Interesting. You're well over the threshold where I'd expect handling cash to be more expensive than handling credit cards. I won't ask you for details of your security arrangements, but I'd be interested in knowing how much you spend on safes and cash transport to the bank.
You're probably putting the isolating in the wrong place. Wireless interface firmware is a good place for exploits at the moment, so you should expect that to be compromised if a nation-state adversary cares. It then has complete access to anything on the same bus, so no VPN software on that host is secure. You're better off with a dumb WiFi bridge that provides an Ethernet interface and running a VPN from your laptop, because then they'd need to compromise the bridge, then use that to attack something on the laptop via Ethernet (not impossible, but wired NICs are simpler than wireless and so you're more likely to see an attack on the kernel, which you might at least be able to spot, even if you can't prevent it).
The difference is, I seem to get most of the benefits for the big hotel chains' schemes simply by being a member. I periodically get emails about how great it is that I have blue status with Hilton's HHonors scheme (threshold: 0 nights per year), and the benefits of a higher status are few and far between.
In contrast, with United's MileagePlus I get basically nothing for simply being a member, but when I got silver status I got free economy plus (read: more legroom) seats at check in and free checked bags on domestic US flights (not very useful), when I got to gold I got economy plus at booking time, lounge access (really nice at Heathrow and Ataturk, pretty crappy in most US airports) and more free checked bags. If I ever make it to Platinum (I hope not to, as flying enough in one year to make gold was too much - and no one seems to want to pay for me to fly everywhere first class, which is about the only way it would be tolerable) I'd get a bunch more stuff. This means I do have an incentive to fly with United (or with other Star Alliance airlines).
I wonder slightly how many hotels are even set up for handling cash. If you're taking payments in cash then you're going to have thousands of dollars sitting on the premises, which is well past the point at which credit cards become cheaper for most small businesses: the cost of the security, insurance, and physically processing the cash go up quite sharply when you become a good target for opportunist burglars.
You might be surprised. Hotels that use electronic booking systems are set up as append-only logs so that you can't modify a booking after the first night and you can't retroactively insert a booking. If anything illegal happens in the room and the police are called and it's not in their system or if there's anything that would require a claim on their insurance then there had better be a booking in their system or they can end up with huge liability. As such, most independent hotel operators other than the really sketchy ones that still use paper-only systems are pretty nervous about this kind of thing. The kind of incident that would result in a bit of paperwork can result in the hotel going out of business if they can't show a booking in the system. Even if you're willing to risk it, do it too often and you're just begging for an IRS audit.
This has nothing to do with cash. Most hotels will offer a discount of 5-50% if you ask for one unless it's peak season and they're guaranteed to be completely full.
A number of the big chains give you pretty big penalties for not being a member of their rewards club. For example, free WiFi for all members of the rewards scheme, even if you've never stayed with them before. A few I've stayed in offer access to a lounge with complimentary snacks and coffee (and, less often, beer) for members of the loyalty club, again with no requirement to actually stay there regularly. I have a small collection of hotel loyalty cards that I never use (I've never been asked to present one, I just log in and book with my account and it's automatically associated) because you always get a better deal if you're a member. I don't really understand why - most of them need your name, address, and credit card number when you book, so it's not like also giving them a single-use email address makes it easier for them to track me.
Smaller hotels will often give you a better rate if you email / call and ask. I've had pretty good luck just saying 'we're only able to pay this much for accommodation, can you come close?' Most of the time, they will (and will also do useful things like give a flat rate per night, rather than a cheap rate some nights, and charge and a more expensive one others, which makes the expenses people happier).
I remember reading about this years ago, and was under the impression that this had been fixed by browsers filling the form fields in the UI, but not in the DOM, until the user explicitly selected one of the fields in the same form. There are still some sneaky things you can do (for example, have a 1px by 1px form field so the user submits more information than they think they are submitting), but you can't just grab the data from the form until the user interacts with some part of it.
I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a while Apple let you download OPENSTEP 4.2 for x86 from the same place you could get System 7 and some other abandoned software. It wasn't open source, but you could run it in a virtual machine (though it became increasingly annoying to find emulated hardware that it knew about over time).
I found it a bit depressing that OPENSTEP 4.2 running in an emulated x86 machine in VirtualPC on a 1.25GHz PowerPC Mac was more responsive than OS X.
I wonder how much a difference reading speed is. I have read Dune quite a few times, and I don't think it's ever taken me close to hours. I tend to average about 100 pages per hour, varying a bit depending on how relaxed or distracted I am. If I spend 1 hour a day reading (which I usually do before I go to sleep), then I finish one 400-page book every 4 days, so about 90 a year if I don't read at any other time. My mother reads faster than me and will happily read one or two books a day. My father reads a lot more slowly and can take a month to finish a novel.
I wonder if that's new books? That's more than one a week, so either you're buying a lot of books, or you live near a good (and convenient) library. I read more than that, but a lot of the time I'm rereading books that I've read at least once before, so they don't count towards a lifetime reading total.
Apple pushes environmentalism for a bunch of reasons. The first is that smaller packaging decreases their logistics cost and gave them some free environmentalism creds. Then Greenpeace decided to target them for no obvious reason (they weren't noticeably worse than their competitors for anything that Greenpeace complained about), so they did a bunch more visible stuff. Finally, they realised that if they provide a free recycling service then a lot of people will use it rather than selling their stuff second hand and so they can reduce the size of the second-hand market (which competes with their new product market).
Netflix is using a completely different class of hardware than a home web server.
Most home network servers aren't using 40GigE, and most probably aren't using GigE. At these rates, TLS is trivial.
Mine is running on a Raspberry PI 2, which is totally overkill for the purpose, an old 486 would do fine.
On a Pi2, the bottleneck is going to be either the SD card or the USB bridge between the CPU and the network interface. TLS will not add any noticeable overhead.
BIOS updates from as long as I can remember involved a program running on an OS. Some came with a FreeDOS bootable floppy image, some just a DOS program. Later ones were installed automatically from within Windows when you installed the motherboard drivers as part of Windows update, or via a similar procedure in Linux. There's nothing specific to EFI about having the OS install firmware updates.
1355, not sure what the option was. I couldn't make it print from anything not Windows / Mac (apparently it can work with Linux with some futzing), but it could print PDFs from SMB or FTP shares (or a USB stick), so in the worst case you can print to PDF and make the printer print that. The model I got only had wired Ethernet support, but there's a version with WiFi.
You might want to read the rest of the post. He's implying that a proper laser printer is one that you can use to print a line through your enemies with.
I bought a Dell-branded all-in-one colour printer for a little over £100 7-8 years ago. The scanner function is a bit hit and miss (it sometimes produces PDFs that crash every PDF viewer I try them in) but it works great for printing. I probably wouldn't trust it for high-volume printing, but for intermittent home use it's great. It will happily sit for a month or two without printing anything and then print a hundred copies of something.
The concern was that for large (multi-gigabyte) files, HTTPS becomes a waste of resources. I'm not going to comment one way or another on the correctness of that claim
I am, by pointing out that Netflix is able to saturate 40GigE NICs in a single machine (I think they can now saturate two of them) serving nothing but HTTPS traffic, and the bottleneck for them is usually the disk and sometimes DRAM, but never the encrypt. On a modern CPU, you're DMAing from cache and you can encrypt a lot faster than line rate (particularly with AES, where it's almost entirely in fixed-function hardware) and then the encrypted data is right next to the DMA unit ready to send to the NIC. With newer NICs, you can offload most of the TLS (not the handshake, but all of the bulk encrypt) to the NIC, so you pay a tiny power cost but nothing else.
No reputable CA will let you have a cert for the 192.168/16 subnet or anything in the.local TLD, because these hosts are not unique and foo.local on your network isn't foo.local on mine. The best solution for these is to give them global IPv6 addresses, but only open a pinhole in your firewall for the Let's Encrypt dialback. This lets you get a proper cert for them, but doesn't allow anything off network to access them.
Only problems I've ever had with it are that it only has a parallel port, which is getting really damn inconvenient to deal with, and it's short on memory, which leads to the occasional inability to print something.
I had a Borther knock-off that had similar issues (combined with a 50MHz MIPS processor, which made page rendering very slow. It was a lot faster if you printed PCL than PostScript (though not always very fast, for complex PCL). I eventually solved both problems by connecting it to an old machine to act as a print server and configuring lpd to turn everything submitted into simple pre-rasterised PCL. These days, a cheap SBC with a USB to parallel adaptor would be able to do the same thing for a much lower power cost.
I doubt there's a market. I can buy a colour laser printer with an integrated scanner and photocopier mode for around £100 (I did a few years ago, but then I stored it at my mother's house when I moved and she decided she wanted to keep it). To consider a black and white one instead, it would have to cost under £50 and at that price it's hard to see the manufacturer breaking even.
AR uses similar technology to VR, but is actually useful. It's also harder, because you have to track the real world and put things seamlessly into it. If you get a chance to play with a Microsoft Hololens, you can see the limitations of the current technology in some of the simple demos: you can put a virtual object in the room, and it will be occluded by nearby objects, but when you get sufficiently far away from it (3 metres or so?) then objects between the range of its depth sensor and the virtual location don't occlude it properly.
Even with these limitations, it's useful. It effectively means that any surface can become a screen and, with decent software, can interface with real things. A friend of mine set up an AR startup a few years ago and had some simple demos that showed off the technology. Their system would do face recognition and add halos to anyone in your contacts database and let you flick files at them that would then be sent by email (or any other mechanism that you had configured for file transfer), and let you take pictures by just holding your fingers in a square shape over the part of the scene you wanted to capture. They also had a nice navigation app that overlaid the map onto your current view and highlighted turns and so on.
Their primary use case was industrial and medical hands-free systems, where you want to see overlaid schematics and interact with them, but don't want to touch a computer. For example, while performing surgery you can overlay x-ray / MRI images and compare what you're seeing directly.
The tech is still a bit too bulky to be useful, but it's shrinking rapidly.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. You're well over the threshold where I'd expect handling cash to be more expensive than handling credit cards. I won't ask you for details of your security arrangements, but I'd be interested in knowing how much you spend on safes and cash transport to the bank.
Beijing airport gives free WiFi... but you need a Chinese mobile phone number to get the authorisation code that will let you log in.
You're probably putting the isolating in the wrong place. Wireless interface firmware is a good place for exploits at the moment, so you should expect that to be compromised if a nation-state adversary cares. It then has complete access to anything on the same bus, so no VPN software on that host is secure. You're better off with a dumb WiFi bridge that provides an Ethernet interface and running a VPN from your laptop, because then they'd need to compromise the bridge, then use that to attack something on the laptop via Ethernet (not impossible, but wired NICs are simpler than wireless and so you're more likely to see an attack on the kernel, which you might at least be able to spot, even if you can't prevent it).
In contrast, with United's MileagePlus I get basically nothing for simply being a member, but when I got silver status I got free economy plus (read: more legroom) seats at check in and free checked bags on domestic US flights (not very useful), when I got to gold I got economy plus at booking time, lounge access (really nice at Heathrow and Ataturk, pretty crappy in most US airports) and more free checked bags. If I ever make it to Platinum (I hope not to, as flying enough in one year to make gold was too much - and no one seems to want to pay for me to fly everywhere first class, which is about the only way it would be tolerable) I'd get a bunch more stuff. This means I do have an incentive to fly with United (or with other Star Alliance airlines).
I wonder slightly how many hotels are even set up for handling cash. If you're taking payments in cash then you're going to have thousands of dollars sitting on the premises, which is well past the point at which credit cards become cheaper for most small businesses: the cost of the security, insurance, and physically processing the cash go up quite sharply when you become a good target for opportunist burglars.
You might be surprised. Hotels that use electronic booking systems are set up as append-only logs so that you can't modify a booking after the first night and you can't retroactively insert a booking. If anything illegal happens in the room and the police are called and it's not in their system or if there's anything that would require a claim on their insurance then there had better be a booking in their system or they can end up with huge liability. As such, most independent hotel operators other than the really sketchy ones that still use paper-only systems are pretty nervous about this kind of thing. The kind of incident that would result in a bit of paperwork can result in the hotel going out of business if they can't show a booking in the system. Even if you're willing to risk it, do it too often and you're just begging for an IRS audit.
This has nothing to do with cash. Most hotels will offer a discount of 5-50% if you ask for one unless it's peak season and they're guaranteed to be completely full.
A number of the big chains give you pretty big penalties for not being a member of their rewards club. For example, free WiFi for all members of the rewards scheme, even if you've never stayed with them before. A few I've stayed in offer access to a lounge with complimentary snacks and coffee (and, less often, beer) for members of the loyalty club, again with no requirement to actually stay there regularly. I have a small collection of hotel loyalty cards that I never use (I've never been asked to present one, I just log in and book with my account and it's automatically associated) because you always get a better deal if you're a member. I don't really understand why - most of them need your name, address, and credit card number when you book, so it's not like also giving them a single-use email address makes it easier for them to track me.
Smaller hotels will often give you a better rate if you email / call and ask. I've had pretty good luck just saying 'we're only able to pay this much for accommodation, can you come close?' Most of the time, they will (and will also do useful things like give a flat rate per night, rather than a cheap rate some nights, and charge and a more expensive one others, which makes the expenses people happier).
Abuse of buzzwords or not, I welcome the news that Carlsberg is going to start producing beer.
I remember reading about this years ago, and was under the impression that this had been fixed by browsers filling the form fields in the UI, but not in the DOM, until the user explicitly selected one of the fields in the same form. There are still some sneaky things you can do (for example, have a 1px by 1px form field so the user submits more information than they think they are submitting), but you can't just grab the data from the form until the user interacts with some part of it.
I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a while Apple let you download OPENSTEP 4.2 for x86 from the same place you could get System 7 and some other abandoned software. It wasn't open source, but you could run it in a virtual machine (though it became increasingly annoying to find emulated hardware that it knew about over time).
I found it a bit depressing that OPENSTEP 4.2 running in an emulated x86 machine in VirtualPC on a 1.25GHz PowerPC Mac was more responsive than OS X.
I wonder how much a difference reading speed is. I have read Dune quite a few times, and I don't think it's ever taken me close to hours. I tend to average about 100 pages per hour, varying a bit depending on how relaxed or distracted I am. If I spend 1 hour a day reading (which I usually do before I go to sleep), then I finish one 400-page book every 4 days, so about 90 a year if I don't read at any other time. My mother reads faster than me and will happily read one or two books a day. My father reads a lot more slowly and can take a month to finish a novel.
Since when is 80 books a year a "super reader"?
I wonder if that's new books? That's more than one a week, so either you're buying a lot of books, or you live near a good (and convenient) library. I read more than that, but a lot of the time I'm rereading books that I've read at least once before, so they don't count towards a lifetime reading total.
Apple pushes environmentalism for a bunch of reasons. The first is that smaller packaging decreases their logistics cost and gave them some free environmentalism creds. Then Greenpeace decided to target them for no obvious reason (they weren't noticeably worse than their competitors for anything that Greenpeace complained about), so they did a bunch more visible stuff. Finally, they realised that if they provide a free recycling service then a lot of people will use it rather than selling their stuff second hand and so they can reduce the size of the second-hand market (which competes with their new product market).
Netflix is using a completely different class of hardware than a home web server.
Most home network servers aren't using 40GigE, and most probably aren't using GigE. At these rates, TLS is trivial.
Mine is running on a Raspberry PI 2, which is totally overkill for the purpose, an old 486 would do fine.
On a Pi2, the bottleneck is going to be either the SD card or the USB bridge between the CPU and the network interface. TLS will not add any noticeable overhead.
BIOS updates from as long as I can remember involved a program running on an OS. Some came with a FreeDOS bootable floppy image, some just a DOS program. Later ones were installed automatically from within Windows when you installed the motherboard drivers as part of Windows update, or via a similar procedure in Linux. There's nothing specific to EFI about having the OS install firmware updates.
1355, not sure what the option was. I couldn't make it print from anything not Windows / Mac (apparently it can work with Linux with some futzing), but it could print PDFs from SMB or FTP shares (or a USB stick), so in the worst case you can print to PDF and make the printer print that. The model I got only had wired Ethernet support, but there's a version with WiFi.
Not sure why you think that. The cheap colour laser I bought 6-7 years ago did 1200dpi.
You might want to read the rest of the post. He's implying that a proper laser printer is one that you can use to print a line through your enemies with.
I bought a Dell-branded all-in-one colour printer for a little over £100 7-8 years ago. The scanner function is a bit hit and miss (it sometimes produces PDFs that crash every PDF viewer I try them in) but it works great for printing. I probably wouldn't trust it for high-volume printing, but for intermittent home use it's great. It will happily sit for a month or two without printing anything and then print a hundred copies of something.
The concern was that for large (multi-gigabyte) files, HTTPS becomes a waste of resources. I'm not going to comment one way or another on the correctness of that claim
I am, by pointing out that Netflix is able to saturate 40GigE NICs in a single machine (I think they can now saturate two of them) serving nothing but HTTPS traffic, and the bottleneck for them is usually the disk and sometimes DRAM, but never the encrypt. On a modern CPU, you're DMAing from cache and you can encrypt a lot faster than line rate (particularly with AES, where it's almost entirely in fixed-function hardware) and then the encrypted data is right next to the DMA unit ready to send to the NIC. With newer NICs, you can offload most of the TLS (not the handshake, but all of the bulk encrypt) to the NIC, so you pay a tiny power cost but nothing else.
No reputable CA will let you have a cert for the 192.168/16 subnet or anything in the .local TLD, because these hosts are not unique and foo.local on your network isn't foo.local on mine. The best solution for these is to give them global IPv6 addresses, but only open a pinhole in your firewall for the Let's Encrypt dialback. This lets you get a proper cert for them, but doesn't allow anything off network to access them.
Only problems I've ever had with it are that it only has a parallel port, which is getting really damn inconvenient to deal with, and it's short on memory, which leads to the occasional inability to print something.
I had a Borther knock-off that had similar issues (combined with a 50MHz MIPS processor, which made page rendering very slow. It was a lot faster if you printed PCL than PostScript (though not always very fast, for complex PCL). I eventually solved both problems by connecting it to an old machine to act as a print server and configuring lpd to turn everything submitted into simple pre-rasterised PCL. These days, a cheap SBC with a USB to parallel adaptor would be able to do the same thing for a much lower power cost.
I doubt there's a market. I can buy a colour laser printer with an integrated scanner and photocopier mode for around £100 (I did a few years ago, but then I stored it at my mother's house when I moved and she decided she wanted to keep it). To consider a black and white one instead, it would have to cost under £50 and at that price it's hard to see the manufacturer breaking even.
AR uses similar technology to VR, but is actually useful. It's also harder, because you have to track the real world and put things seamlessly into it. If you get a chance to play with a Microsoft Hololens, you can see the limitations of the current technology in some of the simple demos: you can put a virtual object in the room, and it will be occluded by nearby objects, but when you get sufficiently far away from it (3 metres or so?) then objects between the range of its depth sensor and the virtual location don't occlude it properly.
Even with these limitations, it's useful. It effectively means that any surface can become a screen and, with decent software, can interface with real things. A friend of mine set up an AR startup a few years ago and had some simple demos that showed off the technology. Their system would do face recognition and add halos to anyone in your contacts database and let you flick files at them that would then be sent by email (or any other mechanism that you had configured for file transfer), and let you take pictures by just holding your fingers in a square shape over the part of the scene you wanted to capture. They also had a nice navigation app that overlaid the map onto your current view and highlighted turns and so on.
Their primary use case was industrial and medical hands-free systems, where you want to see overlaid schematics and interact with them, but don't want to touch a computer. For example, while performing surgery you can overlay x-ray / MRI images and compare what you're seeing directly.
The tech is still a bit too bulky to be useful, but it's shrinking rapidly.