In ye old PowerPC mac days, the Power4, Power5 and Power6 architectures were usually summarised into smaller chips known lovingly as the G3, G4, G5, this would be the G6 if a smaller unit was produced. So afew years ago this would have been bigger news a sign that a new chip was coming to the mac platform.
While I think this is great news if it actually happens. IBM is completely notorious (along with Motorola) for overselling and under delivering on the PowerPC platform. Both companies also release reflex press reports the moment they lose a contract which had a bit of mind share at stake (e.g. Motorola claimed to have developed technology that would allow them to instantly produce chips that were faster, running on less power with less heat, almost to the day that Apple annouced they were buying PPC chips entirely from IBM. Also IBM were quick to tout a similar news article when Apple switched to Intel.) With all this in mind it wouldn't surprise me if we don't see a 5Ghz Power6 or Power6 derivatives (We didn't see a promised 3Ghz Power5 derivative for more than a year after it was expected in market.)
Re:I'm cynical
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The warranty on my plasma (sanyo brand) reveals that they will not cover burn in from video games. My friend that sourced it for me reveals that they can get burn in remarkably quickly (hours not days). So for example a game's score counter on the screen will burn in quite quickly..
I bought a Wii as a gift for my brother who loves gaming, my brother is a big boy and can throw a pretty wild swing. So the first thing I did when I got the Wii home was to open it and check the "weak" lanyard.. and I can assure you, it is anything but weak. With the light controller (the batteries are heavier) the combined weight is minimal, as expected since a user is to be picking it up and swinging it around for an hour or so.
I can only assume the following circumstances:
- Very large wrists+hands (i.e fat) are pulling and stretching at the lanyard tie during normal operation, so when they do finally swing the controller with a great force the combined tension is enough to snap the lanyard. - Kids aren't using the lanyard at all, their hands get a bit sweaty (palms contain 95% of your bodies sweat glands), then tada the controller that is so easy to hang onto suddenly becomes airborne... followed by the kid gnawing at the lanyard tie so they won't get in trouble with their parents."I swear it broke mommy!" - Or similar to option 1, a regular hand is holding the controller in such a way that the lanyard is always pulled tight. - It wouldn't be slashdot without the conspiracy theory: This is just a scare tactic legal to discourage people from buying a Wii
While the article does note that this is only an analysis of credit card payments. (Not gift certificate for example.) It's important to note that a large amount of youth use prepaid cards/gift certificates/other prepay methods. This could be reflecting this trend. iTS sales around christmas routinely drop and hit high again in january(after christmas) with huge prepay redemptions.
Since the youth are a major market for the iTS, it's difficult to pull a certain conclusion from the figures based on credit cards alone. Children now don't have to bug their parents to use their CC to buy songs over iTS, they just pick up a prepaid.
Also of note is that since the video store has launched millions of full length movies have been purchased, so the iTS couldn't be doing too bad.
Overall it's just the consumer that gets hurt by DRM.. as the article points out, Apple is still selling droves of their iPod multimedia player.
Speaking of demographics.. Unless you're purchasing a Mac Pro then the Apple line up is actually cost efficient with other branded computers (in many cases more cost effective, even if you pirate all of your software on the PC). Like most PC brands, there is an Apple for just about every computer price point. $599 gets you a reasonable core duo system desktop with wireless and bluetooth, while $1099 gets you a well outfitted laptop.
Historically this hasn't been the case and it will definitely take time for Apple to become top-of-mind in this dept. Also because Apple know what hardware they have out there even quite old machines stay recent. For example the latest Mac OS runs perfectly fine on my 5 year old powerbook in fact it's actually faster than the original Mac OS that shipped on the unit. This is something which Microsoft unfortunately can not provide (far too much legacy hardware out there to support efficiently.)
As for gateway, it's less about brand and user experience and more about budget entry-level computers. It follows the same analogy as students with automobiles. They start on a poor quality often second-hand car that gets them from A to B, and later in life when they get more cluey and understand that they want something with a better aesthetic they move on to better equipped cars, often buying new instead of second-hand.
As my stance to his attitude, I'm simply not going to buy anything from Universal or it's parent company. It's simple enough to implement and will make almost no difference to my life. Somehow media execs seem to believe that we -need- to buy music/video clips like it's food, water, clothing or shelter. FFS it's an audio track and with recent releases probably a bad audio track at that. The music biz is so arrogant that they don't even bother to remove the ~15-16KHz whine from their CD titles which were recorded with the use of CRT cue-machines.
I don't think production workers in a 3rd world country are benefitting a single penny when these tax like additions are made to device players, they serve only to fatten the stuffed wallets of the upper management.
It makes little sense to use wifi for stationary computers as would be set up in a computer lab. The price of a cabled system is going to be significantly lower than a wifi network and in general you can expect better performance from a cabled network (with particular attention paid to interference and other common signal killers such as cordless phones, microwaves and other wifi networks which all effect popular wifi networks.)
I suspect whoever thought up the idea to tell the parents that wifi is going to seriously harm their children might have been trying to stave off another form of parental zealotry "wanting the best technology for their children".. even when it's not the most suitable for their computer labs.
This is off-topic but necessary - While I agree that digg does often see articles in advance of slashdot. Digg is also notorious for reporting old news repeatedly. (Examples include the art lededev OLED keyboard which was again dugg quite high on the front page about a month ago for no other reason than a digg user having found the years old website.)
Another common digg foul-up is the habit for multiple article posts that make/. look tame. Something which even the digg operators are scornful of.
My personal favourite however is that the digg front page currently carries an article about one of thinkgeek's april fools products with the inclination that it is a legitimate product. (No you can not grow 1-up nintendo mario bros. mushrooms, it's not real, it's a joke, stop digging it.)
While I'm happy to use both sites and for both sites to co-exist (and they will for a very long time, no death-nells here.) Any incredible looking news I find on digg I will always google for supporting articles, as there is no filter for users who deliberately or not post incorrect/fake/joke articles.
On the flip side I personally find the comments in digg a useless montage of fanboyism, unadulerated one-word praises e.g. "cool", "awesome", "wow!!!111sin(90)" or just people who lead me to understand why 419 scamming still works.
While listening into traffic is nothing new(and your method seems perfectly plausable). The email addresses provided to allofmp3 were through an encrypted connection and the spam I am receiving is unique to two separate allofmp3 addresses (no others)
This provides a few facts: Since the connection was over an encrypted channel, we can assume there was no listening in the middle, and Since there were several months between the creation of each of these email addresses for allofmp3.com -and- almost half a year before these addresses began receiving spam, we can only deduce that either allofmp3.com and their financial arm's email databases have been stolen in perfect synchrony.. or they just decided to sell them without my consent.
I used to do that, but then I thought it was too easy for a 3rd party to emulate this system. (Sure this is a little bit over the top, but I've always preferred multiple layers.) E.g. a 3rd party can recognise what is going on, and say, hey lets get some spam going and make it look like it came from his yahoo account etc. A look up table (or a simple code only you can decipher) gets around this lapse.
To get around spam issues I bought a cheap domain and use an included service to redirect all the email that gets sent to that domain to a single email address. (Most will offer this service for free.)
I then use separate email addresses for everything I sign up for. E.g. my bank email address is different from my health fund email address, which is different from my all of mp3 email address etc. I use a little code which isn't obvious(similar to a lookup table) to code each website into the username portion of the email address... That's why I'm a little annoyed at allofmp3.com at the moment, as I've supplied two email addresses to them on only two occassions, and both are huge spam recipients. So it's clear that not only does their financial arm sell my email address, but their online store does too.
This method is good for 2 reasons: It's very easy to direct all email from particular addresses straight to the trash should they become spam targets and secondly, it's very easy for me to figure out (such as the allofmp3.com case) who sold my email address to spammers and when.
I've seen various incarnations of this video all through the year. In particular it's often referenced when speaking about Apple computer's gestural patent applications which detail very similar techniques as shown in this video.
In particular we can see the zooming (into maps, etc) gestures in the patent imagery. http://hrmpf.com/wordpress/48/new-apple-patents/ Although these ideas are not too-new, the related apple patents date as far back as Jan 2005 (through to Oct 06)
I would agree with you, with the exception that I feel that the header article is exaggerating when it suggests that apple are bashing MS over the virus. The actual quote is "As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it." It's a pretty clear they are apologetic for this problem despite that windows computers are often infected with viruses. I'd find issue with apple here if they were not apologetic, not accepting responsibility, or blaming MS in it's entirety for this.
The feature was to appear back in 10.3, but was likely pulled because the hard drive based iPods of the day weren't having 100% stability with the hard drives inside. So it would be a bad idea to have your iPod carry around all your irreplacable data when there is a chance that just dropping the iPod could destroy it. Now Apple have significantly large flash based iPods (big enough to support a home directory.) So the idea is back on the table without the fear of randomly losing all your data from damage to the iPod.
In terms of the feature itself it carries your "keychain" and preferences with you, so operating on any mac will be the same experience as using it on your own mac at home. (Not just access to home directory files for example.) Additionally OSX already supports "live" encryption of the home directory, under the feature name of "FileVault". Which can be optionally enabled.
Of interest as well is that many users are already doing this, as you can already install your entire OS + home folders onto an iPod, then plug it into any mac and boot from it. (Contract graphic designers usually do this with the "daisy cutter" drives as they require no batteries/powersource.)
To speak of efficiency, you only require a 16MB video card to run Quartz Extreme on a Mac (People run it on 8mb though.) Windows Vista asks for a 256mb video card. So you can bet that there is definitely large quality & efficiency differences there.
Also the author seems to inaccurately credit application-tabbing to Microsoft. (In one way or another this feature has existed in almost every developed operating system since the mid 80s.)
A more convincing argument would be to suggest that Apple took "Open With..." from XP.
That aside Apple rarely-ever takes an idea verbatim from others, instead opting to develop it further.
Despite my personal opinion that prefers we all use better operating systems instead of there being a huge quality imbalance. If I were to be worried about who "borrowed" which features from which platform, I'd rate the originality of: - Apple-Tab - Open with far below Mac OS features such as: - Expose(Flip3d) - Widgets(Gadgets) or even - Trash(Recycling Bin).
I personally feel that things like Tabbing through applications and open with are almost completely obvious features that any platform would reach naturally. It's hard to justify that Expose etc would have been natural developments.
The only bonus I see in Windows Vista is that it'll promote the sale of computers with higher spec'd hardware beyond the gaming community. It's disturbing to me that an operating system has higher system requirements than current FPS games.
I've said this ad nauseam on here, and generally most people will agree: The number of patches released for a piece of software is not an indication of the software's security.
There seems to be a journalistic approach that equates more patches with less security.. More patches means a -more- secure product, not a less secure product. We're not talking about Windows XP here, where the tide of patches has never stemmed, to the point where their patches have been guilty of creating new security vulnerabilities. A person can argue that the many-eyes model of open source makes finding vulnerabilities more probable (the more found & corrected vulnerabilities.. the more secure the software is not vice-versa.)
Just because less vulnerabilities are -found- doesn't mean that more don't exist. In closed software only the vendor knows truly how many faults are found in their software.. and they are also able to be more secretive with their security processes.
By comparing raw numbers of patches unfairly attributes that all software is scanned for vulnerabilities in the same way: If for example I have a dodgey piece of software and I am too busy working on my next-gen operating system, then it's not very likely I'll have enough resources to find flaws in my dodgey piece of software. Historically we've seen Microsoft as a reactive patch vendor, which is a good indication that they aren't actively looking for flaws and are only responding to issues found in the wild or by non-MS security groups.
Additionally I rank a flaw that lets malicious websites install malware higher than a flaw that will only crash the browser. (Yet in pure numbers they both count as a sole vulnerability.)
I think this is less a case of Apple doing a poor job, and rather the specific car manufacturer doing a bad implementation. In any case car companies are pretty happy updating their consoles with each revision... so even though it's an Audi which is supposed to be a nice car, and the console is currently unusable, it will be better in the next revision. (Cars often get system updates at services.)
Just to correct the above, of the new patches (3 of them) only some are for the intel macs and some are for the ppc macs. Different flaws exist on different hardware configurations, one requiring 3rd party devices also.
"Apple is still adamant that SecureWorks didn't find any flaws."
I believe just about everyone is adamant that SecureWorks didn't find any flaws.
Since their initial statement which was launched on digg with a title that read something similar to: "Own a macbook in under 60 seconds". They have claimed the following:
- Fault works on macbooks and most other wireless hardware, platform independent.
- Apple had muscled them into not demonstrating it on apple hardware, instead 3rd party hardware.
- They had informed Apple and other companies of the fault, gave the required details and instructions.
- Will demonstrate the flaw on video as to protect the packets from being sniffed.
Now since the demonstration of the video the following has come out of the woodwork
- These updates do not patch intel based macs such as the macbook.. nor do they patch anything described by SecureWorks
- Apple had never spoken with SecureWorks or it's employees about the "flaws" before the blackhat conference.
- SecureWorks have not informed Apple or any other company of the flaws or gave required details to reproduce them.
- The demonstration on video has been dubious and clearly shows 3rd party hardware being used, with there being no proof that this is a wireless flaw or just a hoax.
- SecureWorks has gone mostly silent on the issue, and have changed their story several times, they have never released details to validate -any- of their claims.
The whole thing has been a terrible farse with the perpetrators reeling into hiding after realising that this is something which the public would want proven and not just take their word for it.
No one expects any platform to be 100% secure, but when you find a fault, particularly one as interesting as a remote wireless hack, you will instantly have a huge audience wanting it proven and demonstrated, they deserve being outcast like they have. Their methods are being publicy dealt with in the same way that a disgraced scientist would be.
I'd say the metal ones started as a home hack up. They're interesting being I'm sure they'd probably stop a bullet, but if you ever dropped it the extra momentum would certainly destroy the internal hard disk. The shock would be incredible, you could kill someone with one of those cases.
Email was already facing a similar death from spam the same way that news groups went from being functional communities into spam infested deserts.
With Email we at least saw this one coming and have pretty good methods of dealing with spam. (The next spam frontiers are blogs, IM & VOIP, but that can be dealt with easily too.)
While this might sound a little FUDish. Email is already dying a slow death, communications tools like IM, blogging, voip and video conferencing are making Email feel impersonal and technologically outdated.
I agree that iPods have nearly cooked the market in their current form. This will lead to a natural sales decline. However at the same time I don't agree that comparing adjacent quarters is the way to analyse this. Everyone knows that the quarter after christmas sees a sharp decline in sales (of almost everything), in many industries 50% of yearly volumes are made up in the month of december.
If we compare year to year figures the iPod is still growing...but nothing like the 8x to 16x sales jumps we saw in previous years.
With all that said now, a new iPod product with a significant reason to upgrade would entice users to buy the latest and greatest. The cycle is repeatable, you just need a savvy company that is firstly innovative to create a product difference and secondly interested enough to push the envelope in technology. I don't see this being a problem for Apple.
The launch went ok, only one issue with a support system for engine cooling (they were assuming there was water in it.) they cycled it and it's working fine. So it's all good for now.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think this is great news if it actually happens. IBM is completely notorious (along with Motorola) for overselling and under delivering on the PowerPC platform. Both companies also release reflex press reports the moment they lose a contract which had a bit of mind share at stake (e.g. Motorola claimed to have developed technology that would allow them to instantly produce chips that were faster, running on less power with less heat, almost to the day that Apple annouced they were buying PPC chips entirely from IBM. Also IBM were quick to tout a similar news article when Apple switched to Intel.) With all this in mind it wouldn't surprise me if we don't see a 5Ghz Power6 or Power6 derivatives (We didn't see a promised 3Ghz Power5 derivative for more than a year after it was expected in market.)
The warranty on my plasma (sanyo brand) reveals that they will not cover burn in from video games. My friend that sourced it for me reveals that they can get burn in remarkably quickly (hours not days). So for example a game's score counter on the screen will burn in quite quickly..
I can only assume the following circumstances:
- Very large wrists+hands (i.e fat) are pulling and stretching at the lanyard tie during normal operation, so when they do finally swing the controller with a great force the combined tension is enough to snap the lanyard.
- Kids aren't using the lanyard at all, their hands get a bit sweaty (palms contain 95% of your bodies sweat glands), then tada the controller that is so easy to hang onto suddenly becomes airborne... followed by the kid gnawing at the lanyard tie so they won't get in trouble with their parents."I swear it broke mommy!"
- Or similar to option 1, a regular hand is holding the controller in such a way that the lanyard is always pulled tight.
- It wouldn't be slashdot without the conspiracy theory: This is just a scare tactic legal to discourage people from buying a Wii
Since the youth are a major market for the iTS, it's difficult to pull a certain conclusion from the figures based on credit cards alone. Children now don't have to bug their parents to use their CC to buy songs over iTS, they just pick up a prepaid.
Also of note is that since the video store has launched millions of full length movies have been purchased, so the iTS couldn't be doing too bad.
Overall it's just the consumer that gets hurt by DRM.. as the article points out, Apple is still selling droves of their iPod multimedia player.
Historically this hasn't been the case and it will definitely take time for Apple to become top-of-mind in this dept. Also because Apple know what hardware they have out there even quite old machines stay recent. For example the latest Mac OS runs perfectly fine on my 5 year old powerbook in fact it's actually faster than the original Mac OS that shipped on the unit. This is something which Microsoft unfortunately can not provide (far too much legacy hardware out there to support efficiently.)
As for gateway, it's less about brand and user experience and more about budget entry-level computers. It follows the same analogy as students with automobiles. They start on a poor quality often second-hand car that gets them from A to B, and later in life when they get more cluey and understand that they want something with a better aesthetic they move on to better equipped cars, often buying new instead of second-hand.
I don't think production workers in a 3rd world country are benefitting a single penny when these tax like additions are made to device players, they serve only to fatten the stuffed wallets of the upper management.
I suspect whoever thought up the idea to tell the parents that wifi is going to seriously harm their children might have been trying to stave off another form of parental zealotry "wanting the best technology for their children".. even when it's not the most suitable for their computer labs.
Another common digg foul-up is the habit for multiple article posts that make /. look tame. Something which even the digg operators are scornful of.
My personal favourite however is that the digg front page currently carries an article about one of thinkgeek's april fools products with the inclination that it is a legitimate product. (No you can not grow 1-up nintendo mario bros. mushrooms, it's not real, it's a joke, stop digging it.)
While I'm happy to use both sites and for both sites to co-exist (and they will for a very long time, no death-nells here.) Any incredible looking news I find on digg I will always google for supporting articles, as there is no filter for users who deliberately or not post incorrect/fake/joke articles.
On the flip side I personally find the comments in digg a useless montage of fanboyism, unadulerated one-word praises e.g. "cool", "awesome", "wow!!!111sin(90)" or just people who lead me to understand why 419 scamming still works.
The maxim cover was at: 3537'12.64"N 11522'59.56"W It's gone now.
This provides a few facts:
Since the connection was over an encrypted channel, we can assume there was no listening in the middle, and
Since there were several months between the creation of each of these email addresses for allofmp3.com -and- almost half a year before these addresses began receiving spam, we can only deduce that either allofmp3.com and their financial arm's email databases have been stolen in perfect synchrony.. or they just decided to sell them without my consent.
I used to do that, but then I thought it was too easy for a 3rd party to emulate this system. (Sure this is a little bit over the top, but I've always preferred multiple layers.) E.g. a 3rd party can recognise what is going on, and say, hey lets get some spam going and make it look like it came from his yahoo account etc. A look up table (or a simple code only you can decipher) gets around this lapse.
I then use separate email addresses for everything I sign up for. E.g. my bank email address is different from my health fund email address, which is different from my all of mp3 email address etc. I use a little code which isn't obvious(similar to a lookup table) to code each website into the username portion of the email address... That's why I'm a little annoyed at allofmp3.com at the moment, as I've supplied two email addresses to them on only two occassions, and both are huge spam recipients. So it's clear that not only does their financial arm sell my email address, but their online store does too.
This method is good for 2 reasons: It's very easy to direct all email from particular addresses straight to the trash should they become spam targets and secondly, it's very easy for me to figure out (such as the allofmp3.com case) who sold my email address to spammers and when.
In particular we can see the zooming (into maps, etc) gestures in the patent imagery. http://hrmpf.com/wordpress/48/new-apple-patents/ Although these ideas are not too-new, the related apple patents date as far back as Jan 2005 (through to Oct 06)
...but it'd suck to have a dead pixel.
I would agree with you, with the exception that I feel that the header article is exaggerating when it suggests that apple are bashing MS over the virus. The actual quote is "As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it." It's a pretty clear they are apologetic for this problem despite that windows computers are often infected with viruses. I'd find issue with apple here if they were not apologetic, not accepting responsibility, or blaming MS in it's entirety for this.
The feature was to appear back in 10.3, but was likely pulled because the hard drive based iPods of the day weren't having 100% stability with the hard drives inside. So it would be a bad idea to have your iPod carry around all your irreplacable data when there is a chance that just dropping the iPod could destroy it. Now Apple have significantly large flash based iPods (big enough to support a home directory.) So the idea is back on the table without the fear of randomly losing all your data from damage to the iPod.
In terms of the feature itself it carries your "keychain" and preferences with you, so operating on any mac will be the same experience as using it on your own mac at home. (Not just access to home directory files for example.) Additionally OSX already supports "live" encryption of the home directory, under the feature name of "FileVault". Which can be optionally enabled.
Of interest as well is that many users are already doing this, as you can already install your entire OS + home folders onto an iPod, then plug it into any mac and boot from it. (Contract graphic designers usually do this with the "daisy cutter" drives as they require no batteries/powersource.)
Also the author seems to inaccurately credit application-tabbing to Microsoft. (In one way or another this feature has existed in almost every developed operating system since the mid 80s.)
A more convincing argument would be to suggest that Apple took "Open With..." from XP.
That aside Apple rarely-ever takes an idea verbatim from others, instead opting to develop it further.
Despite my personal opinion that prefers we all use better operating systems instead of there being a huge quality imbalance.
If I were to be worried about who "borrowed" which features from which platform,
I'd rate the originality of:
- Apple-Tab
- Open with
far below Mac OS features such as:
- Expose(Flip3d)
- Widgets(Gadgets) or even
- Trash(Recycling Bin).
I personally feel that things like Tabbing through applications and open with are almost completely obvious features that any platform would reach naturally. It's hard to justify that Expose etc would have been natural developments.
The only bonus I see in Windows Vista is that it'll promote the sale of computers with higher spec'd hardware beyond the gaming community. It's disturbing to me that an operating system has higher system requirements than current FPS games.
There seems to be a journalistic approach that equates more patches with less security.. More patches means a -more- secure product, not a less secure product. We're not talking about Windows XP here, where the tide of patches has never stemmed, to the point where their patches have been guilty of creating new security vulnerabilities. A person can argue that the many-eyes model of open source makes finding vulnerabilities more probable (the more found & corrected vulnerabilities.. the more secure the software is not vice-versa.)
Just because less vulnerabilities are -found- doesn't mean that more don't exist. In closed software only the vendor knows truly how many faults are found in their software.. and they are also able to be more secretive with their security processes.
By comparing raw numbers of patches unfairly attributes that all software is scanned for vulnerabilities in the same way: If for example I have a dodgey piece of software and I am too busy working on my next-gen operating system, then it's not very likely I'll have enough resources to find flaws in my dodgey piece of software. Historically we've seen Microsoft as a reactive patch vendor, which is a good indication that they aren't actively looking for flaws and are only responding to issues found in the wild or by non-MS security groups.
Additionally I rank a flaw that lets malicious websites install malware higher than a flaw that will only crash the browser. (Yet in pure numbers they both count as a sole vulnerability.)
I think this is less a case of Apple doing a poor job, and rather the specific car manufacturer doing a bad implementation. In any case car companies are pretty happy updating their consoles with each revision... so even though it's an Audi which is supposed to be a nice car, and the console is currently unusable, it will be better in the next revision. (Cars often get system updates at services.)
Just to correct the above, of the new patches (3 of them) only some are for the intel macs and some are for the ppc macs. Different flaws exist on different hardware configurations, one requiring 3rd party devices also.
I believe just about everyone is adamant that SecureWorks didn't find any flaws.
Since their initial statement which was launched on digg with a title that read something similar to: "Own a macbook in under 60 seconds". They have claimed the following:
- Fault works on macbooks and most other wireless hardware, platform independent.
- Apple had muscled them into not demonstrating it on apple hardware, instead 3rd party hardware.
- They had informed Apple and other companies of the fault, gave the required details and instructions.
- Will demonstrate the flaw on video as to protect the packets from being sniffed.
Now since the demonstration of the video the following has come out of the woodwork
- These updates do not patch intel based macs such as the macbook.. nor do they patch anything described by SecureWorks
- Apple had never spoken with SecureWorks or it's employees about the "flaws" before the blackhat conference.
- SecureWorks have not informed Apple or any other company of the flaws or gave required details to reproduce them.
- The demonstration on video has been dubious and clearly shows 3rd party hardware being used, with there being no proof that this is a wireless flaw or just a hoax.
- SecureWorks has gone mostly silent on the issue, and have changed their story several times, they have never released details to validate -any- of their claims.
The whole thing has been a terrible farse with the perpetrators reeling into hiding after realising that this is something which the public would want proven and not just take their word for it.
No one expects any platform to be 100% secure, but when you find a fault, particularly one as interesting as a remote wireless hack, you will instantly have a huge audience wanting it proven and demonstrated, they deserve being outcast like they have. Their methods are being publicy dealt with in the same way that a disgraced scientist would be.
I'd say the metal ones started as a home hack up. They're interesting being I'm sure they'd probably stop a bullet, but if you ever dropped it the extra momentum would certainly destroy the internal hard disk. The shock would be incredible, you could kill someone with one of those cases.
With Email we at least saw this one coming and have pretty good methods of dealing with spam. (The next spam frontiers are blogs, IM & VOIP, but that can be dealt with easily too.)
While this might sound a little FUDish. Email is already dying a slow death, communications tools like IM, blogging, voip and video conferencing are making Email feel impersonal and technologically outdated.
If we compare year to year figures the iPod is still growing...but nothing like the 8x to 16x sales jumps we saw in previous years.
With all that said now, a new iPod product with a significant reason to upgrade would entice users to buy the latest and greatest. The cycle is repeatable, you just need a savvy company that is firstly innovative to create a product difference and secondly interested enough to push the envelope in technology. I don't see this being a problem for Apple.
The launch went ok, only one issue with a support system for engine cooling (they were assuming there was water in it.) they cycled it and it's working fine. So it's all good for now.