Because companies are lay, cheap, overly optimistic, and not really interested in designing robust products which can be maintained over their lifecycle.
Extra money spent up-front cuts into profitability, adds cost and complexity, and would have to be done by an organization which is cautious and makes long-term plans.
Do you think the marketing guys screeching to get the product out before Christmas give a crap about any of this stuff?
Sure, lots of things can be designed robustly. But increasingly, nobody gives a damn. They just figure you'll just buy another TV.
Consumer electronics aren't exactly being designed to the highest engineering standards known to man. They're being put out the door as cheaply as possible.
Well, I think it probably stems from people in highly specialized fields trying to explain really really domain specific information and getting utterly blank stares.
From the second link:
"My main aim with this video was to make people laugh," Metz says. But she's now finding that the dance helps people understand her work better. "This bridge between academia and the nonacademic world is crucial."
So, you know, have fun with it, and see if you can explain to your mom what you've been researching.
So the legal system needs fixing so we can fix our appliances. Gotcha.
When companies can claim copyright on screws, and use the DMCA to claim you can't refill your ink cartridges... you're damned right the legal system needs fixing.
Companies want to undermine the right of first sale, the right to do as you please with your property, the right to repair your property... all in the name of 'copyright' and protecting their revenue stream by saying you must buy certain things from them.
Honestly, have you not been paying attention? Because companies have been misusing the legal system to tell us what we can do with things we own for years.
They largely do this by telling us we don't actually own them. Which is odd, because they sure as hell expect us to pay full price for them.
This is a camera, designed to be connected to the internet, accessible via an app, built by companies who sell ad and analytics data, and who want access to all of your information so they can figure out how to monetize it.
Anybody who thought this kind of device was intended to guard your privacy or have any real level of security is kidding themselves.
You want it off, unplug it. Better yet, don't even own one.
At this point all of this "internet of crap" which wants to be constantly connected to the internet and accessible via an app on your phone, I just assume it's all got pathetic security, and spies on you FAR more than they let on.
When people buy this stuff and then go all "oh nos, teh security is the sux0r", I just shake my head. You should assume this up front, because it's quite likely true, and anybody who has been around tech long enough should be doing this.
Never had a webcam, and I never will. Because I have zero trust in the people who make them.
The more stuff people try to connect to the internet, the less interested I am in stuff which connects to the internet.
How can you have release notes when you have a piecemeal release which now deliberately hides what a specific update is for? Or when they pull a release and say "no, bad release, use the previous one"?
Microsoft has abdicated release engineering in favor of what is essentially rolling releases.
My guess is MS themselves haven't the slightest frigging idea of what any release actually contains, and they really don't give a damn if your PC works after the update or not... as long as a statistically "good enough" percentage is shown to work with the mandatory bullshit telemetry they've installed so they can measure how shitty of a job they're doing.
Microsoft has decided people are beta testers, and not giving them much choice in the matter.
And I'm afraid for me that means I might take security updates, and pretty much ignore all the "important" and "recommended" ones... because Microsoft is bloody well no longer being honest about what they're installing on our machines.
I like my Windows 8.1 box -- once I turned off all the Metro crap, installed Classic Desktop, and turned it into a useful computer again.
I have no interest in being part of their beta program for WIndows 10, or for that matter even running Windows 10.
But make no mistake about it, with Windows 10 Microsoft is flailing around like a lumbering beast trying to decide what it is, having everyone be the beta testers, and making random and arbitrary decisions about what software they will permit you to keep.
Microsoft has lost the plot, jumped the shark, and shat the bed on this. And they're doing this to us without really giving a damn about our opinions of it.
Release notes would imply some coherent strategy. So far, I don't think they have one of those they can articulate other than "screw you, we're updating your computer and don't give a fuck what you think".
Well, the hypothetical penalty was written by the same people who paid for the law... it basically allows them to say "ooops, we really believed that but we were wrong".
With a wink and a nudge they can simply claim incompetence, and magically everything is OK.
ALL of these laws bought and paid for by the copyright lobby basically give them huge amounts of leeway to do anything, and ultimately they have no penalties. They can misuse those laws all day long, and nothing will happen to them -- because that was designed into it to allow them to do shit like this.
They have no actual burden of proof, and want to reduce that even further to the point of "we've accused this guy of downloading, you need to cut him off from the internet to stop him"; they want to be able to have innuendo count as proof to save them the trouble. And they want no repercussions when they misuse it.
Welcome to the oligarchy, they've stacked the laws so heavily in their favor we can't win, and they've passed on the cost of policing their "rights" to everyone else.
Am I the only person who wants my smart features outside my TV?
Far from; my TV is essentially a monitor... it takes HDMI input from my amp, and otherwise has NO part in anything other than passively displaying what is sent to it.
It doesn't change channels, it doesn't change the volume (in fact it doesn't even make sound). It sure as hell doesn't connect to the internet or do anything 'smart'.
I see no value at all in any of these 'smart' features. I have other devices better suited to the job, and which I trust more.
Just because marketing thinks I want a 'smart TV' doesn't mean I give a shit.
It's just one more annoying place where they can try to put ads, collect my information, and try to take a cut by 'monetizing' my TV experience. Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
And if the assertion he used to be a lawyer for Disney is true, he was bought and paid for long ago, and has no business covering these kinds of trials since he's already drank the koolaid of the copyright lobby.
One has to wonder if he's still getting any financial considerations, or if he's doing this shit for free.
Either way, if he's saying unsubstantiated accusations by an entity like Rightscorp should have any legal standing to be used as proof of anything, he's a terrible judge.
raining grinch upon glad tidings still is a growing minority of americans who just wont. They hold contempt for christmas in october
LOL... I was practically homicidal when I saw the first Christmas movie in my on-screen TV guide before Halloween. And now it seems pretty much every day of the week, in pretty much every time slot, there's at least one Christmas movie in my TV guide.
Christmas has become nothing more than a three-and-a-half month long bullshit marketing cycle.
Who gives a crap about these retail events "losing their meaning"... the underlying holiday has so utterly lost its meaning that it's now just a pathetic reason for retailers to try to get us to buy more shit.
It's a marketing construct created by Coke and run amok over a century or so.
These aren't days with any real significance other than the usual "quick, come buy shit".
It's not like these dates have any significance, and they're pretty much entirely fabricated by and for retail industries for their own benefit.
I've been hearing ads talking about "Black Friday Week Savings"... whatever. It's just marketing hype and bullshit.
Yo Dawg, we hear you like sales, so we have a pre-sale so you can buy stuff while you're waiting for the sale where you can buy stuff before the next sale, for which we'll have a pre-sale and hype it even more.
Sorry, but just because corporations want a two month long shopping frenzy doesn't mean we need to care.
Stop buying shit you don't need because some asshole in marketing is telling you need to run out today and buy it. How did these clowns get everyone acting like trained fucking monkeys?
I'm so glad we've given up on the whole Christmas gift thing... pretty much from before Halloween until middle of January it's one big, over-hyped retail cycle which has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING except corporate profits and pointless consumerism.
Losing their meaning -- what a pathetic statement.
When 'justice' is defined by corporate interests, it's time to stop pretending 'justice' has anything to do with it.
This is about corporations demanding the right to have 3rd party actors make unsubstantiated accusations, and without proof force ISPs to kick people off the internet because corporations say so.
Because they keep buying more badly written laws which basically lets them do anything they want without oversight or penalty by simply claiming copyright infringement.
But somehow I bet the people who claim about 'activist judges' will say this is perfectly OK, because it's in the interests of corporations.
I'm stuck with a Yahoo email because of my ISP. I tolerate it, but I'm not overly invested in it.
I haven't seen the blocking... if they do that to me I'll ignore them.
But what I have seen is them adding to the number of ad-sites embedded in my email by quite a lot lately -- there's now almost 20 external domains they pull in which I'm blocking in just my email. I understand Yahoo is increasingly desperate to pretend they are relevant and to bring in revenue, but it's not my damned problem. I didn't choose to use Yahoo, my ISP made them my email because they didn't want to provide it themselves.
So, Yahoo is something I use at my sufferance... and my patience with them is growing thin.
They're not that good, I don't use them for anything but that specific email that I'm supposed to keep for my ISP. They keep adding ad sites which I keep blocking. If they block me because of that... well, they'll cease to exist to me, really.
Yahoo is a company which really only lives on its own inertia of people who already have Yahoo accounts. Their painful decline into oblivion means they're being bigger assholes in trying to keep revenue.
And when that backfires on them, they might just discover how irrelevant they've become.
Certainly if they had the ability, someone in that crew would have been aware of the Streisand Effect by now and would have said it was an awful idea.
Right, because batshit crazy dictators who routinely have people offed in spectacular ways who disappoint with them really give a crap when someone says "maybe we shouldn't do this".
I don't know or care who hacked Sony. But if you think telling them something is a bad idea is going to work, then I'm afraid you're so utterly clueless about North Korea that you should really stop talking about it.
North Korea is ran by a vicious little psychopath who thinks he can do anything he wants, and whose daddy and granddaddy have been doing the same thing for decades.
if the North Koreans wanted it to go away the right thing to do would have been to let it fail on its own
Never underestimate the flair for the dramatic from a psycho little dictator, or assume that anything they ever do is rational by your or my standards -- these are people who really think they can define reality according to their own whim.
Smart? Sane? Rational? Not bloody likely.
More like bloodthirsty, remorseless, and utterly convinced of their own position as supreme authority.
Seriously, trying to say what you think makes sense in this context is bound to be wrong.
That would be fine, but alarm clocks, bluetooth speakers and all number of devices that you might find in your bedroom can have superbright blue or white LEDs that can mess with your sleep even if you're not aware of waking up.
Well, I propose a two-pronged solution to this radical dilemma:
1) Banish all things with bright LEDs from your bedroom which you think are keeping you awake 2) See 1)
In this way I feel we can optimize the effort required to not have this shit, and leverage our synergies towards a best practice for minimizing things which negatively impact our ability to sleep.
If you feel this is inadequate for your needs, I suggest an aggressive application of electrical tape, or getting over it and stop whining that it's a difficult problem.
I don't want a room full of blinking lights while I'm sleeping, as such I don't have them in the room I sleep in. It's really a fairly simple problem.
Everything should be two factor password system with one being a token/phone/pc
Of course the problem with this is it somehow presumes I trust entities with my damned phone number.
And I'm sorry, but that's not happening... if Google wants my cell number so they can ostensibly text me with two factor authentication, the reality is I simply don't trust them and fully expect this will be used for further marketing/tracking/analytics.
Take the marketing weasels out of the mix and make sure this stuff is to protect my privacy and security.
But until then, every web site which says "oh, just give us your cell number for added security" gets a big "fuck you". Because time and time again they prove they're not to be trusted.
If I am up late at night, I don't like the bright lights and I certainly don't want my sleep cycle messed up.
Well... then the easier solution is not to be up late at night on your computer and messing up your sleep schedule... it's too late to worry about screwing up your sleep schedule while you're in the middle of screwing up your sleep schedule.;-)
Are you seriously suggesting that highlighting the fact there are gaping security holes in these devices will make the problem worse? And you're suggesting that pretending it's not happening and not highlighting that the existing security is utterly pathetic is somehow better?
I seriously hope you don't work in computer security.
These things are already insecure, whether we talk about it or not. At least talking about it might cause someone to actually do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because companies are lay, cheap, overly optimistic, and not really interested in designing robust products which can be maintained over their lifecycle.
Extra money spent up-front cuts into profitability, adds cost and complexity, and would have to be done by an organization which is cautious and makes long-term plans.
Do you think the marketing guys screeching to get the product out before Christmas give a crap about any of this stuff?
Sure, lots of things can be designed robustly. But increasingly, nobody gives a damn. They just figure you'll just buy another TV.
Consumer electronics aren't exactly being designed to the highest engineering standards known to man. They're being put out the door as cheaply as possible.
I won't even begin to claim to understand it ... but here's the wikipedia link for those of us who need a high level explanation of it.
Admittedly, I could use a "dance your PhD"/crayola explanation of this.
Even the wiki article is way over my head too.
The second link has his username embedded in it ... which essentially means he's publishing links to articles he's put elsewhere.
So, yeah, one can see how it's a little self-promoting.
Well, I think it probably stems from people in highly specialized fields trying to explain really really domain specific information and getting utterly blank stares.
From the second link:
So, you know, have fun with it, and see if you can explain to your mom what you've been researching.
Honestly, un-clench a little.
Because it's hilarious.
Why does it need to have a reason?
When companies can claim copyright on screws, and use the DMCA to claim you can't refill your ink cartridges ... you're damned right the legal system needs fixing.
Companies want to undermine the right of first sale, the right to do as you please with your property, the right to repair your property ... all in the name of 'copyright' and protecting their revenue stream by saying you must buy certain things from them.
Honestly, have you not been paying attention? Because companies have been misusing the legal system to tell us what we can do with things we own for years.
They largely do this by telling us we don't actually own them. Which is odd, because they sure as hell expect us to pay full price for them.
This is a camera, designed to be connected to the internet, accessible via an app, built by companies who sell ad and analytics data, and who want access to all of your information so they can figure out how to monetize it.
Anybody who thought this kind of device was intended to guard your privacy or have any real level of security is kidding themselves.
You want it off, unplug it. Better yet, don't even own one.
At this point all of this "internet of crap" which wants to be constantly connected to the internet and accessible via an app on your phone, I just assume it's all got pathetic security, and spies on you FAR more than they let on.
When people buy this stuff and then go all "oh nos, teh security is the sux0r", I just shake my head. You should assume this up front, because it's quite likely true, and anybody who has been around tech long enough should be doing this.
Never had a webcam, and I never will. Because I have zero trust in the people who make them.
The more stuff people try to connect to the internet, the less interested I am in stuff which connects to the internet.
How can you have release notes when you have a piecemeal release which now deliberately hides what a specific update is for? Or when they pull a release and say "no, bad release, use the previous one"?
Microsoft has abdicated release engineering in favor of what is essentially rolling releases.
My guess is MS themselves haven't the slightest frigging idea of what any release actually contains, and they really don't give a damn if your PC works after the update or not ... as long as a statistically "good enough" percentage is shown to work with the mandatory bullshit telemetry they've installed so they can measure how shitty of a job they're doing.
Microsoft has decided people are beta testers, and not giving them much choice in the matter.
And I'm afraid for me that means I might take security updates, and pretty much ignore all the "important" and "recommended" ones ... because Microsoft is bloody well no longer being honest about what they're installing on our machines.
I like my Windows 8.1 box -- once I turned off all the Metro crap, installed Classic Desktop, and turned it into a useful computer again.
I have no interest in being part of their beta program for WIndows 10, or for that matter even running Windows 10.
But make no mistake about it, with Windows 10 Microsoft is flailing around like a lumbering beast trying to decide what it is, having everyone be the beta testers, and making random and arbitrary decisions about what software they will permit you to keep.
Microsoft has lost the plot, jumped the shark, and shat the bed on this. And they're doing this to us without really giving a damn about our opinions of it.
Release notes would imply some coherent strategy. So far, I don't think they have one of those they can articulate other than "screw you, we're updating your computer and don't give a fuck what you think".
LOL, you must be new here.
Slashdot is a up into the 4 million or so accounts created range, some subset of which are smart and knowledgeable.
Another significant subset are a bunch of poo-flinging monkeys screeching at one another.
You really really can't generalize about the makeup of Slashdot.
Well, the hypothetical penalty was written by the same people who paid for the law ... it basically allows them to say "ooops, we really believed that but we were wrong".
With a wink and a nudge they can simply claim incompetence, and magically everything is OK.
ALL of these laws bought and paid for by the copyright lobby basically give them huge amounts of leeway to do anything, and ultimately they have no penalties. They can misuse those laws all day long, and nothing will happen to them -- because that was designed into it to allow them to do shit like this.
They have no actual burden of proof, and want to reduce that even further to the point of "we've accused this guy of downloading, you need to cut him off from the internet to stop him"; they want to be able to have innuendo count as proof to save them the trouble. And they want no repercussions when they misuse it.
Welcome to the oligarchy, they've stacked the laws so heavily in their favor we can't win, and they've passed on the cost of policing their "rights" to everyone else.
Far from; my TV is essentially a monitor ... it takes HDMI input from my amp, and otherwise has NO part in anything other than passively displaying what is sent to it.
It doesn't change channels, it doesn't change the volume (in fact it doesn't even make sound). It sure as hell doesn't connect to the internet or do anything 'smart'.
I see no value at all in any of these 'smart' features. I have other devices better suited to the job, and which I trust more.
Just because marketing thinks I want a 'smart TV' doesn't mean I give a shit.
It's just one more annoying place where they can try to put ads, collect my information, and try to take a cut by 'monetizing' my TV experience. Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
And if the assertion he used to be a lawyer for Disney is true, he was bought and paid for long ago, and has no business covering these kinds of trials since he's already drank the koolaid of the copyright lobby.
One has to wonder if he's still getting any financial considerations, or if he's doing this shit for free.
Either way, if he's saying unsubstantiated accusations by an entity like Rightscorp should have any legal standing to be used as proof of anything, he's a terrible judge.
LOL ... I was practically homicidal when I saw the first Christmas movie in my on-screen TV guide before Halloween. And now it seems pretty much every day of the week, in pretty much every time slot, there's at least one Christmas movie in my TV guide.
Christmas has become nothing more than a three-and-a-half month long bullshit marketing cycle.
Who gives a crap about these retail events "losing their meaning" ... the underlying holiday has so utterly lost its meaning that it's now just a pathetic reason for retailers to try to get us to buy more shit.
It's a marketing construct created by Coke and run amok over a century or so.
I hope people don't buy stuff.
These aren't days with any real significance other than the usual "quick, come buy shit".
It's not like these dates have any significance, and they're pretty much entirely fabricated by and for retail industries for their own benefit.
I've been hearing ads talking about "Black Friday Week Savings" ... whatever. It's just marketing hype and bullshit.
Yo Dawg, we hear you like sales, so we have a pre-sale so you can buy stuff while you're waiting for the sale where you can buy stuff before the next sale, for which we'll have a pre-sale and hype it even more.
Sorry, but just because corporations want a two month long shopping frenzy doesn't mean we need to care.
Stop buying shit you don't need because some asshole in marketing is telling you need to run out today and buy it. How did these clowns get everyone acting like trained fucking monkeys?
I'm so glad we've given up on the whole Christmas gift thing ... pretty much from before Halloween until middle of January it's one big, over-hyped retail cycle which has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING except corporate profits and pointless consumerism.
Losing their meaning -- what a pathetic statement.
When 'justice' is defined by corporate interests, it's time to stop pretending 'justice' has anything to do with it.
This is about corporations demanding the right to have 3rd party actors make unsubstantiated accusations, and without proof force ISPs to kick people off the internet because corporations say so.
Because they keep buying more badly written laws which basically lets them do anything they want without oversight or penalty by simply claiming copyright infringement.
But somehow I bet the people who claim about 'activist judges' will say this is perfectly OK, because it's in the interests of corporations.
This shit has to stop.
Companies are so bad about security these days that I refuse to differentiate between stupidity and malice.
If they do it to sell ads, or they do it to make support easy but don't have proper security people review it ... I don't see much difference.
Basically you're a moron you didn't read the rest of what I wrote and now you're making up stupid things?
No, it's not the only fucking email I have access to.
But, hey, go be stupid. That's what the internet is for, apparently.
I'm stuck with a Yahoo email because of my ISP. I tolerate it, but I'm not overly invested in it.
I haven't seen the blocking ... if they do that to me I'll ignore them.
But what I have seen is them adding to the number of ad-sites embedded in my email by quite a lot lately -- there's now almost 20 external domains they pull in which I'm blocking in just my email. I understand Yahoo is increasingly desperate to pretend they are relevant and to bring in revenue, but it's not my damned problem. I didn't choose to use Yahoo, my ISP made them my email because they didn't want to provide it themselves.
So, Yahoo is something I use at my sufferance ... and my patience with them is growing thin.
They're not that good, I don't use them for anything but that specific email that I'm supposed to keep for my ISP. They keep adding ad sites which I keep blocking. If they block me because of that ... well, they'll cease to exist to me, really.
Yahoo is a company which really only lives on its own inertia of people who already have Yahoo accounts. Their painful decline into oblivion means they're being bigger assholes in trying to keep revenue.
And when that backfires on them, they might just discover how irrelevant they've become.
Right, because batshit crazy dictators who routinely have people offed in spectacular ways who disappoint with them really give a crap when someone says "maybe we shouldn't do this".
I don't know or care who hacked Sony. But if you think telling them something is a bad idea is going to work, then I'm afraid you're so utterly clueless about North Korea that you should really stop talking about it.
North Korea is ran by a vicious little psychopath who thinks he can do anything he wants, and whose daddy and granddaddy have been doing the same thing for decades.
Never underestimate the flair for the dramatic from a psycho little dictator, or assume that anything they ever do is rational by your or my standards -- these are people who really think they can define reality according to their own whim.
Smart? Sane? Rational? Not bloody likely.
More like bloodthirsty, remorseless, and utterly convinced of their own position as supreme authority.
Seriously, trying to say what you think makes sense in this context is bound to be wrong.
Sorry, but corporate greed is utterly indistinguishable from malice.
Which means it's easier to attribute pretty much anything done by a corporation as a form of malice, and stop trying to make excuses for them.
Well, I propose a two-pronged solution to this radical dilemma:
1) Banish all things with bright LEDs from your bedroom which you think are keeping you awake
2) See 1)
In this way I feel we can optimize the effort required to not have this shit, and leverage our synergies towards a best practice for minimizing things which negatively impact our ability to sleep.
If you feel this is inadequate for your needs, I suggest an aggressive application of electrical tape, or getting over it and stop whining that it's a difficult problem.
I don't want a room full of blinking lights while I'm sleeping, as such I don't have them in the room I sleep in. It's really a fairly simple problem.
Of course the problem with this is it somehow presumes I trust entities with my damned phone number.
And I'm sorry, but that's not happening ... if Google wants my cell number so they can ostensibly text me with two factor authentication, the reality is I simply don't trust them and fully expect this will be used for further marketing/tracking/analytics.
Take the marketing weasels out of the mix and make sure this stuff is to protect my privacy and security.
But until then, every web site which says "oh, just give us your cell number for added security" gets a big "fuck you". Because time and time again they prove they're not to be trusted.
Well ... then the easier solution is not to be up late at night on your computer and messing up your sleep schedule ... it's too late to worry about screwing up your sleep schedule while you're in the middle of screwing up your sleep schedule. ;-)
Really? This is what we're calling articles now?
"An AC wants bigger e-reader screens, what would you change".
Are you joking us?
Thanks, Souskill, for continuing to demonstrate the downward spiral Slashdot is in these days.
I'm not saying this is the singularly worst "Ask Slashdot" ever, but it's got to be up there.
Are you seriously suggesting that highlighting the fact there are gaping security holes in these devices will make the problem worse? And you're suggesting that pretending it's not happening and not highlighting that the existing security is utterly pathetic is somehow better?
I seriously hope you don't work in computer security.
These things are already insecure, whether we talk about it or not. At least talking about it might cause someone to actually do something about it.