UK lecturers and professors (which actually means something here - a professor is a much higher grade of personnel than in the US, you'll be incredibly lucky to meet a professor outside of academia).
And it's not just as simple as "things will carry on". My girlfriend came over as an EU citizen. She has "leave to remain", so she can stay and live and work in the UK. But to get permanent citizenship, she would have to marry or go through a lengthy immigration process (including a stupid test asking questions about kings and queens that I, as a natural Brit, would be baffled by). Coming out of the EU could revoke that leave to remain. Nobody's sure at the moment and we only have two years to work that out.
If that's taken away, or the paperwork involved in heinous, or even if the process that's required is overwhelmed by all the EU people working in the UK suddenly applying to stay here, then you have quite a situation that is an awful lot of effort to sit through. And they are already disgusted and feeling unwanted because of the Brexit vote.
It's like a state voting itself out of the USA. Imagine how you'd feel as the out-of-state worker who's just been voted against, made to feel unwelcome, contemplating being in a "foreign" state, and may have to jump through all kinds of hoops to carry on your normal life that you've had for YEARS.
We're going to lose an awful lot of talent, from students coming to our universities to the lecturers teaching them, from the waitresses on minimum wages to the doctors earning a fortune. And there's no way that it will become a zero-paperwork process for any of the above, which just adds costs and hassle.
We're now basically a foreign country. If you're American you may not understand that - do you have automatic right to live in any other country in the world? Because before the vote, we have had that guaranteed for decades. We can just up sticks, go to Sweden and start up a life like anyone else, without even bothering with paperwork or visas.
We've (potentially) just thrown that in the bin, which means a lot of people who found that convenient and wanted to live in Britain are now unwelcome and may be forced to leave, or put under such scrutiny that they decide to go to one of the other dozens of countries just 30 miles away, where they don't have any of that hassle.
Watch the NHS, education, and the large businesses. They're all about to suffer, even if they don't immediately collapse.
And antivirus stops all viruses.
And medicines cures all illnesses.
How many MASS shootings? Much less.
How many shootings in general? Much less.
Go learn statistics, some HUNDREDS of times more shootings in the US.
Sounds like a terrible idea personally.
Not that the postman or delivery drivers don't just lob things over my fence if they can't find a place to put it already, but a drone trying to navigate into people's property, identifying a door or entrance and that it's the correct one (hard enough for humans where large shared houses are concerned), and getting a way to leave it somewhere without dropping it on the cat, smashing into the patio, or having a small child run straight into its blades because of the novelty of the thing? It's a huge task.
To be honest, once you're there it's really just a matter of texting the delivery recipient and getting them to come out and collect the parcel from a box on the side of the van anyway (and you can at least check they have a right to it by making them swipe the original payment card or similar before it will release).
If they aren't in, does it really matter beyond leaving it or taking it away and coming back later if the process is automated? The reason delivery hours are so useless is because those are the working hours of the people doing the delivering. An autonomous system that can text you and say "Are you going to be in in 20 minutes to collect your parcel?" and assuming a default no without a reply, or allow you to accept or reschedule will actually bring it to you WHILE YOU'RE AT HOME at any time of the day or not, at your convenience, even if there's a last minute change.
Pissing about trying to land drones on people's doorsteps from a mobile van full of parcels is really just a waste of parcel space in comparison, let alone the sheer hassle. You can barely fly a decent sized drone in most cities anyway, you can't fly it over people's heads, you can't fly it near buildings, etc. (P.S. There are REASONS for that - I've built drones with schoolchildren and you can do surprising damage with even the most sturdy of drones). Programming dozens of them to deliver any kind of sizeable parcel while moving around the city full of people (Skyscrapers? What are you going to do, land on their balconies?)? It's insane.
Automated delivery vehicle, sure. We're 99% of the way there. Just build an electric van with auto-drive and satnav and a "bank dropbox" on the back with a credit card reader to open it up. Secure. Existing tech. Practical works.
Drones running around neighbourhoods trying to drop parcels like a human? Not even close.
Correct.
But in the entire EU, for instance, linking such data to anything else - including date of birth, or facebook profile, etc. instantly takes it out of the "it's just public data" into it's "protected data".
And in the EU - under our data protection laws that the US currently refuse to abide by causing all sorts of problems with cloud services - this breach would cost you MILLIONS of dollars. Literally, a hospital was fined hundreds of thousands for losing a handful of medical records that they COULDN'T prove were encrypted when they were put onto a disc for transfer (that was then lost in the post). Get that? A huge fine for not being able to reasonable prove the disc was encrypted before you sent it?
The "solution" that the summary is looking for? Proper data protection laws like everyone else has.
Literally, I work in schools. I can be PERSONALLY liable if data leaks out that includes, say, a child's name and the class they are in , or their date of birth, or their latest exam score. It's all classed as "personal data" and thus, if held on a computer, subject to the Data Protection Act and, as such, if the leak is due to an ability to disprove it was any minor failing on my part, I can be held liable myself. Let alone the company I work for. Let alone if you're just slack and don't follow best practice.
That's how you stop that shit leaking out. You enforce the damn laws.
Literally, have been > this close to having an unrelated member of staff sacked because they ignored the IT user agreement with regards to this and typed in some kid's names and dates of births on a website registered in Panama (i.e. not subject to EU Data Protection). As it was, there was a massive fuss, full backup from my superiors all the way to the top, immediate cessation of use of the service, and complete audit of what services we use along with every-staff warning. Are we a multi-national? Nope, we're a small prep school (ages 5-13). Did data actually get out or get made public? Nope. Did the potential legal consequences scare the shit out of the school leadership? Absolutely.
Is this the norm in Europe? Yes. You can find any number of cases and "it was a rogue employee" just doesn't cut it as a defence any more.
But America won't respect that we have to do this with any data on our people, so we can't use your cloud services for many things AT ALL, you won't provide guarantees that you'll follow EU law while in the EU (Google have, OneCloud have, but others - e.g. iCloud - had not last time I checked - this is why AWS has so many European centres). And you keep asking us for full personal data for flying to America and refuse to secure that in anywhere near the same fashion.
Data protection is something to take seriously. But in a country where your SSN is this magic secret number that can be abused to do powerful things, it's shocking that they still haven't learned that.
Hey, you weren't using FAT32 support in Windows were you? It's a useless feature, right? We'll just patch that out so your USB sticks no longer work, and you can't just open devices that people use.
Sure, only the occasional granddad and IT department will be affected, but you can just buy another OS that does FAT32, right?
The answer: BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT AND PAID FOR IT. And then it was removed. That's a breach of the sales contract. And if you didn't punish it, quite literally companies would take every advantage they could and disable every device you have every couple of years "because you can just buy the new OS, right?".
1) Yes. They do. And point versions are normally fine. When they are updated. But take OpenSSL as an example - numerous programs broke when they had to change the way the library worked. And if something breaks the ABI, the shared library stops and the program needs a rewrite. This does happen all the time.
2) No, maybe not "crash" in the programmer sense. But it will refuse to load, error out, the function won't be found by dlopen or similar. To the user, that's all pretty much the same thing. Take a Windows game and upgrade the library to a non-compatible version. It just stops working, errors out, or falls over itself into an error handler that only the developer can fix.
3) Nope. You think that. It's just not that simple. Manage a network or similar and see. Windows will bodge it by keeping old copies of DLL's around in a cache for particular programs but still be using them (insecure much?) and they can be a bitch to discover which particular version it's decided to use for a particular program. Linux et al pretty much have a "get the updated library" mentality (which is correct, but just breaks "working" programs from the user point of view). If you really want to prove this to yourself, install multiple copies of Cygwin and then see what happens to your programs that use it.
4) I don't WANT to do any of those things. Nobody does. But the reason those kinds of things occur, the reason that hundreds of games in my library have their own copies of SDL libraries and similar or are statically compiled is not because those people want to. It's because that's how you get things to work for your users with the least amount of hassle.
It's not MY security nightmare. It's OURS until we learn to deal with it differently. Our bodge at the moment is to keep old copies of libraries around silently and not tell anyone (happens even on Linux if the shared library is in use, even if only for a limited period of time until certain applications restart). That's not secure. The alternative is break existing user programs in ways that users cannot fix (Sorry, no, you can't do your banking / gaming / browsing until we release a new version). That's not acceptable either, but it is why many developers of non-security-critical programs choose not to do that.
The solution is not as clear cut as you make out, especially when new versions of libraries do anything more than just add features and put in compatibility layers for older functions. The second you deprecate, you've broken userspace. The second you introduce an element to a structure, you've broken userspace. The second you write a new way of doing things without providing a 100% backwards compatible legacy function emulation, you've broken userspace.
That might be acceptable on a closed system with on-hand developers. It's not out there in the real world, especially where people do business or are charging customers for it.
I'm not saying there's a solution. In fact, I'm saying you're blinkered to think that either way is a real-world viable solution. The problem is that we have no alternative and have to choose between "Program may be insecure" or "Program won't work next week without warning".
Because when your program crashes / errors / doesn't work because someone updated the library that it depends on, it looks like you're the idiot.
Because when your program does that because the library isn't installed, or the dependencies were wrongly specified, or API changed (because the old one was declared unfixable without a change of API because of, say, a security issue?), or whatever reason, you get the blame. Have you seen the vitriol you can get as a developer on, say, Steam, because your program needs a certain DirectX DLL and the user has to run the "official" DirectX installer all over again like they did for hundreds of other games. Or .NET. Or even audio DLL's.
And if you upgrade the library, it can break other programs on the same machine and if you don't upgrade, you can break the expectations of new programs or propagate security flaws.
Sure, it's a lovely idea that we get a perfect static API and shared libraries the same on every machine and architecture, but it's a pipe dream. And when you include certain OS into the mix, shared libraries quickly become a nightmare (e.g. Windows DLL hell such as Cygwin still has, etc.). Or are we supposed to compile against a shared library on Linux and a static on Windows?
In the end, sometimes the only way to do these things without getting 500 users on the first day of software release all complaining about install the Visual C++ DLL's yet again, or not working on a fresh system because it needs all the dependencies installing, etc. is to statically compile. Which, for 99% of programs which aren't security critical (Games? Are you going to open a "malicious" savegame?), is the only sensible way to go.
The problem is that shared libraries have no sense of versioning or backwards compatibility and little auto-resolution of dependencies without someone, somewhere literally writing out a list. And, even then, the list of dependencies sucked in might be far too much just because you include support for, say, OGG, MP3 and whatever where most people only care about MP3 but - bam - "apt-get install" automatically brings in dozens of libraries that aren't necessary, potentially giving you more problems than you started with.
The program is that the developer gets the blame for the distribution, installer, third-parties or even just lack of user common sense when it comes to shared libraries.