The company will (temporarily) make some extra profit, which is good for management bonuses. And after a few years the manager moves to another company... Rinse, repeat!
Another option is that it is just a manufacturing hack (because of component shortage) without properly thinking about the consequences.
The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?) And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.
Nothing in the "Encrypted Media Extension" specs prevents or forbids proxying of both the key and the encrypted media stream to an external "decryption and caching" service.
And all of the usual "how do we prevent the plaintext from leaking from the user's machine" questions are still in full force. It is unlikely that the W3C will get "effective protection".
KPN tried "carrier grade" IP4-NAT in the Netherlands a decade ago... Unfortunately the router software was too buggy and made the routers trash and crash.
And how can the customers of the ISP run servers on their computers? NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.
I agree that the biggest danger is close to home, family and friends of the family. And while there are "predators" on the net they are far less dangerous than the predators the child may meet in real life. Children are pretty safe with the online equivalent of "don't go with the stranger offering you candy."
What are some good rules of the thumb:
Don't talk to people you are not comfortable with.
Don't tell where you live. "Near Big City" is good enough for someone until you trust him/her.
Be careful with what you show on your webcam.
If you following the advice the Internet is a good place to experiment with political and sexual discussion, pregnancies and STDs come from meeting IRL.
It depends on the exact bug that is triggered. When a security researcher mentions "potentially exploitable bug" it could be serious. Very often a memory corruption is a first step into more serious exploits.
While I don't mind putting some restrictions on someone while (s)he's on probation; the laundry list of conditions sounded like something typed in a decade (or more) ago with some conditions added over time. It is so convenient to have a standard list, without regard for the probatee or his crime!
It is good to have relevant restrictions as conditions for porbation (no alcohol for people convicted of intoxication related crimes), but I don't see any good in a total restriction of computer use for a petty thief (unless he brokers on ebay).
But there is no reason why I should make it easy for my ISP, upstream providers and the NSA to eavesdrop on communication with a webserver. Encrypting my communication plugs a big privacy hole: so, why not use it?
I have a program that generates CSV output, for import into a spreadsheet. Open Office Calc creates the sheet I expect (slowly but correct). However, Excel sees it fit to mess op the data; it arbitrarily breaks long lines mid-field, creating a mess that requires more time to clean up than waiting for OOo to import correctly.
N.B. OOo suffices for most of my business correspondence; I prefer (La)TeX/LyX for the more scientific documents.
They say that some oil companies are heavy into alternative energy, buying start-ups and shelving their products. For them, "Never" is the answer to your question!
I assume the consumer does not have to pay to be part of a beta test program. Consumer protection law in my country (.nl) takes the price paid for the product into account when determining how much quality a "reasonable consumer" might expect. There is no need for a computer game to be perfect, as long as it is playable. Our judges are likely to handle "paid beta" software as any other paid for software: It should work, for reasonable definitions of work.
Most of the storage media in common use (disks, tapes, CD/DVD-R) already do use ECC at sector of block level and will fix "single bit" errors at firmware level transparently. What is more of an issue at application level are "missing block" errors; when the low-level ECC fails and the storage device signals "unreadable sector" and one or more blocks of data are lost.
Off course this can be fixed by "block redundancy" (like RAID does), "block recovery checksums" or old-fashioned backups.
Agile works for software because it is cheap to redesign software and also cheap to do a few test runs. Building a rocket, filling it with fuel and then see whether it flies or explodes is expensive when you talk about the size needed for manned spacecraft. It is more or less the same for Boeing and Airbus who spend years and years designing before they start building their first full scale planes for test flights. We're talking planes that cost over $100 million each, not something you like to throw away on a test.
How do you upgrade Android? Do you get a single firmware image from Google containing both the Linux kernel and the Google apps? If it is a single firmware image the GPL says that the full image should be distributable under the GPL. Denying someone the right to remix it would be a GPL violation!
What I heard from a Coverity employee doing a presentation is that the best closed source/commercial projects score as good as the best Open Source projects; bad commercial projects do as bad as bad Open Source projects.
In other words, the variation in both categories is so big (more than a factor 10!) that one can not say either side is better with statistical relevance.
Slashdot Mirror
Another option is that it is just a manufacturing hack (because of component shortage) without properly thinking about the consequences.
If you think a bit further... An operating system could load an executable at a different address every time it is used, without recompilation!
Most likely one of the conditions of the settlement is that the executives are not prosecuted for their transgressions.
And the executives will have the fine paid from the corporate funds... business as usual.
The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?)
And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.
Nothing in the "Encrypted Media Extension" specs prevents or forbids proxying of both the key and the encrypted media stream to an external "decryption and caching" service. And all of the usual "how do we prevent the plaintext from leaking from the user's machine" questions are still in full force. It is unlikely that the W3C will get "effective protection".
KPN tried "carrier grade" IP4-NAT in the Netherlands a decade ago... Unfortunately the router software was too buggy and made the routers trash and crash. And how can the customers of the ISP run servers on their computers? NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.
There already is a picture of Mickey crossing light-sabers: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63819000/jpg/_63819199_starwars.jpg (Minnie is in the picture too. *sigh*)
What are some good rules of the thumb:
If you following the advice the Internet is a good place to experiment with political and sexual discussion, pregnancies and STDs come from meeting IRL.
It depends on the exact bug that is triggered. When a security researcher mentions "potentially exploitable bug" it could be serious. Very often a memory corruption is a first step into more serious exploits.
It is good to have relevant restrictions as conditions for porbation (no alcohol for people convicted of intoxication related crimes), but I don't see any good in a total restriction of computer use for a petty thief (unless he brokers on ebay).
But there is no reason why I should make it easy for my ISP, upstream providers and the NSA to eavesdrop on communication with a webserver. Encrypting my communication plugs a big privacy hole: so, why not use it?
N.B. OOo suffices for most of my business correspondence; I prefer (La)TeX/LyX for the more scientific documents.
They say that some oil companies are heavy into alternative energy, buying start-ups and shelving their products. For them, "Never" is the answer to your question!
I assume the consumer does not have to pay to be part of a beta test program. Consumer protection law in my country (.nl) takes the price paid for the product into account when determining how much quality a "reasonable consumer" might expect. There is no need for a computer game to be perfect, as long as it is playable. Our judges are likely to handle "paid beta" software as any other paid for software: It should work, for reasonable definitions of work.
Off course this can be fixed by "block redundancy" (like RAID does), "block recovery checksums" or old-fashioned backups.
Agile works for software because it is cheap to redesign software and also cheap to do a few test runs. Building a rocket, filling it with fuel and then see whether it flies or explodes is expensive when you talk about the size needed for manned spacecraft. It is more or less the same for Boeing and Airbus who spend years and years designing before they start building their first full scale planes for test flights. We're talking planes that cost over $100 million each, not something you like to throw away on a test.
It could make a short-circuit very painful!
No, 2^43,112,610-1 can be divided by 3.
If it would be hard for you to find the $50.000 to patent it, you won't have the $5.000.000 to enforce your patent in court.
Apparently the damage was limited to only one site... But similar hacks could be done on other vulnerable sites.
How do you upgrade Android? Do you get a single firmware image from Google containing both the Linux kernel and the Google apps? If it is a single firmware image the GPL says that the full image should be distributable under the GPL. Denying someone the right to remix it would be a GPL violation!
In other words, the variation in both categories is so big (more than a factor 10!) that one can not say either side is better with statistical relevance.
But it almost perfectly captures Microsoft's view on the software market.
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x1467270710/Police-say-irate-car-dealership-customer-recorded-altercation
You missed the lock in model of being forced to work with the applications that the cloud provider supports.