XPrivacy does exactly this, but AFIAK, it doesn't work well with Android 5 or newer. There are a lot of applications which ask for everything. For example, the Cracked app used to demand access to the GPS, even though all it just did was be a shell for Web content.
Another app that fetches everything is Yik Yak. It goes through the phone to find any individual IDs it can, so it can permanently tie an "anonymous" ID to the phone and the person.
Location data isn't too hard to fake. Enable mock locations... done. However, stuff like slurping contacts, SMS records, advert IDs, and other items, needs something like XPrivacy, DonkeyGuard, or something decent like that.
That is only if the app developer allows that in the manifest. Otherwise, the app falls back to the all or nothing permission model.
The best solution is XPrivacy/XPosed, but IIRC, that hasn't worked since Android 5 came out. Second best solution is either CyanogenMod, or if you can read Chinese and choose to trust the app, LBE Privacy Master.
Same here. I have had generations of phones. The 6S is the first phone I've had which requires being placed on a shelf, TP dispenser, or otherwise held, otherwise when using a restroom stall, it will just fall out of the trousers. Every generation before that (3, 4, 4S, 5, 5S), not an issue.
Some people just like large phones or phablets. I prefer a smaller phone, especially when using a more protective case like an Otterbox Defender, because if I'm out camping or doing some maintenance on a vehicle, I don't have to worry about something happening to the phone.
There will be a place for HDDs, with their price advantage... but already, SSDs are storing stuff more densely than HDDS can. HDDs that use SMR or HAMR will be useful, either as a lower tier for storage, or be used for home NAS servers, just because they are relatively inexpensive, and at the low price point, a 3 TB WD Red HDD for a C-note is a lot cheaper than a 3TB SSD for that use. No, you won't want to run iSCSI from that array, but for stashing files and having some redundancy, it is good enough.
LTO 7 WORM tapes seem to be the best thing for this as of now. Not cheap for the drive, but cartridges are not bad, and have a very long archival life.
After that, perhaps Amazon Glacier comes to mind. Cheap to get the data in... costly to get it out.
Depends on how they are trying to kill it. If they forbid solar inverters from touching the grid, well, the inverters get replaced by battery chargers, and one uses a battery bank that is fed by the panels, or if there isn't enough solar to keep them topped off, then mains power.
Rooftop solar is a "why not", rather than a "why". Yes, it has a high initial cost, but once in place, the cost for upkeep is relatively low, and it benefits everyone involved.
I have some cautious optimism. I would love to see some ability for Linux to run AD, Exchange, and other core services, as well as be better managed in domains/trees/forests. Winbind is very fiddly, and it would be nice to see something (preferably OSS) from MS to make Linux variants work with AD with fewer headaches, so I can have the boxes be locked and loaded into the domain in the kickstart file, with whatever GPOs pushed from on high to the boxes before they even reboot the first time.
Some other MS features would be nice as well. ReFS and Storage Spaces/Storage Spaces Direct would be nice, especially if usable as root filesystem. Merging KVM and Hyper-V, especially if coupled with a LVM layer.
Of course, seeing Linux features in Windows can't hurt. SSH, first and foremost comes to mind.
One thing I've wondered about is the concept of password recovery providers. Not a central website, since it can get compromised, but different organizations, similar to how OpenID is set up.
When setting an account with some provider, one chooses a recovery provider or providers, and what methods will be used to get back the account. This way, if someone has their own dedicated VM or device that makes an OATH number, that can be used. Another provider sends an encrypted SMS message, and has an app that decrypts it for the user. Still another provider sends out a physical card via registered mail with a bunch of scratch-out blanks. Another provider has a database of recovery questions (similar to how PGP Server used to have a way to recover keys), and someone uses x out of y questions (where are the bodies buried) to get a valid recovery code.
This would provide a lot of flexibility, but still have solid security. For example, someone might have a basic E-mail account, and for them, just a "click here to get a recovery code" message is good enough. Other people might want a physical device, similar to a SecurID "calculator" that is offline and airgapped, requires a PIN to get a recovery code. Still other people just want to have a scratch-off card with passwords in one lock-box, and SMS messages on their phone for general use.
I've also wondered about a device similar to the SecurID fob, except with no battery (plug it into a USB port to power it, but it doesn't use the plug for data), it would keep sync with time via a 3G connection, but would function as an offline device (punch button, get recovery code.) This could be tossed in the desk drawer, safe, or other spots, for something to recover an account, should all else fail. If it used a standard TKIP protocol, it would be simple, and decently secure.
There is always liquid cooling. A data center usually has a decent water chilling system present, so if inverters could be cooled by that (likely via a heat exchanger, so a leak wouldn't be a major disaster), it would be more efficient than ones that are air cooled. Liquid cooling is maturing slowly, but surely, the main advance are better closed loop systems which make it easier to go this route.
Not all encryption. -some- encryption, namely RSA and public key based algos that can be factored with Shor's algorithm. We will just wind up moving to UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar), lattice-based crypto, new ECC based encryption, or another method, and life will go on, just like it did when MD5 was weakened, and DES's short key space was found to be easily run through.
Life will go on.
As for symmetric encryption (AES, IDEA, BLOWFISH), quantum crypto won't do much for this, so there is no need to worry here.
IIRC, Time Machine backups have an ACL, similar to what SELinux uses, to inhibit writing to TM backup disks. However, it may not be that difficult for software to override that, or just write to/dev/diskwhatever to zero out the backups.
Time Machine is best used with another backup program. Mozy comes to mind, or back up via TM to a NAS, and have the data stashed there, saved to another location via snapshots (either by an automated process like what Synology and QNAP offer), or just tar the NAS share, pipe it to a zbackup repository.
Time Machine is the Mac's built in backup program. Time Capsule is Apple's firewall/switch/Wi-Fi AP/NAS which allows one to back up (using Time Machine) to it, optionally encrypted.
As an alternative to the Time Capsule, especially if one already has a wireless AP, switch, or router, and just needs a NAS, a Synology or QNAP device is cheaper, and can store more. A 3TB Time Capsule runs about $400. You can buy a Synology 216se for $150, add two WD Reds for about $100 each, and have the same functionality as the TC... except with RAID 1 [1].
One backup plan that I have been doing is having more than one NAS. My first NAS is where my shares are directly attached for backups of my desktop boxes. The second NAS doesn't interact with any machines other than the first NAS, and is where the first NAS pushes snapshots to. Synology's replication software (which does deduplicate) can keep up to 256 snapshots, space permitting, so if malware does zero out the NAS shares, those can be restored to a pre-calamity state, and files restored to desktops.
A failed drive is that... a failed drive. Any malware worth its salt will be encrypting/corrupting all data on external backup drives. It doesn't matter if you have RAID 7+1, replicated among three active/active peers. If the machine can get to it and rm/corrupt files, the backups are worthless.
What really needs do be done is to have an outside server SSH into the desktop machine and dump the files to someplace the desktop cannot touch by normal means. On Macs, this isn't too difficult -- have a decent Synology NAS with zbackup installed do a dump.
vSANs are going to be more popular once Windows Server 2016 hits the server rooms, because of Storage Spaces Direct. Of course, it would be nice if one could interconnect machines via Infiniband like Isilon nodes do, but even though the technology is somewhat shaky as of now, the buzzword of hyperconvergence is out there, and there may be use cases for it, where one can just add more compute nodes and gain more disk space to the backing store.
Will it replace a SAN? Not really. In fact, it seems like enterprises are moving to stuff like Tintri and PureStorage, because those tend to be better for the specialized purposes of having the I/O needed for virtualization. vSANs do have their place, but it will be hard to convince people to stop using their tried and true fiber channel fabric, especially for production critical tasks. Eventually, just like virtualization and SANs, it will wind up in production server farms, but vSAN stuff will have to earn its bones first, just like any new technology.
Exchange/ActiveSync can be configured to have various policies be placed on one's device before it allows the device to download/sync mail.
One way to get around this is to use the Outlook app, or on Android, one of the other Exchange programs like Nine, Touchdown, RoadSync, or others, where if the organization decides to wipe the phone, just the app's data gets erased, not your entire device.
There used to be a company called Divide which made a decent product that was good at separating work stuff from one's usual items on a phone, but that disappeared into Google a few years ago. Ideally, it would be nice for virtualization to hit phones, so the work stuff can sit in a VM, well away from malware and other items that might get on a BYOD item.
I would feel much safer with more self-driving cars on the road:
1: Fewer drivers texting, drunk, drugged, stoned, putting on makeup, shaving, or all the above. 2: If there -were- a crash, it would be well logged. No he said/she said BS. 3: Computers react faster than I do. Thus, it would be stopping before I would have a foot on the stop pedal. 4: Computers don't get road rage. This means I can find a gap to merge into a highway if driving, or the computer can merge in itself. 5: Of course, there will be edge cases, but those would be far rarer than a case of too slow reactions, or some type of fumble. One fender bender at 2mph with tens to hundreds of millions of miles on the road is a lot better than any human can do. This means my self-driving car is safer on the roads, which is a benefit to other commuters. 6: Self-driving vehicles actually will give the occupants the time spent commuting to do things that actually may benefit them, be it reading, jamming to a new album, or just catching a snooze before work.
I'm curious if the Intel drives doing this are consumer level or enterprise grade drives. The Intel enterprise grade drives did quite well at a previous job where they were used to handle an insane amount of random I/O hitting them on a constant basis.
Of course, the difference between the two are the capacitors, which hold enough electricity to finish the in-flight write transaction, so a hard power off is less likely to cause the controller to lose its ability to find pages (the SSD equivalent of the thumping noise a HDD makes when it can't find the track servos, so hits the center hub constantly.)
One reason companies buy from Dell and HP is that models don't change. I buy a DL380 G9, I get a DL380G8, and I know what it will have onboard. This is why a lot of companies specify certain models and configs, with special exceptions given for items that are not on this list.
Minor updates tend to get enterprise customers very irritable, especially in environments where each computer has to be virtually identical, or else it becomes an administrative nightmare, especially for having parts on hand (usually local drives used for loading ESXi, power supplies, RAM, etc.)
The nice thing about the enterprise level is that newer machines use UEFI... but it is quite easy to turn off (and oftentimes, is disabled with MBR emulation the default until changed.) If you want Secure UEFI, you turn it on via the BIOS screen, or the web page on the iDRAC/iLO controller.
Some drive arrays power down hot spares to save energy (and periodically powering them on to run a drive check). Even though it isn't much energy, keeping platters spinning does take some, and then the HVAC system has to deal with the heat from the platters.
The thing about SSD is that it can store data using zero watts. For dense data centers where power management is essential, this ability is critical, even if SSDs cost more, for saving wattage and showing off a "green" data center. Since SSDs are denser than HDDs, are more shock resistant, and -tend- to have a better MTBF, once cost comes down, there may be no need to bother with a new HDD form factor at all.
Of course, this doesn't say that SSDs are perfect. When they lose data, it tends to be gone for good, as opposed to HDDs where the magnetic domains are present, and can be accessed somehow, barring physical damage from head crashes.
There was one drive maker which actually did this. They had two drive platters at opposite ends, each independent of the other, and either could fail, letting the other completely take over. I've wondered why this isn't more commonplace, perhaps a drive form factor with four heads, all active/active and can handle a head array failing (perhaps lighting up SMART.) This wouldn't just allow for four times the I/O, but allow four different threads to write at the same time, which is useful for virtualization, although these days, virtualization should just go to SSD or a large I/O buffer due to all the random reads/writes.
This can be doable, because this is intended for servers, so if drive companies could make the platters, server companies make the hot-pluggable bays, and third party makers make enclosures so the drives can be used as external drives.
I can see a drive using 2.5" platters (so less re-engineering would have to be done by the HDD makers, as opposed to a different diameter), stacking a good number of them in an enclosure. This would allow for some decent sustained I/O, since it could read/write from all those sides at once. Add HAMR and SMR, and these would be quite useful for low tier, read-mostly storage. It would be expected that there would be a very large I/O cache, or an array of SSDs to handle the random reads/writes, because of the nature of these drives.
MTBF, bit rot, and redundancy would be paramount, so hopefully these drives could be designed from the ground up to be more reliable, be it a larger bad sector relocation table, more ECC/parity, drive heads able to take more shock, or so on.
For the consumer, perhaps combine the physical drive with some SSD, so that the flash part works as a landing zone for data, minimizing the amount of random I/O the actual spinning platters have to deal with.
It might just be good PR for the company anyway, especially if the fixes are significant. What does the company gain by not releasing the fixes? If it isn't released, it might wind up a dead-end fork being worth zero value to the company, while merging all changes results in not just the fixes from the OP, but other people's contributions as well, making for a better product for all involved.
There will always be a niche for manual coders for platforms that either have very little headroom (e.g. a coding house writing code in whatever is the language is in vogue this month couldn't do.) There are still many devices which count RAM in bytes, or even nybbles, as opposed to megs or gigs. Similar with storage, which would be in kilobytes, so having the latest language with all the libraries and moving parts just isn't going to fit.
Agreed, a currency shouldn't need to be blessed... but it is a lot better than being outright banned, or causing someone to wind up on lists because one uses that currency. Is this a step forward? Who knows. Since BitCoin transactions leave a definite trail behind forever and a day, there might be more criminals using the BTC rope to hang themselves if the currency is more mainstream.
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XPrivacy does exactly this, but AFIAK, it doesn't work well with Android 5 or newer. There are a lot of applications which ask for everything. For example, the Cracked app used to demand access to the GPS, even though all it just did was be a shell for Web content.
Another app that fetches everything is Yik Yak. It goes through the phone to find any individual IDs it can, so it can permanently tie an "anonymous" ID to the phone and the person.
Location data isn't too hard to fake. Enable mock locations... done. However, stuff like slurping contacts, SMS records, advert IDs, and other items, needs something like XPrivacy, DonkeyGuard, or something decent like that.
That is only if the app developer allows that in the manifest. Otherwise, the app falls back to the all or nothing permission model.
The best solution is XPrivacy/XPosed, but IIRC, that hasn't worked since Android 5 came out. Second best solution is either CyanogenMod, or if you can read Chinese and choose to trust the app, LBE Privacy Master.
Same here. I have had generations of phones. The 6S is the first phone I've had which requires being placed on a shelf, TP dispenser, or otherwise held, otherwise when using a restroom stall, it will just fall out of the trousers. Every generation before that (3, 4, 4S, 5, 5S), not an issue.
Some people just like large phones or phablets. I prefer a smaller phone, especially when using a more protective case like an Otterbox Defender, because if I'm out camping or doing some maintenance on a vehicle, I don't have to worry about something happening to the phone.
There will be a place for HDDs, with their price advantage... but already, SSDs are storing stuff more densely than HDDS can. HDDs that use SMR or HAMR will be useful, either as a lower tier for storage, or be used for home NAS servers, just because they are relatively inexpensive, and at the low price point, a 3 TB WD Red HDD for a C-note is a lot cheaper than a 3TB SSD for that use. No, you won't want to run iSCSI from that array, but for stashing files and having some redundancy, it is good enough.
LTO 7 WORM tapes seem to be the best thing for this as of now. Not cheap for the drive, but cartridges are not bad, and have a very long archival life.
After that, perhaps Amazon Glacier comes to mind. Cheap to get the data in... costly to get it out.
Depends on how they are trying to kill it. If they forbid solar inverters from touching the grid, well, the inverters get replaced by battery chargers, and one uses a battery bank that is fed by the panels, or if there isn't enough solar to keep them topped off, then mains power.
Rooftop solar is a "why not", rather than a "why". Yes, it has a high initial cost, but once in place, the cost for upkeep is relatively low, and it benefits everyone involved.
I have some cautious optimism. I would love to see some ability for Linux to run AD, Exchange, and other core services, as well as be better managed in domains/trees/forests. Winbind is very fiddly, and it would be nice to see something (preferably OSS) from MS to make Linux variants work with AD with fewer headaches, so I can have the boxes be locked and loaded into the domain in the kickstart file, with whatever GPOs pushed from on high to the boxes before they even reboot the first time.
Some other MS features would be nice as well. ReFS and Storage Spaces/Storage Spaces Direct would be nice, especially if usable as root filesystem. Merging KVM and Hyper-V, especially if coupled with a LVM layer.
Of course, seeing Linux features in Windows can't hurt. SSH, first and foremost comes to mind.
Password recovery is in itself, an art form.
One thing I've wondered about is the concept of password recovery providers. Not a central website, since it can get compromised, but different organizations, similar to how OpenID is set up.
When setting an account with some provider, one chooses a recovery provider or providers, and what methods will be used to get back the account. This way, if someone has their own dedicated VM or device that makes an OATH number, that can be used. Another provider sends an encrypted SMS message, and has an app that decrypts it for the user. Still another provider sends out a physical card via registered mail with a bunch of scratch-out blanks. Another provider has a database of recovery questions (similar to how PGP Server used to have a way to recover keys), and someone uses x out of y questions (where are the bodies buried) to get a valid recovery code.
This would provide a lot of flexibility, but still have solid security. For example, someone might have a basic E-mail account, and for them, just a "click here to get a recovery code" message is good enough. Other people might want a physical device, similar to a SecurID "calculator" that is offline and airgapped, requires a PIN to get a recovery code. Still other people just want to have a scratch-off card with passwords in one lock-box, and SMS messages on their phone for general use.
I've also wondered about a device similar to the SecurID fob, except with no battery (plug it into a USB port to power it, but it doesn't use the plug for data), it would keep sync with time via a 3G connection, but would function as an offline device (punch button, get recovery code.) This could be tossed in the desk drawer, safe, or other spots, for something to recover an account, should all else fail. If it used a standard TKIP protocol, it would be simple, and decently secure.
There is always liquid cooling. A data center usually has a decent water chilling system present, so if inverters could be cooled by that (likely via a heat exchanger, so a leak wouldn't be a major disaster), it would be more efficient than ones that are air cooled. Liquid cooling is maturing slowly, but surely, the main advance are better closed loop systems which make it easier to go this route.
Not all encryption. -some- encryption, namely RSA and public key based algos that can be factored with Shor's algorithm. We will just wind up moving to UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar), lattice-based crypto, new ECC based encryption, or another method, and life will go on, just like it did when MD5 was weakened, and DES's short key space was found to be easily run through.
Life will go on.
As for symmetric encryption (AES, IDEA, BLOWFISH), quantum crypto won't do much for this, so there is no need to worry here.
Opera has BitTorrent built in, but disabled by default. Not too hard to enable/use it.
IIRC, Time Machine backups have an ACL, similar to what SELinux uses, to inhibit writing to TM backup disks. However, it may not be that difficult for software to override that, or just write to /dev/diskwhatever to zero out the backups.
Time Machine is best used with another backup program. Mozy comes to mind, or back up via TM to a NAS, and have the data stashed there, saved to another location via snapshots (either by an automated process like what Synology and QNAP offer), or just tar the NAS share, pipe it to a zbackup repository.
Time Machine is the Mac's built in backup program. Time Capsule is Apple's firewall/switch/Wi-Fi AP/NAS which allows one to back up (using Time Machine) to it, optionally encrypted.
As an alternative to the Time Capsule, especially if one already has a wireless AP, switch, or router, and just needs a NAS, a Synology or QNAP device is cheaper, and can store more. A 3TB Time Capsule runs about $400. You can buy a Synology 216se for $150, add two WD Reds for about $100 each, and have the same functionality as the TC... except with RAID 1 [1].
One backup plan that I have been doing is having more than one NAS. My first NAS is where my shares are directly attached for backups of my desktop boxes. The second NAS doesn't interact with any machines other than the first NAS, and is where the first NAS pushes snapshots to. Synology's replication software (which does deduplicate) can keep up to 256 snapshots, space permitting, so if malware does zero out the NAS shares, those can be restored to a pre-calamity state, and files restored to desktops.
[1]: Technically Linux's MD-RAID.
A failed drive is that... a failed drive. Any malware worth its salt will be encrypting/corrupting all data on external backup drives. It doesn't matter if you have RAID 7+1, replicated among three active/active peers. If the machine can get to it and rm/corrupt files, the backups are worthless.
What really needs do be done is to have an outside server SSH into the desktop machine and dump the files to someplace the desktop cannot touch by normal means. On Macs, this isn't too difficult -- have a decent Synology NAS with zbackup installed do a dump.
vSANs are going to be more popular once Windows Server 2016 hits the server rooms, because of Storage Spaces Direct. Of course, it would be nice if one could interconnect machines via Infiniband like Isilon nodes do, but even though the technology is somewhat shaky as of now, the buzzword of hyperconvergence is out there, and there may be use cases for it, where one can just add more compute nodes and gain more disk space to the backing store.
Will it replace a SAN? Not really. In fact, it seems like enterprises are moving to stuff like Tintri and PureStorage, because those tend to be better for the specialized purposes of having the I/O needed for virtualization. vSANs do have their place, but it will be hard to convince people to stop using their tried and true fiber channel fabric, especially for production critical tasks. Eventually, just like virtualization and SANs, it will wind up in production server farms, but vSAN stuff will have to earn its bones first, just like any new technology.
Exchange/ActiveSync can be configured to have various policies be placed on one's device before it allows the device to download/sync mail.
One way to get around this is to use the Outlook app, or on Android, one of the other Exchange programs like Nine, Touchdown, RoadSync, or others, where if the organization decides to wipe the phone, just the app's data gets erased, not your entire device.
There used to be a company called Divide which made a decent product that was good at separating work stuff from one's usual items on a phone, but that disappeared into Google a few years ago. Ideally, it would be nice for virtualization to hit phones, so the work stuff can sit in a VM, well away from malware and other items that might get on a BYOD item.
I would feel much safer with more self-driving cars on the road:
1: Fewer drivers texting, drunk, drugged, stoned, putting on makeup, shaving, or all the above.
2: If there -were- a crash, it would be well logged. No he said/she said BS.
3: Computers react faster than I do. Thus, it would be stopping before I would have a foot on the stop pedal.
4: Computers don't get road rage. This means I can find a gap to merge into a highway if driving, or the computer can merge in itself.
5: Of course, there will be edge cases, but those would be far rarer than a case of too slow reactions, or some type of fumble. One fender bender at 2mph with tens to hundreds of millions of miles on the road is a lot better than any human can do. This means my self-driving car is safer on the roads, which is a benefit to other commuters.
6: Self-driving vehicles actually will give the occupants the time spent commuting to do things that actually may benefit them, be it reading, jamming to a new album, or just catching a snooze before work.
I'm curious if the Intel drives doing this are consumer level or enterprise grade drives. The Intel enterprise grade drives did quite well at a previous job where they were used to handle an insane amount of random I/O hitting them on a constant basis.
Of course, the difference between the two are the capacitors, which hold enough electricity to finish the in-flight write transaction, so a hard power off is less likely to cause the controller to lose its ability to find pages (the SSD equivalent of the thumping noise a HDD makes when it can't find the track servos, so hits the center hub constantly.)
One reason companies buy from Dell and HP is that models don't change. I buy a DL380 G9, I get a DL380G8, and I know what it will have onboard. This is why a lot of companies specify certain models and configs, with special exceptions given for items that are not on this list.
Minor updates tend to get enterprise customers very irritable, especially in environments where each computer has to be virtually identical, or else it becomes an administrative nightmare, especially for having parts on hand (usually local drives used for loading ESXi, power supplies, RAM, etc.)
The nice thing about the enterprise level is that newer machines use UEFI... but it is quite easy to turn off (and oftentimes, is disabled with MBR emulation the default until changed.) If you want Secure UEFI, you turn it on via the BIOS screen, or the web page on the iDRAC/iLO controller.
Some drive arrays power down hot spares to save energy (and periodically powering them on to run a drive check). Even though it isn't much energy, keeping platters spinning does take some, and then the HVAC system has to deal with the heat from the platters.
The thing about SSD is that it can store data using zero watts. For dense data centers where power management is essential, this ability is critical, even if SSDs cost more, for saving wattage and showing off a "green" data center. Since SSDs are denser than HDDs, are more shock resistant, and -tend- to have a better MTBF, once cost comes down, there may be no need to bother with a new HDD form factor at all.
Of course, this doesn't say that SSDs are perfect. When they lose data, it tends to be gone for good, as opposed to HDDs where the magnetic domains are present, and can be accessed somehow, barring physical damage from head crashes.
There was one drive maker which actually did this. They had two drive platters at opposite ends, each independent of the other, and either could fail, letting the other completely take over. I've wondered why this isn't more commonplace, perhaps a drive form factor with four heads, all active/active and can handle a head array failing (perhaps lighting up SMART.) This wouldn't just allow for four times the I/O, but allow four different threads to write at the same time, which is useful for virtualization, although these days, virtualization should just go to SSD or a large I/O buffer due to all the random reads/writes.
This can be doable, because this is intended for servers, so if drive companies could make the platters, server companies make the hot-pluggable bays, and third party makers make enclosures so the drives can be used as external drives.
I can see a drive using 2.5" platters (so less re-engineering would have to be done by the HDD makers, as opposed to a different diameter), stacking a good number of them in an enclosure. This would allow for some decent sustained I/O, since it could read/write from all those sides at once. Add HAMR and SMR, and these would be quite useful for low tier, read-mostly storage. It would be expected that there would be a very large I/O cache, or an array of SSDs to handle the random reads/writes, because of the nature of these drives.
MTBF, bit rot, and redundancy would be paramount, so hopefully these drives could be designed from the ground up to be more reliable, be it a larger bad sector relocation table, more ECC/parity, drive heads able to take more shock, or so on.
For the consumer, perhaps combine the physical drive with some SSD, so that the flash part works as a landing zone for data, minimizing the amount of random I/O the actual spinning platters have to deal with.
It might just be good PR for the company anyway, especially if the fixes are significant. What does the company gain by not releasing the fixes? If it isn't released, it might wind up a dead-end fork being worth zero value to the company, while merging all changes results in not just the fixes from the OP, but other people's contributions as well, making for a better product for all involved.
There will always be a niche for manual coders for platforms that either have very little headroom (e.g. a coding house writing code in whatever is the language is in vogue this month couldn't do.) There are still many devices which count RAM in bytes, or even nybbles, as opposed to megs or gigs. Similar with storage, which would be in kilobytes, so having the latest language with all the libraries and moving parts just isn't going to fit.
Agreed, a currency shouldn't need to be blessed... but it is a lot better than being outright banned, or causing someone to wind up on lists because one uses that currency. Is this a step forward? Who knows. Since BitCoin transactions leave a definite trail behind forever and a day, there might be more criminals using the BTC rope to hang themselves if the currency is more mainstream.