The problem with "basic security practices" is that they are too much for most users to handle on a general purpose OS...
How do you expect users to install application software? They download it and execute it, how do you expect them to tell a legitimate site from a malicious one? The answer for such users is the repository / app store model...
The fact is general purpose operating systems are simply not suitable for the category of people who need their hands held, and these users make up the vast majority of the public. General purpose computers are tools for geeks, always have been. Give average users their walled garden ipads, and keep complex machines available only for those who know how to use them.
When those viruses were running rampant, i was running Linux.. The only annoyance was the constant scans from machines infected with such malware that only served to waste my bandwidth.
Back then i could apply updates to anything but the kernel in the background, and then restarted the affected software at a time of my choosing. Same with the kernel, i could install the update in the background and reboot at my convenience to run the new kernel. Rebooting or restarting applications was quick because the actual update had already been applied so the system only had to boot the new version. If i decided to turn the machine off at night or for the weekend, then the updates would already have been installed so when i next booted it i would get the latest version of everything automatically.
I was able to strip out useless software from my machine, so the number and frequency of updates was reduced.
Nowadays you can even patch the kernel without rebooting...
Likely AmigaOS will have been rebooted many many times in all those years, and chances are you've replaced the battery and possibly the motherboard capacitors too in all that time.
The EU already had an agreement with the US, a similar one with the UK is not impossible especially seeing as the UK is starting from a point with already-compatible data protection laws. Some EU members already have rules that certain data must be retained within the same country, and cannot be stored anywhere else including other EU members.
MS is primarily an American company, and a majority of their financial calculations will be performed in USD... Their income from the UK may have decreased due to the lower exchange rate (although they are now putting prices up anyway), but also their costs within the uk will have decreased relative to the company as a whole.
The price to purchase hardware isn't affected by the GBP exchange rate as virtually none of it comes from the UK anyway. The price to build and operate data centers in the UK will be cheaper because of the reduced cost of anything sourced in the uk (ie the labour to build and operate the dc, the power to run it, many of the building materials sourced locally, applicable taxes and other fees etc).
Indeed, so build out better infrastructure for telecommuting and those of us who work remotely will go and live in small quiet communities where housing is a fraction of the cost.
Well that is the whole point, mass migration has become a serious problem which is negative impacting millions of people but the only political groups offering any kind of solution are the extreme ones. Most people would never vote for these parties if any of the more moderate parties was offering a solution, and most people would happily accept a moderate solution in preference to an extreme one.
If you created a cure for HIV then the companies selling existing treatments would likely buy you out, or bury you in court for years...
It's far more profitable to sell ongoing treatments which reduce the symptoms... The existing treatments for HIV can remain profitable for years, whereas you can only sell a cure once. There's no incentive to actually cure something like HIV.
Region coding is easily and commonly bypassed... The only reason it's not more common with DVDs is because shipping physical media around the world is more expensive and slower than sending digital files across the internet, so all the pirate DVDs on sale in any given location were probably downloaded and burned locally.
In fact, region coding encourages piracy because there are many titles that are not available in all regions, so people in those regions who would have bought are faced with the choice of piracy or not watching the movie at all.
Also region coding basically is a form of price control, and it doesn't work.
Well that's the whole point.. If you visit a link, you have no idea what that link is going to contain... You may follow an innocent looking link, and see childporn. Even if you immediately close the page, your browser has likely inserted the images into its local on-disk cache.
Similarly if you receive an email containing such content, it will typically be downloaded automatically to your machine, even if you immediately delete it upon noticing it there will still be traces on your drive for some time to come.
It's also possible for a website to load images but not make them visible, such images will still be cached by your browser but if they're not displayed your unlikely to realise they're there unless you explicitly check.
Not really... A single file was found in deleted space on this guy's machine, was he truly a criminal who intentionally sought out illegal material or did he have this single file on his machine through no fault or intention of his own? (eg browser cache, malware, spam etc)
At the very least, i'd expect someone who was actively looking for such material to have a lot more of it than just a single deleted file.
IMDB is aggregating and republishing information that is already in the public domain, about people who have chosen a career that puts them in public view.
Instagram is using lawyer speak to claim they have a contract with kids parents, knowing full well that not only have the parents never even seen the agreement but neither the parents nor the kids would even understand it.
If you're willing to pay big money for something, then you should be able to afford to continue maintaining an open source stack even if the original author has lost interest... Just because something is expensive doesn't mean the vendor will keep maintaining it.. Many big vendors have dropped products over the years, or moved their customers to new versions with various disadvantages etc. If the code runs on your own hardware then you can keep running old versions, but it will become increasingly problematic and insecure.
On the other hand, if it's a proprietary service offered by someone else you are entirely beholden to that supplier to continue running the service and shouldn't become dependant on it.
There are plenty of silverlight vulnerabilities, but the silverlight plugin is not as widespread as flash so there's far less incentive for anyone to attack it.
Flash gets targeted because its a monoculture, 95% of potential victims are running the same flash plugin with the same vulnerabilities, there aren't really any alternative flash plugins. Targeting the browser is less effective these days as there are several major browsers and your potential victims could be using any of them.
Targeting IE instead of Firefox is still more effective as its a default install. Anyone running Firefox has generally gone out of their way to install it and is more likely to keep it up to date, users running IE are generally doing so just because it's there and are likely to be less tech savvy. Back when IE had 95% of the browser market it was the obvious target.
You're right that its unsustainable, but every business that automates will only be thinking about their own bottom line and not about society as a whole. If they don't automate, they will be uncompetitive against others that do. Consumers would need to vote with their feet and opt for the more expensive non automated suppliers in order to discourage the trend, but people wont because again they only think about their own bottom line.
Trying to prevent reverse engineering is pointless, all you can do is make things more difficult and in doing so, making your code more complicated and harder to debug or potentially unreliable. The fact is if you access something from a compromised device then you run the risk of whatever you're accessing being compromised too.
I would quite happily watch the ad supported version (have been watching broadcast tv for years), if it provided a decent service... Having to use specific devices to access the services, having a bunch of different services rather than a single standard usable from any compatible device (like broadcast tv), having drm etc is a big turn off.
The economies of scale from the UK system also do a lot to bring prices under control, major pharma companies can't afford to lose a single customer as big as the NHS.
Native apps were faster, but apps under emulation were always pretty slow, especially on the early ppc models. The fastest 68k based mac was actually an amiga with a 68060 processor (apple never moved beyond the 68040) running an emulator.
On the contrary we were back up and running very quickly, took no more than a few mins to unscrew the case, remove the ssd and put it into another compatible chassis. On some devices the drives are even easier to remove, and simply slides out the side held in by a single screw or similar.
Fake news has always circulated, but before the only entities capable of spreading fake/manipulated news en masse were those in power... Regular people could only spread things on a very small scale so it didn't really have any effect.
People just need to learn to be cynical, and to do proper research before blindly believing what they read...
If EFI can run then chances are the motherboard is in a fairly good state... I've had one just recently where the motherboard was toast (due to a can of coke) but the SSD was fine.
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That's kind of their problem, MS won't acknowledge that any competition exists... They do everything their own way, and others are forced to comply.
The problem with "basic security practices" is that they are too much for most users to handle on a general purpose OS...
How do you expect users to install application software? They download it and execute it, how do you expect them to tell a legitimate site from a malicious one?
The answer for such users is the repository / app store model...
The fact is general purpose operating systems are simply not suitable for the category of people who need their hands held, and these users make up the vast majority of the public. General purpose computers are tools for geeks, always have been. Give average users their walled garden ipads, and keep complex machines available only for those who know how to use them.
When those viruses were running rampant, i was running Linux.. The only annoyance was the constant scans from machines infected with such malware that only served to waste my bandwidth.
Back then i could apply updates to anything but the kernel in the background, and then restarted the affected software at a time of my choosing. Same with the kernel, i could install the update in the background and reboot at my convenience to run the new kernel. Rebooting or restarting applications was quick because the actual update had already been applied so the system only had to boot the new version. If i decided to turn the machine off at night or for the weekend, then the updates would already have been installed so when i next booted it i would get the latest version of everything automatically.
I was able to strip out useless software from my machine, so the number and frequency of updates was reduced.
Nowadays you can even patch the kernel without rebooting...
Likely AmigaOS will have been rebooted many many times in all those years, and chances are you've replaced the battery and possibly the motherboard capacitors too in all that time.
The EU already had an agreement with the US, a similar one with the UK is not impossible especially seeing as the UK is starting from a point with already-compatible data protection laws.
Some EU members already have rules that certain data must be retained within the same country, and cannot be stored anywhere else including other EU members.
MS is primarily an American company, and a majority of their financial calculations will be performed in USD... Their income from the UK may have decreased due to the lower exchange rate (although they are now putting prices up anyway), but also their costs within the uk will have decreased relative to the company as a whole.
The price to purchase hardware isn't affected by the GBP exchange rate as virtually none of it comes from the UK anyway.
The price to build and operate data centers in the UK will be cheaper because of the reduced cost of anything sourced in the uk (ie the labour to build and operate the dc, the power to run it, many of the building materials sourced locally, applicable taxes and other fees etc).
Indeed, so build out better infrastructure for telecommuting and those of us who work remotely will go and live in small quiet communities where housing is a fraction of the cost.
Well that is the whole point, mass migration has become a serious problem which is negative impacting millions of people but the only political groups offering any kind of solution are the extreme ones.
Most people would never vote for these parties if any of the more moderate parties was offering a solution, and most people would happily accept a moderate solution in preference to an extreme one.
If you created a cure for HIV then the companies selling existing treatments would likely buy you out, or bury you in court for years...
It's far more profitable to sell ongoing treatments which reduce the symptoms... The existing treatments for HIV can remain profitable for years, whereas you can only sell a cure once. There's no incentive to actually cure something like HIV.
Region coding is easily and commonly bypassed...
The only reason it's not more common with DVDs is because shipping physical media around the world is more expensive and slower than sending digital files across the internet, so all the pirate DVDs on sale in any given location were probably downloaded and burned locally.
In fact, region coding encourages piracy because there are many titles that are not available in all regions, so people in those regions who would have bought are faced with the choice of piracy or not watching the movie at all.
Also region coding basically is a form of price control, and it doesn't work.
So which devices would you recommend with fully open source stacks?
Well that's the whole point..
If you visit a link, you have no idea what that link is going to contain... You may follow an innocent looking link, and see childporn. Even if you immediately close the page, your browser has likely inserted the images into its local on-disk cache.
Similarly if you receive an email containing such content, it will typically be downloaded automatically to your machine, even if you immediately delete it upon noticing it there will still be traces on your drive for some time to come.
It's also possible for a website to load images but not make them visible, such images will still be cached by your browser but if they're not displayed your unlikely to realise they're there unless you explicitly check.
Not really...
A single file was found in deleted space on this guy's machine, was he truly a criminal who intentionally sought out illegal material or did he have this single file on his machine through no fault or intention of his own? (eg browser cache, malware, spam etc)
At the very least, i'd expect someone who was actively looking for such material to have a lot more of it than just a single deleted file.
IMDB is aggregating and republishing information that is already in the public domain, about people who have chosen a career that puts them in public view.
Instagram is using lawyer speak to claim they have a contract with kids parents, knowing full well that not only have the parents never even seen the agreement but neither the parents nor the kids would even understand it.
If you're willing to pay big money for something, then you should be able to afford to continue maintaining an open source stack even if the original author has lost interest...
Just because something is expensive doesn't mean the vendor will keep maintaining it.. Many big vendors have dropped products over the years, or moved their customers to new versions with various disadvantages etc. If the code runs on your own hardware then you can keep running old versions, but it will become increasingly problematic and insecure.
On the other hand, if it's a proprietary service offered by someone else you are entirely beholden to that supplier to continue running the service and shouldn't become dependant on it.
There are plenty of silverlight vulnerabilities, but the silverlight plugin is not as widespread as flash so there's far less incentive for anyone to attack it.
Flash gets targeted because its a monoculture, 95% of potential victims are running the same flash plugin with the same vulnerabilities, there aren't really any alternative flash plugins.
Targeting the browser is less effective these days as there are several major browsers and your potential victims could be using any of them.
Targeting IE instead of Firefox is still more effective as its a default install. Anyone running Firefox has generally gone out of their way to install it and is more likely to keep it up to date, users running IE are generally doing so just because it's there and are likely to be less tech savvy.
Back when IE had 95% of the browser market it was the obvious target.
You're right that its unsustainable, but every business that automates will only be thinking about their own bottom line and not about society as a whole. If they don't automate, they will be uncompetitive against others that do.
Consumers would need to vote with their feet and opt for the more expensive non automated suppliers in order to discourage the trend, but people wont because again they only think about their own bottom line.
Trying to prevent reverse engineering is pointless, all you can do is make things more difficult and in doing so, making your code more complicated and harder to debug or potentially unreliable.
The fact is if you access something from a compromised device then you run the risk of whatever you're accessing being compromised too.
I would quite happily watch the ad supported version (have been watching broadcast tv for years), if it provided a decent service...
Having to use specific devices to access the services, having a bunch of different services rather than a single standard usable from any compatible device (like broadcast tv), having drm etc is a big turn off.
The economies of scale from the UK system also do a lot to bring prices under control, major pharma companies can't afford to lose a single customer as big as the NHS.
Native apps were faster, but apps under emulation were always pretty slow, especially on the early ppc models.
The fastest 68k based mac was actually an amiga with a 68060 processor (apple never moved beyond the 68040) running an emulator.
On the contrary we were back up and running very quickly, took no more than a few mins to unscrew the case, remove the ssd and put it into another compatible chassis. On some devices the drives are even easier to remove, and simply slides out the side held in by a single screw or similar.
Fake news has always circulated, but before the only entities capable of spreading fake/manipulated news en masse were those in power... Regular people could only spread things on a very small scale so it didn't really have any effect.
People just need to learn to be cynical, and to do proper research before blindly believing what they read...
If EFI can run then chances are the motherboard is in a fairly good state...
I've had one just recently where the motherboard was toast (due to a can of coke) but the SSD was fine.