Feel free to widen it further to telephones, roads, cars, the postal service, horseback, boats, shoes. All of these things have been used in the commission of a crime in the past. If we start banning shit because it was used at some point to commit a crime, pretty much everything gets banned.
If Slashdot had it's way... this is why we can't have nice things.
You are missing a key component - all these mapping systems use traffic data that is compiled by departments of transportation, as well as sometimes crowdsource information from the users of the app.
When you leave the arterials and highways, the resolution of data drops dramatically, so there is a good chance that Google Maps (et. al.) will *not* keep people away from the secondary / tertiary roads because it just doesn't know that it's all jammed up. If every car was all reporting data into the same collective data source about traffic conditions and position, then the entire road system could be maximized as you suggest. However, we aren't even close to that, so only parts of it that have sufficient data can be maximized, and any traffic that gets redirected to "blind spots" is just a guess, and that guess could turn out to be wrong.
Plus, routing a freeway worth of traffic through a residential neighborhood probably isn't the best idea for many reasons. There's a reason why highways have multiple lanes, concrete dividers, limited access, and wide shoulders - it's to increase the capacity by reducing intersection points, increase safety for operation of vehicles at speed, and reduce the amount of pedestrians and other non-motorized traffic.
And, if the planners get wind of people using particular neighborhood streets to bypass the designated arterials, they usually end up spending money to get people back to "where they should be" by increasing the amount of stop signs, adding "speed humps", and in extreme cases narrowing roads to make a neighborhood "more walkable" even though nobody asked for that, and adding "bike boulevard" curb extensions that block the lane heading into the neighborhood that make it a complete pain in the ass to get to your house in your car should you live on one of those "boulevards", etc. And basically all of those make the traffic worse, because at the end of the day people still need to get where they are going.
"It's not our problem if OEMs don't update their ROMs with our latest and most secure versions!" - that's what you could expect Google to say in response, seemingly unaware that some of their own damn hardware doesn't get updates either.
If they can't even be bothered to update their own shit, how could you ever expect LG, HTC, Lenovo, Samsung, Huawei, et. al. to ?
While I agree, these flaws are in hardware that is staying in use for longer and longer with each cycle (because the performance is still adequate enough that people don't want to buy a new PC). That gives people plenty of time to find ways to exploit the flaw, and still have many vulnerable systems out there.
Software vulnerabilities can be patched up within days. This one will be years before there is "herd immunity".
and with an iPhone you would carry a usb-to-lightning cable and power adapter, and a pair of headphones that on the end of the cable you have the 0.3 ounce 3.5mm-to-lighning adapter which came in the box with the phone for the exact same functionality.
Is that 0.3 ounce free adapter going to be the proverbial straw the broke the camel's back?
The argument against proprietary connectors is a legitimate one, but your "half a dozen dongles" is you either having zero clues about which you speak, or you making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Yeah, but if you make it simple and based on what everyone uses today, you don't get to put out a press release about how your new standard for doing things that there's already at least 5 standards for is so shiny and spiffy.
They're solving problems that already have solutions, dammit! Stop making sense!
Didn't click the link, not expecting to find "we wanted our own snowflake system that does exactly what we want, and is less useful outside our organization than existing standards that may already be in use"
Plus, if they expect this to take over for street addresses such as the headline suggests, they should think again. "Oh, it's on Walnut Street, just past 5th" is far more useful than "Oh, it's at CMXR+X6" which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.
OMG so if you gain root access to the system, you can do anything with the hardware that the drivers allow? Or if you replace the software that the thing is running with your own software, it does stuff that you tell it to?
How is this an "exploit" exactly? Sounds like it's working as intended.
The sentence on the web site was probably edited from:
"Due to the sensitive nature of security vulnerabilities, we usually work under strict mutual NDAs with our customers to ensure maximum safety and privacy. If you would like to become one of our customers by handing over a signed NDA and a fat bag of money, you can contact us at the following email address. Should we find a flaw in a product that is not produced by one of our NDA partners, we'll first ask them for a fat bag of money, and if they don't immediately capitulate, we'll be publishing their dirty laundry as "full disclosure with previous notification".
Somehow I have a feeling that the "disclosure" to AMD included the offer of a mutual NDA and business-to-business financial arrangement, with AMD telling them to pound it.
I agree completely that DRM is a waste of time, treats legitimate users as criminals, and just adds layers of complexity that *will* break someday causing unneeded issues. It's one of the reasons I have purchased a grand total of zero movies or TV shows from iTunes.
That being said, Apple has contractual obligations with content owners that they are distributors for to keep the DRM secure. We already saw the RIAA sue hardware manufacturers for creating "instruments of piracy" multiple times - there's no reason to think they wouldn't try the same on Apple as a co-defendant if they didn't at least make a reasonable attempt at preventing it.
DRM completely sucks, and adds no value to the purchaser whatsoever. But it's also a fact of life as long as the content owners demand it be, unless there is a rapid and unforeseen shift in the entertainment consuming public to "free" content that is unshackled by DRM.
He was referring to VS Code, Microsoft's opened-up free (MIT license) IDE that does many more things than just Visual C / C# / VB: https://code.visualstudio.com/
Use it, don't use it, whatever. I've been bouncing between different IDEs for what I do and found it to be exactly what the GP said: Atom, but better. Example: Atom absolutely gags on large files where VS Code doesn't seem to give a shit - it just opens it and lets you scroll and edit immediately on the same hardware.
Because there's absolutely no way to declare a common standard to use, and then write useful APIs and libraries for developers to call upon in order to encourage the use of that standard.
Oh wait, that's exactly what Apple did, and NeXT before them, with the XML-ish plist format that is still in use today.
Or they could stop the pissing match with Qualcomm and support AptX (which they already do on macOS) so that the wireless music doesn't sound like garbage unless you have their special headphones, or one of a handful of other headphone sets that supports AAC over bluetooth...
Yeah, those have been a thing since about two weeks after Slashdot wanted to break out the bitch-forks about Apple doing away with the stereo plug. Then the gripe became "I don't want to have to carry around another 0.3 ounces of wire with my huge 3 pound stereo cans that already take up half of my bag!" Or, "it's something else to lose, because I can't figure out that I can just keep it in the case with my headphones, or just plugged into the end of the headphone cable!"
It was probably stupid for Apple to ditch that connector when they did, especially without support for AptX due to their pissing match with Qualcomm; but really the grousing and griping about such a little thing was (and still is) a bit pathetic, when it's a problem on an $800 - $1000 device (iPhone) talking to a $100 - $500 device (quality headphones) that is solved more or less permanently with an accessory that costs right around 1% of the phone's price.
You claim he's wrong, and back it up with exactly zero evidence, giving only hater conjecture.
His pass-through reasoning is probably right on - they are looking to prevent someone from creating an "iTunes cache device" that makes perfect digital copies of the all-you-can-eat iTunes subscription, so that you can turn off the subscription and still have all the music you aren't supposed to have. That explains the data pass-through restriction quite nicely.
The charging bit is more of a mystery - if it was really about variable power delivery they could have put specifications around it - your device must accept these signals from the phone about power utilization and be able to step up / down the charge being delivered accordingly, etc. After all, this is a device certification program - if the device can't do it or doesn't do it properly when tested, it's not certified.
Don't forget that it would also give Intel a massive market share on WiFi radios too. Every Mac uses a Broadcom, and many Windows PC OEMs have Intel PRO/Wireless for vPro, and a Broadcom alternative for non-vPro. There's a few out there using Atheros (including Dell) but the early versions of those were rather lumpy, and the fix was usually to throw a $30 Intel radio into the slot where the Atheros used to be.
But guess what? Atheros is Qualcomm. So if all of this comes to pass, it all becomes Intel.
I'm wondering if it's "not available" because they know it's horribly broken with certain families of GPUs. After all, the acrobatics you have to go through to get Gnome working on an Nvidia "Optimus" laptop with Ubuntu 17 isn't exactly straight-forward...
while nasty, it's also relatively short-lived in comparison to unprocessed waste (hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands) and very small volume in comparison to unprocessed waste. You're removing the 1-2% of really nasty shit that prevents the other 98% of fuel from being used.
That 2% of really nasty shit can then be vitrified to make it easier to handle and store for the orders of magnitude less time until it becomes essentially inert.
I imagine it was pretty easy to find a swordsmith before rifles were a thing, too. The buggy whip manufacturers are having hard times as well - don't forget about them. And I hear that there isn't nearly as much demand for granite block construction as there used to be, due to concrete and steel framed buildings. I mean, how is someone supposed to build their medieval castles in the days of skyscraper construction? And all the people that used to have to cut down entire forests of firewood to keep people warm during the winter - look what electricity and natural gas has done to them!
As technology improves, there will be displacement of workers that are in the business of obsolete technology that is replaced. That is the nature of progress.
I guess we shouldn't worry about extinction-level events from asteroids and such either, since there is no evidence of one about to smash into the planet? Probably shouldn't worry about antibiotic-resistant disease either, or anything else that is a threat until it's too late to do anything about it.
More than that, Microsoft's previous extinguishing of competitive products were all closed-source for-profit corporations. How do you extinguish something that is free, open, and worked on by thousands of volunteers?
It's one thing to deprive a competitor of revenue until they collapse under the weight of their own expenses. It's quite another to try to erase an idea from the Internet. Open software is here for good, and Linux with it.
So maybe instead of levying some specific tax on 4 specific companies, they could change the rules that are being exploited to dodge taxes?
If you don't like the legal behavior, make it illegal and they'll stop. This is the worst kind of fix possible. What happens when a fifth company decides to do the same damn thing, and it goes unnoticed for years?
Slashdot Mirror
Feel free to widen it further to telephones, roads, cars, the postal service, horseback, boats, shoes. All of these things have been used in the commission of a crime in the past. If we start banning shit because it was used at some point to commit a crime, pretty much everything gets banned.
If Slashdot had it's way... this is why we can't have nice things.
You are missing a key component - all these mapping systems use traffic data that is compiled by departments of transportation, as well as sometimes crowdsource information from the users of the app.
When you leave the arterials and highways, the resolution of data drops dramatically, so there is a good chance that Google Maps (et. al.) will *not* keep people away from the secondary / tertiary roads because it just doesn't know that it's all jammed up. If every car was all reporting data into the same collective data source about traffic conditions and position, then the entire road system could be maximized as you suggest. However, we aren't even close to that, so only parts of it that have sufficient data can be maximized, and any traffic that gets redirected to "blind spots" is just a guess, and that guess could turn out to be wrong.
Plus, routing a freeway worth of traffic through a residential neighborhood probably isn't the best idea for many reasons. There's a reason why highways have multiple lanes, concrete dividers, limited access, and wide shoulders - it's to increase the capacity by reducing intersection points, increase safety for operation of vehicles at speed, and reduce the amount of pedestrians and other non-motorized traffic.
And, if the planners get wind of people using particular neighborhood streets to bypass the designated arterials, they usually end up spending money to get people back to "where they should be" by increasing the amount of stop signs, adding "speed humps", and in extreme cases narrowing roads to make a neighborhood "more walkable" even though nobody asked for that, and adding "bike boulevard" curb extensions that block the lane heading into the neighborhood that make it a complete pain in the ass to get to your house in your car should you live on one of those "boulevards", etc. And basically all of those make the traffic worse, because at the end of the day people still need to get where they are going.
"It's not our problem if OEMs don't update their ROMs with our latest and most secure versions!" - that's what you could expect Google to say in response, seemingly unaware that some of their own damn hardware doesn't get updates either.
If they can't even be bothered to update their own shit, how could you ever expect LG, HTC, Lenovo, Samsung, Huawei, et. al. to ?
Thank you for your insightful and well thought out post. I particularly enjoy the part where you back up your assertion with anything at all.
While I agree, these flaws are in hardware that is staying in use for longer and longer with each cycle (because the performance is still adequate enough that people don't want to buy a new PC). That gives people plenty of time to find ways to exploit the flaw, and still have many vulnerable systems out there.
Software vulnerabilities can be patched up within days. This one will be years before there is "herd immunity".
and with an iPhone you would carry a usb-to-lightning cable and power adapter, and a pair of headphones that on the end of the cable you have the 0.3 ounce 3.5mm-to-lighning adapter which came in the box with the phone for the exact same functionality.
Is that 0.3 ounce free adapter going to be the proverbial straw the broke the camel's back?
The argument against proprietary connectors is a legitimate one, but your "half a dozen dongles" is you either having zero clues about which you speak, or you making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Yeah, but if you make it simple and based on what everyone uses today, you don't get to put out a press release about how your new standard for doing things that there's already at least 5 standards for is so shiny and spiffy.
They're solving problems that already have solutions, dammit! Stop making sense!
Didn't click the link, not expecting to find "we wanted our own snowflake system that does exactly what we want, and is less useful outside our organization than existing standards that may already be in use"
Plus, if they expect this to take over for street addresses such as the headline suggests, they should think again. "Oh, it's on Walnut Street, just past 5th" is far more useful than "Oh, it's at CMXR+X6" which has everyone scrambling for Google Maps just to decode what the fuck you just said.
OMG so if you gain root access to the system, you can do anything with the hardware that the drivers allow? Or if you replace the software that the thing is running with your own software, it does stuff that you tell it to?
How is this an "exploit" exactly? Sounds like it's working as intended.
The sentence on the web site was probably edited from:
"Due to the sensitive nature of security vulnerabilities, we usually work under strict mutual NDAs with our customers to ensure maximum safety and privacy. If you would like to become one of our customers by handing over a signed NDA and a fat bag of money, you can contact us at the following email address. Should we find a flaw in a product that is not produced by one of our NDA partners, we'll first ask them for a fat bag of money, and if they don't immediately capitulate, we'll be publishing their dirty laundry as "full disclosure with previous notification".
Somehow I have a feeling that the "disclosure" to AMD included the offer of a mutual NDA and business-to-business financial arrangement, with AMD telling them to pound it.
I agree completely that DRM is a waste of time, treats legitimate users as criminals, and just adds layers of complexity that *will* break someday causing unneeded issues. It's one of the reasons I have purchased a grand total of zero movies or TV shows from iTunes.
That being said, Apple has contractual obligations with content owners that they are distributors for to keep the DRM secure. We already saw the RIAA sue hardware manufacturers for creating "instruments of piracy" multiple times - there's no reason to think they wouldn't try the same on Apple as a co-defendant if they didn't at least make a reasonable attempt at preventing it.
DRM completely sucks, and adds no value to the purchaser whatsoever. But it's also a fact of life as long as the content owners demand it be, unless there is a rapid and unforeseen shift in the entertainment consuming public to "free" content that is unshackled by DRM.
He was referring to VS Code, Microsoft's opened-up free (MIT license) IDE that does many more things than just Visual C / C# / VB: https://code.visualstudio.com/
Use it, don't use it, whatever. I've been bouncing between different IDEs for what I do and found it to be exactly what the GP said: Atom, but better. Example: Atom absolutely gags on large files where VS Code doesn't seem to give a shit - it just opens it and lets you scroll and edit immediately on the same hardware.
Because there's absolutely no way to declare a common standard to use, and then write useful APIs and libraries for developers to call upon in order to encourage the use of that standard.
Oh wait, that's exactly what Apple did, and NeXT before them, with the XML-ish plist format that is still in use today.
You are wrong.
Or they could stop the pissing match with Qualcomm and support AptX (which they already do on macOS) so that the wireless music doesn't sound like garbage unless you have their special headphones, or one of a handful of other headphone sets that supports AAC over bluetooth...
SBC encoding is god damn garbage.
Yeah, those have been a thing since about two weeks after Slashdot wanted to break out the bitch-forks about Apple doing away with the stereo plug. Then the gripe became "I don't want to have to carry around another 0.3 ounces of wire with my huge 3 pound stereo cans that already take up half of my bag!" Or, "it's something else to lose, because I can't figure out that I can just keep it in the case with my headphones, or just plugged into the end of the headphone cable!"
It was probably stupid for Apple to ditch that connector when they did, especially without support for AptX due to their pissing match with Qualcomm; but really the grousing and griping about such a little thing was (and still is) a bit pathetic, when it's a problem on an $800 - $1000 device (iPhone) talking to a $100 - $500 device (quality headphones) that is solved more or less permanently with an accessory that costs right around 1% of the phone's price.
You claim he's wrong, and back it up with exactly zero evidence, giving only hater conjecture.
His pass-through reasoning is probably right on - they are looking to prevent someone from creating an "iTunes cache device" that makes perfect digital copies of the all-you-can-eat iTunes subscription, so that you can turn off the subscription and still have all the music you aren't supposed to have. That explains the data pass-through restriction quite nicely.
The charging bit is more of a mystery - if it was really about variable power delivery they could have put specifications around it - your device must accept these signals from the phone about power utilization and be able to step up / down the charge being delivered accordingly, etc. After all, this is a device certification program - if the device can't do it or doesn't do it properly when tested, it's not certified.
Don't forget that it would also give Intel a massive market share on WiFi radios too. Every Mac uses a Broadcom, and many Windows PC OEMs have Intel PRO/Wireless for vPro, and a Broadcom alternative for non-vPro. There's a few out there using Atheros (including Dell) but the early versions of those were rather lumpy, and the fix was usually to throw a $30 Intel radio into the slot where the Atheros used to be.
But guess what? Atheros is Qualcomm. So if all of this comes to pass, it all becomes Intel.
I'm wondering if it's "not available" because they know it's horribly broken with certain families of GPUs. After all, the acrobatics you have to go through to get Gnome working on an Nvidia "Optimus" laptop with Ubuntu 17 isn't exactly straight-forward...
while nasty, it's also relatively short-lived in comparison to unprocessed waste (hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands) and very small volume in comparison to unprocessed waste. You're removing the 1-2% of really nasty shit that prevents the other 98% of fuel from being used.
That 2% of really nasty shit can then be vitrified to make it easier to handle and store for the orders of magnitude less time until it becomes essentially inert.
Now only if we were actually doing that.
I imagine it was pretty easy to find a swordsmith before rifles were a thing, too. The buggy whip manufacturers are having hard times as well - don't forget about them. And I hear that there isn't nearly as much demand for granite block construction as there used to be, due to concrete and steel framed buildings. I mean, how is someone supposed to build their medieval castles in the days of skyscraper construction? And all the people that used to have to cut down entire forests of firewood to keep people warm during the winter - look what electricity and natural gas has done to them!
As technology improves, there will be displacement of workers that are in the business of obsolete technology that is replaced. That is the nature of progress.
Short version: adapt or die
I guess we shouldn't worry about extinction-level events from asteroids and such either, since there is no evidence of one about to smash into the planet? Probably shouldn't worry about antibiotic-resistant disease either, or anything else that is a threat until it's too late to do anything about it.
More than that, Microsoft's previous extinguishing of competitive products were all closed-source for-profit corporations. How do you extinguish something that is free, open, and worked on by thousands of volunteers?
It's one thing to deprive a competitor of revenue until they collapse under the weight of their own expenses. It's quite another to try to erase an idea from the Internet. Open software is here for good, and Linux with it.
Apparently not any more, but only if you are the EU, and if you don't specific non-EU people using the laws you passed and refuse to change.
I was unaware that the EU taxing authority gave two fucks about Slashdot and it's whiners.
Really, I'm surprised anybody gives to fucks about what is posted to this site, except for people squarely in the middle of the echo chamber.
So maybe instead of levying some specific tax on 4 specific companies, they could change the rules that are being exploited to dodge taxes?
If you don't like the legal behavior, make it illegal and they'll stop. This is the worst kind of fix possible. What happens when a fifth company decides to do the same damn thing, and it goes unnoticed for years?