Then, there comes the hurdle of cleaning the filters. I wonder if this is possible, or if the devices will just be disposable when the filters are clogged with particulates.
I wouldn't mind seeing both ASIC chiplets, dedicated for a specific task, like AES array shifting, RSA exponentiation and multiplication, and other tasks a computer commonly does. From there, it would be nice to have FPGAs for most anything else. This can easily allow a hypervisor to run x86 code as well as ARM. Done right, this could also improve security between VMs.
Of course, if someone wants to grind cryptocurrency, next to dedicated ASIC boards, FPGAs are not bad.
There is a difference. Back in the Halloween Documents era, MS wasn't making money from Linux. Now, they make money, hand-over-fist over Linux. That Android phone? MS makes something from each and every one of those. Azure? It doesn't really matter what OS people run on their cloud platform; they get charged for the VM anyway, so might as well make Linux work better.
MS is in an odd position where their financial interests lie in keeping Linux going, so if they want to port some of their useful utilities, more power to them.
Why would you want to make an old protocol secure, when there are other protocols out that solve the issues FTP has from the ground up. FTPS (as in SSL/TLS over FTP) is a band-aid at best. Why even bother with that, when you have SFTP which is designed from the ground up to be secure, can be configured to allow for RSA authentication from both ends, so a password never goes in the clear, can't be brute-forced, and goes over only one port.
With how easy it is to use SSH, why even bother with FTP these days?
From what I've read, VMWare Workstation can do a decent job on Linux with the right drivers present. Running Windows under that might be an answer. Caveat: Put the guest VM on a SSD... or put everything on an SSD. It makes a BIG difference with I/O and usability of the system, just because all the processes are not fighting for a single drive head.
On the other hand, Yahoo, Google, et. al. are not designed to be login providers. What would be ideal would be a company that has rigorous security and compliance testing, where the logins are not shared with advertisers or others, and remain confidential, where if people are signing up for user accounts, only the provider and the company who is using them for authenticating know the users.
$25,000,000 is a drop in the bucket, but there are some things which can do a lot of good:
1: Research into thermal depolymerization. Yes, this is energy intensive, but it actually gets plastic out of the environment completely. 2: Better nuclear reactors. Combine with #1, and now you have ships that remove the pollution layer, and can bring usable, short-chain mineral oil to port to be converted into diesel or other uses. 3: A guild for sysadmins and IT people. The "U" word is fraught. However, a guild where people get licenses, similar to plumbers, HVAC workers, and electricians. An electrician doesn't have Square-D certify them, for example. This way, someone with an apprentice/journeyman/master record actually has some real world certification behind them. 4: I hate waxing political, but why not take the money for "The Wall" and turn it into a solar panel array spanning the US/Mexican border? Then sell the power to those on both sides of the line? This would make everyone happy... be it people who want a barrier, and people who want cheap, clean energy. All benefit. This would be similar to the Itipu Dam where both Brazil and Paraguay get power from, and well worth the investment. 5: Toss some money for local culture and decent indie films. 6: With all the fear and uncertainity about RedHat, perhaps Google should consider being the flagbearer, and make an enterprise-tier Linux distribution that is well maintained and supported?
My last LG phone had a battery that was easily popped in and out.
I think there are four reasons for this that are not just planned obsolescence:
1: IP67+ waterproofing. Phones that can stand a dunk are becoming what consumers expect. 2: Heat dissipation. Phones have to have better engineering to handle getting the heat from the CPU, battery, and other things to the phone's case so the heat can be dumped. 3: Thinness of device and bezels. People want the notch and wall to wall screens. Because of this, the thicker phones that allow for easy battery replacement have gone on the wayside. 4: Style. People don't want machined aluminum, they want shiny glass for their phones.
The funny thing is that Oracle could get back into many peoples' good graces. If they offered ZFS under the GPL and allowed it to become part of the default Linux kernel, this would be one of the biggest enterprise issues that would get solved.
Similar if they opened up a lot of their Solaris IP, instead of letting it die a slow death. Zones and LDOMs would be quite useful in Linux, even with it duplicating existing hypervisor functionality.
Detroit has one thing that most towns don't have, and that is ample water. Most tech cities have major water issues, or will have them, either because they have plenty of salt water, but no fresh water, or inland where the water system isn't sturdy enough to handle the added population. Detroit, on the other hand can easily handle future water needs of any business that comes there.
There are some quality devices. Synology and QNAP NAS models have solid security, and if you need to add stuff like fail2ban, borg backup, gpg, or other items, that is easily accomplished.
You can have a NAS that is secure enough to sit on a public IP space (not sure why you want to), and be resistant to attack, provided you limit the IP space, enable 2FA, SSH RSA keys, and keep good backups.
Secure NAS products are out there... it is just that some companies just don't seem to care enough about making a securable device.
Every open plan place I worked at had the meeting rooms full, just because you cannot do work while one co-worker is chowing down on chips, another is talking about his hysterectomy, another is running around dropping Pokemon lures, and others are just shooting the shit. Before you say "just use headphones", those just mean that people stick their face in front of you or constantly poke you on the shoulder to get your attention, which gets even distracting, because they want their thing resolved now.
I worked at places like that. Nothing ever got done because there were too many distractions. Lots of meetings, and boy, the place looked mighty fine with all the reflective glass and brushed aluminum, but your ears hurt after a few hours in that place due to the constant din, and the "hip, edgy" decor with zero sound dampening.
Also, the companies just go out of business one day, pop up the next. The ABC logo gets chucked by the XYZ logo after the bankruptcy filing, while all employees and assets are owned by holding companies. No judge will risk their bench seat and pierce the corporate veil, so this type of racket is easy to do and maintain without consequence other than bankrupcy filings and new articles of incorporation.
Even grocery stores make more than that. I'd say a 3-10% profit margin would be useful.
Maybe do like gas stations -- have the media and drives be the low profit item, and then make the money on software or options. For example, the tape drives would ship with basic compression, password-based encryption, and crypto signing for WORM media. However, the tape drives could have optional licenses for more toys, such as better compression, deduplication, automatic expiration of media (so after a certain day, the tape cannot be read), and many other things.
1: VCs want flash and sizzle. Tape is pedestrian, as opposed to some device that does little other than get compromised and send analytics back. 2: VCs want cheap. You cannot go the cheap route with tape. 3: There is a multi-trillion dollar push to get people to "the cloud". Tape goes against this. 4: There are many patents for density items. 5: There isn't a market for tape. Consumers don't care about backups, and businesses consider backups having no ROI for the most part. 6: A high capacity drive needs high I/O, and has to be done constantly to avoid "shoe-shining". You are not going to get a tape drive that plugs into USB that would be manageable, unless the drive was combined with a secondary media cache (SSD, hard disk) for staging. 7: A tape needs to be reliable. Finding engineers who have a mindset for designing for the long haul, as opposed to shipping a prototype out and letting legal handle the lawsuits is a mindset very uncommon in modern computing. 8: A tape has to have modern day features, like LTFS, encryption, and compression. Those are not easy to make or come by. 9: A tape needs to be able to be made from now to 10-20 years from now. Same with the drive. Maybe even 40 years. 10: There is already a market leader, LTO.
Now, what would be nice, would be an optical format. Sony has multi-terabyte formats. Optical has a lot of advantages over tape:
1: With antediluvian technologies (Burn-proof, etc.) buffer underruns are not an issue. So, having an optical drive hooked up to a smartphone can be doable for backups. 2: Optical is "cooler" than tape. The average consumer "gets" an optical drive, because CD/DVD/Blu Ray drives are common. So, Joe Sixpack will actually buy an optical drive for backups, given enough advertising. 3: Optical has a wider market. 4: Optical, in theory, can last a lot longer than magnetic tape, especially with inorganic technologies.
The problem with optical is that there has been no research on it in the past few years. It could easily compare to tape as a backup/storage medium, but the will isn't there for it to be improved.
I've wondered about something like a UL listing, done by a non-partisan group, but would review offerings (be it apps or hardware devices) on the security they provided. This would be at different levels, similar to Europe's Sold Secure bronze/silver/gold ratings. This way, one could tell a service that offered end to end encryption and proper, auditable procedure versus some a company that has security as an afterthought at best.
I don't get the point of WhatsApp. If I want solid security, there is Signal and Telegram, both have good ratings. If I need a "corporate" messaging app, there is Slack and Skype for Business. Even Facebook Messenger can do end to end encryption with its "secret" functionality uses Signal's protocol. Why do I need an insecure messaging app when there is so much better out there?
I respect any company that can take a step and have a major code iteration be a refactor. I don't mind having a release just be bug fixes and security improvements. That to me, is more important than new features.
The main reason for the forced change is to transfer all responsibility of security to the user as early as possible. If the user wants "hunter2" or "password", that is up to them. It also mitigates any issues, should the password generator for the device wind up being weak, or the screen the password displayed on limited in how many characters it can display. I would say 8 characters would be minimum displayed on the screen, provided it is changed almost immediately.
What might be the best thing is an e-Ink display or a cheap LCD display. When the device is hard reset, the display will show a random 10-20 digit code on it, which will be the temporary password for the device. Then, once the device is logged into, it will force a password change.
Someone has to pay the cost to keep the servers running.
What would be ideal would be a note utility that worked as a web page, and an Android/iOS/macOS/Windows app, which would use one's cloud provider of choice, be it GDrive, Box, Dropbox, even Tencent, Yandex, and other providers which have ground in a region. The note utility would use its own encryption [1], ensuring that even if the cloud account got compromised, the notes would be protected.
The closest to this are utilities like enPass, 1Password, Safeincloud, and Codebook, but those are designed for password storage, with note taking as a second function.
[1]: The encryption could be as simple as a master password, or more complex, where each device has its own key, and has to be "introduced" to the database by another instance of the app.
Synology and QNAP have their issues, but one thing I am reasonably assured of with the Synology NAS models I have is decent security. It is very easy to use the onboard firewall, they have logging and reporting, onboard encryption for data (so if the drives or unit is taken, the data is protected), a backup utility to save data to an external drive, another NAS, or a cloud provider (with the option for clientside encryption.)
On the cheap, I can buy a discontinued, new Synology 115j for $50 or so. Even this model with its slow ARM CPU can handle Samba, backups, even iSCSI if one is that insanely inclined. Of course, it is wise to buy a two drive NAS for RAID, but the cost for a low end model makes it viable to buy a discounted, external USB drive, pull the HDD out of the enclosure, and put it in the NAS, and have a lot more features, including "cloud" access, and backups.
I wonder if Apple should consider spinning off divisions (similar to FileMaker), so the company can solely focus on gadgets. That way, Macs get a dedicated company with engineering teams keeping those products refreshed and up to date, as opposed to letting models languish for many years.
What would be nice is a spin-off company dedicated for everyday computing. In the past, one could have everything they worked on done by Apple, be it the router, printer, external hard drives, and so on. Apple also had applications, so for a lot of things, a user just needed one number to call should something break, no trying to figure out if it is the hardware/app vendor/OS vendor's fault. This company would focus on Macs, headless NAS devices, routers, printers, and stuff that may not be glitzy, but used at home or the office. It also would be more enterprise friendly, offering known product release cycles (given the NDA, of course). By separating it from Apple, it can be a predictable company. It may not have the crazy profits that iDevices have, but it would be something that will always bring in revenue, especially if Apple created (or rebranded) some cloud solutions for offsite backups, virtualization, mail, and directory services.
Makes me wonder too. I wonder if White Wolf would be sold off (likely) or spun off (unlikely, but would be nicer). My fear is that it gets tossed to some big company, and the IP completely shelved, never to see the light of day again, similar to how EA has done with a lot of Origin IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, there comes the hurdle of cleaning the filters. I wonder if this is possible, or if the devices will just be disposable when the filters are clogged with particulates.
I wouldn't mind seeing both ASIC chiplets, dedicated for a specific task, like AES array shifting, RSA exponentiation and multiplication, and other tasks a computer commonly does. From there, it would be nice to have FPGAs for most anything else. This can easily allow a hypervisor to run x86 code as well as ARM. Done right, this could also improve security between VMs.
Of course, if someone wants to grind cryptocurrency, next to dedicated ASIC boards, FPGAs are not bad.
There is a difference. Back in the Halloween Documents era, MS wasn't making money from Linux. Now, they make money, hand-over-fist over Linux. That Android phone? MS makes something from each and every one of those. Azure? It doesn't really matter what OS people run on their cloud platform; they get charged for the VM anyway, so might as well make Linux work better.
MS is in an odd position where their financial interests lie in keeping Linux going, so if they want to port some of their useful utilities, more power to them.
Why would you want to make an old protocol secure, when there are other protocols out that solve the issues FTP has from the ground up. FTPS (as in SSL/TLS over FTP) is a band-aid at best. Why even bother with that, when you have SFTP which is designed from the ground up to be secure, can be configured to allow for RSA authentication from both ends, so a password never goes in the clear, can't be brute-forced, and goes over only one port.
With how easy it is to use SSH, why even bother with FTP these days?
From what I've read, VMWare Workstation can do a decent job on Linux with the right drivers present. Running Windows under that might be an answer. Caveat: Put the guest VM on a SSD... or put everything on an SSD. It makes a BIG difference with I/O and usability of the system, just because all the processes are not fighting for a single drive head.
On the other hand, Yahoo, Google, et. al. are not designed to be login providers. What would be ideal would be a company that has rigorous security and compliance testing, where the logins are not shared with advertisers or others, and remain confidential, where if people are signing up for user accounts, only the provider and the company who is using them for authenticating know the users.
$25,000,000 is a drop in the bucket, but there are some things which can do a lot of good:
1: Research into thermal depolymerization. Yes, this is energy intensive, but it actually gets plastic out of the environment completely.
2: Better nuclear reactors. Combine with #1, and now you have ships that remove the pollution layer, and can bring usable, short-chain mineral oil to port to be converted into diesel or other uses.
3: A guild for sysadmins and IT people. The "U" word is fraught. However, a guild where people get licenses, similar to plumbers, HVAC workers, and electricians. An electrician doesn't have Square-D certify them, for example. This way, someone with an apprentice/journeyman/master record actually has some real world certification behind them.
4: I hate waxing political, but why not take the money for "The Wall" and turn it into a solar panel array spanning the US/Mexican border? Then sell the power to those on both sides of the line? This would make everyone happy... be it people who want a barrier, and people who want cheap, clean energy. All benefit. This would be similar to the Itipu Dam where both Brazil and Paraguay get power from, and well worth the investment.
5: Toss some money for local culture and decent indie films.
6: With all the fear and uncertainity about RedHat, perhaps Google should consider being the flagbearer, and make an enterprise-tier Linux distribution that is well maintained and supported?
I wonder how many phone case makers will have a physical shutter built in to cover the front and back cams when this technology becomes mainstream.
My last LG phone had a battery that was easily popped in and out.
I think there are four reasons for this that are not just planned obsolescence:
1: IP67+ waterproofing. Phones that can stand a dunk are becoming what consumers expect.
2: Heat dissipation. Phones have to have better engineering to handle getting the heat from the CPU, battery, and other things to the phone's case so the heat can be dumped.
3: Thinness of device and bezels. People want the notch and wall to wall screens. Because of this, the thicker phones that allow for easy battery replacement have gone on the wayside.
4: Style. People don't want machined aluminum, they want shiny glass for their phones.
The funny thing is that Oracle could get back into many peoples' good graces. If they offered ZFS under the GPL and allowed it to become part of the default Linux kernel, this would be one of the biggest enterprise issues that would get solved.
Similar if they opened up a lot of their Solaris IP, instead of letting it die a slow death. Zones and LDOMs would be quite useful in Linux, even with it duplicating existing hypervisor functionality.
Detroit has one thing that most towns don't have, and that is ample water. Most tech cities have major water issues, or will have them, either because they have plenty of salt water, but no fresh water, or inland where the water system isn't sturdy enough to handle the added population. Detroit, on the other hand can easily handle future water needs of any business that comes there.
There are some quality devices. Synology and QNAP NAS models have solid security, and if you need to add stuff like fail2ban, borg backup, gpg, or other items, that is easily accomplished.
You can have a NAS that is secure enough to sit on a public IP space (not sure why you want to), and be resistant to attack, provided you limit the IP space, enable 2FA, SSH RSA keys, and keep good backups.
Secure NAS products are out there... it is just that some companies just don't seem to care enough about making a securable device.
Every open plan place I worked at had the meeting rooms full, just because you cannot do work while one co-worker is chowing down on chips, another is talking about his hysterectomy, another is running around dropping Pokemon lures, and others are just shooting the shit. Before you say "just use headphones", those just mean that people stick their face in front of you or constantly poke you on the shoulder to get your attention, which gets even distracting, because they want their thing resolved now.
I worked at places like that. Nothing ever got done because there were too many distractions. Lots of meetings, and boy, the place looked mighty fine with all the reflective glass and brushed aluminum, but your ears hurt after a few hours in that place due to the constant din, and the "hip, edgy" decor with zero sound dampening.
Also, the companies just go out of business one day, pop up the next. The ABC logo gets chucked by the XYZ logo after the bankruptcy filing, while all employees and assets are owned by holding companies. No judge will risk their bench seat and pierce the corporate veil, so this type of racket is easy to do and maintain without consequence other than bankrupcy filings and new articles of incorporation.
Even grocery stores make more than that. I'd say a 3-10% profit margin would be useful.
Maybe do like gas stations -- have the media and drives be the low profit item, and then make the money on software or options. For example, the tape drives would ship with basic compression, password-based encryption, and crypto signing for WORM media. However, the tape drives could have optional licenses for more toys, such as better compression, deduplication, automatic expiration of media (so after a certain day, the tape cannot be read), and many other things.
The problem is a number of things:
1: VCs want flash and sizzle. Tape is pedestrian, as opposed to some device that does little other than get compromised and send analytics back.
2: VCs want cheap. You cannot go the cheap route with tape.
3: There is a multi-trillion dollar push to get people to "the cloud". Tape goes against this.
4: There are many patents for density items.
5: There isn't a market for tape. Consumers don't care about backups, and businesses consider backups having no ROI for the most part.
6: A high capacity drive needs high I/O, and has to be done constantly to avoid "shoe-shining". You are not going to get a tape drive that plugs into USB that would be manageable, unless the drive was combined with a secondary media cache (SSD, hard disk) for staging.
7: A tape needs to be reliable. Finding engineers who have a mindset for designing for the long haul, as opposed to shipping a prototype out and letting legal handle the lawsuits is a mindset very uncommon in modern computing.
8: A tape has to have modern day features, like LTFS, encryption, and compression. Those are not easy to make or come by.
9: A tape needs to be able to be made from now to 10-20 years from now. Same with the drive. Maybe even 40 years.
10: There is already a market leader, LTO.
Now, what would be nice, would be an optical format. Sony has multi-terabyte formats. Optical has a lot of advantages over tape:
1: With antediluvian technologies (Burn-proof, etc.) buffer underruns are not an issue. So, having an optical drive hooked up to a smartphone can be doable for backups.
2: Optical is "cooler" than tape. The average consumer "gets" an optical drive, because CD/DVD/Blu Ray drives are common. So, Joe Sixpack will actually buy an optical drive for backups, given enough advertising.
3: Optical has a wider market.
4: Optical, in theory, can last a lot longer than magnetic tape, especially with inorganic technologies.
The problem with optical is that there has been no research on it in the past few years. It could easily compare to tape as a backup/storage medium, but the will isn't there for it to be improved.
I've wondered about something like a UL listing, done by a non-partisan group, but would review offerings (be it apps or hardware devices) on the security they provided. This would be at different levels, similar to Europe's Sold Secure bronze/silver/gold ratings. This way, one could tell a service that offered end to end encryption and proper, auditable procedure versus some a company that has security as an afterthought at best.
I don't get the point of WhatsApp. If I want solid security, there is Signal and Telegram, both have good ratings. If I need a "corporate" messaging app, there is Slack and Skype for Business. Even Facebook Messenger can do end to end encryption with its "secret" functionality uses Signal's protocol. Why do I need an insecure messaging app when there is so much better out there?
The last link is interesting. From what it says, the cost for making the cell is recouped in 1.5 years in a southern area, and 2.5 years in Germany.
I respect any company that can take a step and have a major code iteration be a refactor. I don't mind having a release just be bug fixes and security improvements. That to me, is more important than new features.
The main reason for the forced change is to transfer all responsibility of security to the user as early as possible. If the user wants "hunter2" or "password", that is up to them. It also mitigates any issues, should the password generator for the device wind up being weak, or the screen the password displayed on limited in how many characters it can display. I would say 8 characters would be minimum displayed on the screen, provided it is changed almost immediately.
What might be the best thing is an e-Ink display or a cheap LCD display. When the device is hard reset, the display will show a random 10-20 digit code on it, which will be the temporary password for the device. Then, once the device is logged into, it will force a password change.
Someone has to pay the cost to keep the servers running.
What would be ideal would be a note utility that worked as a web page, and an Android/iOS/macOS/Windows app, which would use one's cloud provider of choice, be it GDrive, Box, Dropbox, even Tencent, Yandex, and other providers which have ground in a region. The note utility would use its own encryption [1], ensuring that even if the cloud account got compromised, the notes would be protected.
The closest to this are utilities like enPass, 1Password, Safeincloud, and Codebook, but those are designed for password storage, with note taking as a second function.
[1]: The encryption could be as simple as a master password, or more complex, where each device has its own key, and has to be "introduced" to the database by another instance of the app.
Synology and QNAP have their issues, but one thing I am reasonably assured of with the Synology NAS models I have is decent security. It is very easy to use the onboard firewall, they have logging and reporting, onboard encryption for data (so if the drives or unit is taken, the data is protected), a backup utility to save data to an external drive, another NAS, or a cloud provider (with the option for clientside encryption.)
On the cheap, I can buy a discontinued, new Synology 115j for $50 or so. Even this model with its slow ARM CPU can handle Samba, backups, even iSCSI if one is that insanely inclined. Of course, it is wise to buy a two drive NAS for RAID, but the cost for a low end model makes it viable to buy a discounted, external USB drive, pull the HDD out of the enclosure, and put it in the NAS, and have a lot more features, including "cloud" access, and backups.
I wonder if Apple should consider spinning off divisions (similar to FileMaker), so the company can solely focus on gadgets. That way, Macs get a dedicated company with engineering teams keeping those products refreshed and up to date, as opposed to letting models languish for many years.
What would be nice is a spin-off company dedicated for everyday computing. In the past, one could have everything they worked on done by Apple, be it the router, printer, external hard drives, and so on. Apple also had applications, so for a lot of things, a user just needed one number to call should something break, no trying to figure out if it is the hardware/app vendor/OS vendor's fault. This company would focus on Macs, headless NAS devices, routers, printers, and stuff that may not be glitzy, but used at home or the office. It also would be more enterprise friendly, offering known product release cycles (given the NDA, of course). By separating it from Apple, it can be a predictable company. It may not have the crazy profits that iDevices have, but it would be something that will always bring in revenue, especially if Apple created (or rebranded) some cloud solutions for offsite backups, virtualization, mail, and directory services.
Makes me wonder too. I wonder if White Wolf would be sold off (likely) or spun off (unlikely, but would be nicer). My fear is that it gets tossed to some big company, and the IP completely shelved, never to see the light of day again, similar to how EA has done with a lot of Origin IP.