Unfortunately I found that XBMC/Kodi plugin for NPR was not terribly good, and the Blu-Ray module worked very well. It's been awhile though, maybe I should see if it's been improved on.
Honestly, the Windows GUI hit its peak with Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2008. Windows XP, Vista, 7 the GUI went slightly downhill, and 8/8.1/10 is a full step in the wrong direction and the rest of the Microsoft applications of the era follow suit.
Problem is, Windows 7 is getting really long in the tooth, it came out in 2009. Windows 8.1 itself is approaching four years old. And I simply don't want Windows 10.
Right now you do. Who's to say that they won't change that functionality once they're sufficiently widely popular?
Those who profit off of malware do so on only a very small number of 'customers'. Like a half a percent or fewer. It's just that they push their wares on so many people that it still results in a large number of victims even if it's a small percentage.
If they need the novelty of this to be huge before the switch of behavior then that might mean letting it grow for a time without delivering any payload. Get people used to it before becoming insidious.
It looks like from my perspective that the updates we're told-of are milestone updates, major release changes. Before Google fucked up the versioning mentality that would be the number before the decimal point.
Heh. I beta-tested Windows Chicago and Cairo when I was young and excited about such things. I have no doubt that Tesla could find owners with similar mentalities that are willing to test bleeding-edge features even if they get cut from time to time.
My biggest complaint is that security updates are now bungled with UI or functionality changes. I don't mean functionality additions, I mean where the way something behaves from the user point of view, a behavior that had no fault in it, is rewritten an the previous way is removed entirely, or where arbitrary changes are made solely for change's sake in order to attempt to demonstrate the newness of the new version.
I've gotten to the point where I would rather firewall-off of leave entirely offline a device or a system if I want its featureset to remain static. Learned that lesson with an Internet-connected Blu-Ray player that previously could access NPR "podcasts" but on receiving a firmware/software update had that feature removed.
This means I'm stuck with "Internet of Things" with vulnerabilities because if I patch those vulnerabilities I lose functionality, so I have to spend a lot of effort thinking about my network design (ie, VLAN my non-PC/non-Phone devices off from the rest of the network) and my firewalling rules (default to block-all and add whitelist exceptions, rather than attempting to blacklist) for those things that need only limited connections to the Internet for specific purposes. This is in addition to having to go through published IP range lists for countries to block essentially all IP ranges other than the United States, western Europe, and Japan...
There is also a nasty little "Track Downloads" feature that lets you send a "trick URL" to somebody else. When they click on the URL -- thinking its something cool on Facebook, Twitter or the general internet -- THEY see what they URL promised,
And of course, it delivers malware that because you're trusted to the recipient, they'll infect their PC with, thus introducing a new vector in addition to the compromised ad servers and malware delivered via email...
I very much doubt that the reason this site was created was for the reasons laid-out in the article summary.
I think the point of this exercise is to figure out how to infer when someone is dealing with their keys, or eggs, or other things, without using sensors on everything.
Sensors on everything is going to be impractical. There are too many end-products that can't really be tagged, especially natural products. Even if Dole stickers got made to have tags, they're not going to be able to integrate mass into those tags. It's necessary to figure out the answers to the pertinent questions without relying on self-reporting from the items themselves.
Some of these problems are similar to those that autonomous vehicles have- you can make cars report themselves, you can make barricades that report themselves, but you're probably not going to make pedestrians, or cyclists, or animals, or fallen tree branches report themselves, so you have to infer what's going on and deal with it without the situation itself telling you about it.
If the entire system were self-contained in my domicile, in the same way that the computer is self-contained aboard the Enterprise I would be OK with it.
This system sounds a lot more like Virtual Interactive Kinesthetic Interface, or VIKI, from the film I, Robot, in the sense that it's using a central controller to attempt to do everything and the ability of that central controller to be used for ill is very much a concern. The fictional AI-takeover part is definitely the realm of science fiction, but the ability to essentially takeover the data and functions for nefarious ends is plausible.
I got to go to a security conference the other day, geared toward organizations that have both large networks and a fairly significant cloud presence. With the introduction of "cloud services" and the ability for cloud services to tie to third-party web-delivered software/sites and to each other, and the ability for one's roaming users to reach company-subscribed cloud services without ever using the corporate LAN, the number of vectors for attack to an organization's data has literally increased by an order of magnitude.
Whenever I read about "the cloud" I rewrite it as "someone else's server" and it helps keep things in perspective for me. There absolutely are times for the use of cloud services, but a lot of stuff is being pushed to it that really shouldn't be there.
Some of us realized that it was never a good idea to plug-in in this fashion in the first place. I have a degree of control on the PCs and even the smartphones. I can shut them down or power them off, using them only when I want to use them, and they're actually designed for this to be fairly straightforward and easy to do.
The "Internet of Things" is a whole new ball of wax, especially in consumer-land where devices are not single-taskers. Bad enough that a commercial EMS controller on an HVAC system or a lighting controls system could be vulnerable, but in commercial environments those are usually only tied into like-systems. In a consumer system there's a good chance that an all-in-one approach is chosen so one's garage door opener, thermostat, lighting controls, smart TV, and a slew of other devices could be tied to a single vulnerable controller, or through virtue of using the same back-end code, be all vulnerable to the same kinds of software worms.
The software is simply not mature enough and software writers are not devious enough as white-hat hackers themselves to write the code for these products to ensure that they're robust against exploit. Frankly I'm surprised that CPSC rulings haven't come down lending weight that software companies are liable for their own faulty products.
Pretty much. I'm carrying one of those Kyocera IP-68-rated and MIL-810-rated rugged phones because my job has me working in poorly maintained, often dirty telecom closets and I wanted something that would handle harsh environments. I wasn't going to get that kind of capability out of an Apple device unless I put one hell of a case on it, and at that point the phone would be just as heavy and bulky as the Kyocera.
I suppose that Apple inventing new terms for marketing purposes also annoys me, such that I was disinclined towards Apple to start with.
There was a registry tweak to change the color of the Screen of Death. I always liked setting it to the Fuschia Screen of Death. Though we did joke about the Chartreuse Screen of Death, so I guess Microsoft listened to that particular suggestion instead...
Then I realized that the vast majority of users were not going to read what was on the screen. Even if the Helpdesk person asked them what the error said they were not going to be able to provide any useful feedback. Hell, users used to be instructed to call-in when the antivirus software popped up, and even then we couldn't get useful info, half of the time they thought "Win32" was the name of the virus as part of "Win32/..."
Forget about getting the user to find on that field of text the actual name of the process or executable that generated the fault.
The problem is that there are so many ways to spread an infection, and that those that write malware use multiple vectors to infect, that it doesn't really matter if the user tried to do something shady and got bitten or not. Infections that the user brings down on themselves, infections brought down by ad servers, infections brought down by compromised content servers, infections that make use of network vulnerabilities in the device, infections that the users are tricked into bringing down, all very common routes. I see this lightweight computer as being no different than any other computer, other than since the manufacturer has no interest in paying for the costs associated with after-sale support, this will become increasingly common.
"Smart TV" is bogus. never hook an ethernet cable to one. use a Roku or Chromecast or something else cheap, easily replaceable, and disposeable if you feel the need for direct streaming.
Unfortunately the TV manufacturers are making it harder and harder to avoid some kind of network connection. Our Vizio comes with a really terrible and over-simple remote that doesn't do anything, to configure the TV you must at least use your smartphone and a crappy application.
At least in our TV's case, they are only one step from the conventional TV and remote so I can order an older TV's remote and get most of the functionality, but it's still annoying as hell.
But you're right, I doubt I will ever hook the TV to the Ethernet or the Wifi. Bad enough that I couldn't avoid doing that with the Blu-ray player, otherwise I'd just let the computer that I've put into the entertainment center supply whatever I need.
The guy who wrote the screenplay has basically admitted that he did it to attempt to get nookie from a hottie that was part of Scientology. He has since apologized.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately I found that XBMC/Kodi plugin for NPR was not terribly good, and the Blu-Ray module worked very well. It's been awhile though, maybe I should see if it's been improved on.
True. Doesn't mean that there aren't some that will still go for it, damn the consequences.
Honestly, the Windows GUI hit its peak with Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2008. Windows XP, Vista, 7 the GUI went slightly downhill, and 8/8.1/10 is a full step in the wrong direction and the rest of the Microsoft applications of the era follow suit.
Problem is, Windows 7 is getting really long in the tooth, it came out in 2009. Windows 8.1 itself is approaching four years old. And I simply don't want Windows 10.
Right now you do. Who's to say that they won't change that functionality once they're sufficiently widely popular?
Those who profit off of malware do so on only a very small number of 'customers'. Like a half a percent or fewer. It's just that they push their wares on so many people that it still results in a large number of victims even if it's a small percentage.
If they need the novelty of this to be huge before the switch of behavior then that might mean letting it grow for a time without delivering any payload. Get people used to it before becoming insidious.
It looks like from my perspective that the updates we're told-of are milestone updates, major release changes. Before Google fucked up the versioning mentality that would be the number before the decimal point.
Heh. I beta-tested Windows Chicago and Cairo when I was young and excited about such things. I have no doubt that Tesla could find owners with similar mentalities that are willing to test bleeding-edge features even if they get cut from time to time.
My biggest complaint is that security updates are now bungled with UI or functionality changes. I don't mean functionality additions, I mean where the way something behaves from the user point of view, a behavior that had no fault in it, is rewritten an the previous way is removed entirely, or where arbitrary changes are made solely for change's sake in order to attempt to demonstrate the newness of the new version.
I've gotten to the point where I would rather firewall-off of leave entirely offline a device or a system if I want its featureset to remain static. Learned that lesson with an Internet-connected Blu-Ray player that previously could access NPR "podcasts" but on receiving a firmware/software update had that feature removed.
This means I'm stuck with "Internet of Things" with vulnerabilities because if I patch those vulnerabilities I lose functionality, so I have to spend a lot of effort thinking about my network design (ie, VLAN my non-PC/non-Phone devices off from the rest of the network) and my firewalling rules (default to block-all and add whitelist exceptions, rather than attempting to blacklist) for those things that need only limited connections to the Internet for specific purposes. This is in addition to having to go through published IP range lists for countries to block essentially all IP ranges other than the United States, western Europe, and Japan...
Your neighbor must be better at information security than mine...
There is also a nasty little "Track Downloads" feature that lets you send a "trick URL" to somebody else. When they click on the URL -- thinking its something cool on Facebook, Twitter or the general internet -- THEY see what they URL promised,
And of course, it delivers malware that because you're trusted to the recipient, they'll infect their PC with, thus introducing a new vector in addition to the compromised ad servers and malware delivered via email...
I very much doubt that the reason this site was created was for the reasons laid-out in the article summary.
I think the point of this exercise is to figure out how to infer when someone is dealing with their keys, or eggs, or other things, without using sensors on everything.
Sensors on everything is going to be impractical. There are too many end-products that can't really be tagged, especially natural products. Even if Dole stickers got made to have tags, they're not going to be able to integrate mass into those tags. It's necessary to figure out the answers to the pertinent questions without relying on self-reporting from the items themselves.
Some of these problems are similar to those that autonomous vehicles have- you can make cars report themselves, you can make barricades that report themselves, but you're probably not going to make pedestrians, or cyclists, or animals, or fallen tree branches report themselves, so you have to infer what's going on and deal with it without the situation itself telling you about it.
If the entire system were self-contained in my domicile, in the same way that the computer is self-contained aboard the Enterprise I would be OK with it.
This system sounds a lot more like Virtual Interactive Kinesthetic Interface, or VIKI, from the film I, Robot, in the sense that it's using a central controller to attempt to do everything and the ability of that central controller to be used for ill is very much a concern. The fictional AI-takeover part is definitely the realm of science fiction, but the ability to essentially takeover the data and functions for nefarious ends is plausible.
Pretty much.
I got to go to a security conference the other day, geared toward organizations that have both large networks and a fairly significant cloud presence. With the introduction of "cloud services" and the ability for cloud services to tie to third-party web-delivered software/sites and to each other, and the ability for one's roaming users to reach company-subscribed cloud services without ever using the corporate LAN, the number of vectors for attack to an organization's data has literally increased by an order of magnitude.
Whenever I read about "the cloud" I rewrite it as "someone else's server" and it helps keep things in perspective for me. There absolutely are times for the use of cloud services, but a lot of stuff is being pushed to it that really shouldn't be there.
Some of us realized that it was never a good idea to plug-in in this fashion in the first place. I have a degree of control on the PCs and even the smartphones. I can shut them down or power them off, using them only when I want to use them, and they're actually designed for this to be fairly straightforward and easy to do.
The "Internet of Things" is a whole new ball of wax, especially in consumer-land where devices are not single-taskers. Bad enough that a commercial EMS controller on an HVAC system or a lighting controls system could be vulnerable, but in commercial environments those are usually only tied into like-systems. In a consumer system there's a good chance that an all-in-one approach is chosen so one's garage door opener, thermostat, lighting controls, smart TV, and a slew of other devices could be tied to a single vulnerable controller, or through virtue of using the same back-end code, be all vulnerable to the same kinds of software worms.
The software is simply not mature enough and software writers are not devious enough as white-hat hackers themselves to write the code for these products to ensure that they're robust against exploit. Frankly I'm surprised that CPSC rulings haven't come down lending weight that software companies are liable for their own faulty products.
How much are you willing to spend to achieve that $14 million? If you spend $16 million then it's a flop.
So it can be a flop on yet another platform!
That might have been it. Now that I look back on it I haven't done it in close to 20 years. It was a fun thing to mess with before I discovered Linux.
Pretty much. I'm carrying one of those Kyocera IP-68-rated and MIL-810-rated rugged phones because my job has me working in poorly maintained, often dirty telecom closets and I wanted something that would handle harsh environments. I wasn't going to get that kind of capability out of an Apple device unless I put one hell of a case on it, and at that point the phone would be just as heavy and bulky as the Kyocera.
I suppose that Apple inventing new terms for marketing purposes also annoys me, such that I was disinclined towards Apple to start with.
There was a registry tweak to change the color of the Screen of Death. I always liked setting it to the Fuschia Screen of Death. Though we did joke about the Chartreuse Screen of Death, so I guess Microsoft listened to that particular suggestion instead...
I used to agree with you. Honestly I did.
Then I realized that the vast majority of users were not going to read what was on the screen. Even if the Helpdesk person asked them what the error said they were not going to be able to provide any useful feedback. Hell, users used to be instructed to call-in when the antivirus software popped up, and even then we couldn't get useful info, half of the time they thought "Win32" was the name of the virus as part of "Win32/..."
Forget about getting the user to find on that field of text the actual name of the process or executable that generated the fault.
Sounds real horrorshow. Viddy well, brothers! Viddy well!
Wow. At least this Vizio has a physical input-source button even on the really crappy remote.
The problem is that there are so many ways to spread an infection, and that those that write malware use multiple vectors to infect, that it doesn't really matter if the user tried to do something shady and got bitten or not. Infections that the user brings down on themselves, infections brought down by ad servers, infections brought down by compromised content servers, infections that make use of network vulnerabilities in the device, infections that the users are tricked into bringing down, all very common routes. I see this lightweight computer as being no different than any other computer, other than since the manufacturer has no interest in paying for the costs associated with after-sale support, this will become increasingly common.
"Smart TV" is bogus. never hook an ethernet cable to one. use a Roku or Chromecast or something else cheap, easily replaceable, and disposeable if you feel the need for direct streaming.
Unfortunately the TV manufacturers are making it harder and harder to avoid some kind of network connection. Our Vizio comes with a really terrible and over-simple remote that doesn't do anything, to configure the TV you must at least use your smartphone and a crappy application.
At least in our TV's case, they are only one step from the conventional TV and remote so I can order an older TV's remote and get most of the functionality, but it's still annoying as hell.
But you're right, I doubt I will ever hook the TV to the Ethernet or the Wifi. Bad enough that I couldn't avoid doing that with the Blu-ray player, otherwise I'd just let the computer that I've put into the entertainment center supply whatever I need.
The guy who wrote the screenplay has basically admitted that he did it to attempt to get nookie from a hottie that was part of Scientology. He has since apologized.
"There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses." --Ezekiel 23:20