Personally, I consider all religions nonsense but certainly support the right of people to be able to have whatever stupid beliefs they have.
I think we've identified the source of your complete lack of sympathy. I suspected as much of course but thanks for confirming it.
However, there is a line that needs to be drawn somewhere when people don't just hold their own thoughts but interact with each other - i.e. how much immigrants need to adapt and how far the EU accommodates to their preferences
Dictating the manner in which someone can dress in public serves no legitimate reason other than to marginalize them. Personally I find it incredibly fucking irritating when youth wear baggy pants that expose their undergarments but legislation against such behavior in the United States is rightfully struck down on freedom of expression laws. My style of dress does not cause you harm and you have no right to try and control it.
Accommodating too much to religion causes resentment among agnostics and atheists and that's what the vast majority of young people in Europe are.
You're not accommodating anything by allowing people to dress as they choose, unless of course you offend so easily that merely seeing a religious person is enough to make you run to your MP. Just call it what it is: thinly veiled bigotry, against a people and faith that you can't be bothered to understand. And if you're going to legislate such bigotry into law do both yourselves and them a favor and stop letting them into your countries in the first place. My country would be happy to take them in and we'll emerge stronger and better for it.
People who brave enough to flee their country of birth are exactly the sort that the West needs to remain viable in the 21st century. It's a pity that you can't see that or what's going to happen to the EU if you don't address your demographics problem. Have fun paying for that social safety net you're so proud of when you have no young people to pay into the system.
But I repeat, concealing your face is just as obscene to some as full nudity to others. Should both be allowed?
Public breastfeeding offends some people but I'm fairly certain such behavior is protected and even encouraged in the EU. Again, you're just choosing to use secularism as a cloak for bigotry. I'm not buying it and neither are your un-assimilated immigrants. To answer your stupid question though, yes, both should be allowed. Seeing a naked person does not harm me. Neither does seeing someone totally covered. Of course private property owners should be free to set whatever standards they wish for admittance onto their property.
I stopped taking you seriously at the STASI comparison, just so you know, but I'll respond anyway to this point:
All it takes to be on the radar is to (knowingly or not) communicate with someone who (also knowingly or not) communicated with someone who is either of interest or who has been confused with someone who is of interest. And of interest need not be limited to foreign nationals working with terrorists. We know they give tips to the DEA and FBI as well. Are you sure you have never talked to anyone who talked to someone who knows a drug dealer?
The only difference between NSA and a classical gumshoe detective is that the latter's activities aren't easily automated. If you're two degrees removed from a drug dealer you were always going to land on law enforcement's desk. You'll quickly leave that desk when they determine that the lead is a dead end. The Federal Government of the United States isn't going to compromise your SSH server because you called somebody who called somebody who called a terrorist. They aren't even likely to give you more than a cursory look.
Fantasy land: "Oh no! sjames called this guy who ordered a pizza from this place that once sold a pizza to a terrorist! I need his file on my desk YESTERDAY. Find out who his high school sweetheart was; I want her in here for an interview ASAP. Get me his Facebook and Slashdot credentials while you're at it. Don't forget to put this in the President's Daily Brief, this needs to go to the top STAT."
Real world: "Hmm, the computer says we got a hit. Oh, that's a pizza delivery place. Next."
The average person should be more worried about their sexual partner(s) going through their SMS history than the NSA doing the same. I know it's a shock to the ego but very few of us are interesting enough to be on the radar of any intelligence agency. The lion's share of the population is fat and unimportant.
Not being allowed to cover your face completely is not the same as telling people what they can and cannot wear
Yes, actually it is. Justify it however you want; it's a manifestation of France's hostility towards religion and if you had bothered to follow both links you would have noted that they target such policies at Jews as well as Muslims. In any event, it's not my place to tell the French how to run their country, but if they're going to bellyache about resentment amongst immigrant populations you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself where such resentment is coming from.
I don't live in a part of the United States with a large Muslim community (Upstate New York) but even I occasionally see people wearing face coverings in public. Guess what? It doesn't hurt me or mine one damned bit. Why the French feel the need to legislate this is beyond me. Send the immigrants to the United States if you don't like them so much; we'll take them in and make them our own. Meanwhile France's (actually the EU as a whole) demographic problem will continue to get worse and worse. The EU has a binary choice at the end of the day: Have more babies or welcome immigrants.
However, it doesn't change the fact that it is a foreign language to them and since it's your native language, they're already making an effort to accommodate you and if you didn't show that you appreciate it, it's hardly surprising that you got hostility in return.
I didn't say I got "hostility"; I said I saw treatment of immigrant communities that was shocking to my North American sensibilities. The Canadians I knew made the same observation so it wasn't some uniquely American perspective that I had which was offended. On balance I had positive experiences; I'd go back there in a New York Minute. All I'm saying is I can see how easily it is for immigrant communities in the EU to feel marginalized, and Finland is one of the best EU countries with regards to the integration of new arrivals.
To be fair again, the US has a bit of a problem with integration, specifically with Latino populations.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that; all of the second or later generation Latinos I know are at least as "American" as I am, if not more so. It's hard to define what "American" means exactly but in this context I'm referring to assimilation; they've thoroughly assimilated by the time of the second generation. Even the first generation immigrations I know are fairly well assimilated after a few years here; whatever barriers remain there are typically more related to age than culture, for example, the Grandparents of my Mexican friends would find a lot in common with my own Grandparents with regards to cultural conservatism.
Thing is, if you want to *stay* in France, Germany, the UK, etc, one would think that integration would be a top priority, if only for success and stature within your local society.
Culture changes over time even without immigration. Those who cling to past romanticized ideals of their own culture are doomed to disappointment and resentment.
yet suspicious of whether these are really good recommendations.
Some of them are good. Then there's this:
Set up Tor hidden services for your SSH servers. This has multiple advantages. It provides an additional layer of encryption and server authentication. People looking at your traffic will not know your IP, so they will be unable to scan and target other services running on the same server and client.
That seems like a huge tradeoff in usability for not much security benefit, IMHO, particularly if the box is running services that are far more likely to be probed than ssh. Nor do I much care for the notion of having to rely on Tor if I need to manage a critical system.
It's kind of silly to wrap these common sense suggestions in the cloak of NSA surveillance. If you're on the radar of any major nation-state's signals intelligence agency you've got bigger problems than SSH. Any significant intelligence agency is apt to have the resources to gain physical access to your hardware without your knowledge, which is game over in any conceivable scenario. SSH is and always was intended primarily to protect one from nosy network operators running packet sniffers.
The fact that you can move files between the directory structures means there's SOMETHING (a file manager in Android, Explorer in Windows, a shell of some sort in Linux) that has access to the root file system. What will you do when malware starts to target that as an infection vector?
There's also the training burden that's going to come with teaching people (many of whom do not even know what a file or directory is) how to use such a system. For the same amount of hassle you could instruct them in the necessary steps to avoid getting infected in the first place. I would submit that you've lost the battle as soon as the ad/mal/randomware is installed on one of your devices regardless of how good or bad your underlying security model is.
Long story short, this is a hell of a lot more complex than you make it out to be, and points to a growing problem throughout the EU. The US sees only a small fraction of this issue (see also the town of Dearborn, MI) by comparison.
That's because the EU treats their immigrants like shit in comparison to the United States. France goes so far as to tellpeople what they can and can not wear in public spaces then wonders why they have a backlash from their non-assimilated immigrant populations. I lived in the EU for a time (Finland) and the treatment I saw there of the immigrant population was genuinely shocking. Hell, I encountered some of it myself, as a temporary resident, while being a white person of European descent who shared a common language with the locals. I can only imagine the day to day experiences of someone trying to establish themselves there permanently, with a complete language barrier to overcome and open contempt/hostility directly towards their faith.
The United States is far from perfect but we do a much better job of integrating immigrants than Europe. You don't see nearly as many disaffected second or even third generation immigrants leaving the United States to join ISIS or similar organizations. The EU needs to confront this reality and deal with it sooner rather than later.
Now we can have the obligatory "Islam sucks" conversation, which will lead to the inevitable "all religion sucks" conversation, both of which are infinitely more enjoyable than simply leaving it at "Crazy people suck."
There's a low but non-zero chance that we might actually have an insightful conversation about free speech and the costs thereof but I wouldn't hold my breath. One of the new civil rights is the right not to be offended by anything at anytime....
Then you can click a box saying 'yes, I really want to let this app save this file to this location'.
So you're going to use an annoying UAC-like pop-up that will rapidly be ignored by 99.9% of the population because it appears so often as to be nearly useless?
Does the Facebook app even let you save other people's pictures?
Yes it does, but that's beside the point. Don't get hung-up on the particular example of Facebook, I only used it because it's an app used by the mainstream that needs access to the file structure for legitimate purposes. There are countless others, big and small, and if you're serious about this idea you're going to have to take them all into account and find a way to do it that isn't overly annoying or cumbersome to non-technical end users. Smarter people than either one of us have tried and failed to solve this problem....
For a start, an app like Facebook should only have read-only access to your photos.
What if I want to save photos posted by a friend to my device? Now Facebook needs write access to the file structure. Do you propose having multiple directory structures and chroot jails for something as simple as photos? With nothing being able to access / except for the OS?
No software should have access to anything it doesn't need access to.
I agree with you in principle but I'm playing devil's advocate to try and illustrate the point that it's not as cut and dry as we would like it to be. I used the example of Android because it's an OS that was created by intelligent people in the day and age where these threats are well known. It also has the theoretical advantage of being an OS where apps don't typically have to interact with the data stored by other apps (the obvious exception is photos), which should make it easier to chroot them, but as soon as you drill down into the nuts and bolts you realize that doing so would eliminate all manner of useful functionality.
Keep in mind your end user target audience too. How hard was it for Microsoft to get the MSCE crowd used to user account control? UAC was not a new concept but the introduction of it into the Microsoft world threw many of their most knowledgeable users into a confused tailspin. It was even worse for the end/home users without technical backgrounds. Now imagine the headache of trying to introduce chroot'ing into a consumer grade OS and making it the default behavior for applications. Want to import that chart from Excel into Word? Here's a UAC-like pop-up asking for permission. Need to insert that clip art you just downloaded in your browser into your PowerPoint presentation? Here's another UAC-like pop-up asking for permission. Do you see the problem?
Maybe then we'll get proper application whitelisting / sandboxing by default in a desktop OS. And, hell, why do applications get the run of every file I use under my account? Should they not have to request such things first? Even on Unix-likes, if you get on as my user, you can trash all my data - why?
The answer is functionality. Let's consider the example of Android, an OS with a fairly recent security model, built on top of Linux which provides for chroot. Why not put apps into their own chroot jail by default? Seems like a good idea, right? How do you explain to Grandma why she can't upload photos from her camera's image gallery to Facebook? Oh, you'll solve that problem by putting the photos in a public directory? Okay, that eliminates the functionality concern, but now you're right back where you started with exposure to ransomware....
People think I overreact when I just remote-off the machine (or tell them to pull the plug) and just re-image for even the most basic of adware.
It's not an overreaction, that's y response as well but I would have to ask you why you're getting adware in your environment? In the gigs where I've worked as in-house IT I can count the number of ad/malware infections we've had over the years on one hand. I'm fairly proactive about training my users and maintaining a solid security model. Have a decent security package, don't allow your users to be admins on their local machines, and train them in common sense steps to avoid ad/malware. That will eliminate the lion's share of infections. Conversely, when I worked in consulting it seemed like all we did was remove ad/malware; it got to the point where it was readily apparent that we were deliberately not proactive because being so would have reduced our billable hours. That's one of many reasons why I quit that job....
Even crazier though, the shareware download for this game from 1995 is 2.8MB, smaller than a single pic from my smartphone.
Thus explaining why porn in the 1990s sucked so bad. You'd wait five minutes for each photo from alt.binaries.erotica to download (1MB photo at 28.8kbit/s = ~5 minutes) only to discover that 99.9% of them sucked. Today it's much better; now you wait five minutes for each video to download (600MB video at 10mbit/s = ~5 minutes) only to discover that 99.9% of them suck. "What? They used THAT pose? Again? And what's with the lousy lighting here? Did they blow the whole budget on the script and save nothing for light bulbs? *sigh* *delete* Hey, here's another video set, this one is sure to be better.... Ugh, an hour to download. Guess I'll make some coffee and read Slashdot while I wait."
Teenagers today don't know how good they have it.;)
It has also developed a partial PC emulator called DOSBox that contains a stripped down clone of MS-DOS. The emulator is not quite cycle-accurate, but because of variance among manufacturers' PCs, PC games tended not to demand cycle accuracy.
What's really awesome is that every old DOS game I play (there's a lot of them) runs better under DOSBox than it did back in the day on native hardware. I can only assume this is because of the abstracted hardware layer and memory management; whatever the reasons it's really awesome playing these old games without worrying about random crashes or lockups.
That POS real-time clock mechanism in your average PC holds time as good as a $10 wristwatch
NTP can keep time to within tens to hundreds of milliseconds across the public internet. Plenty good enough for 99.9999% of the applications out there. The RTC only comes into play across reboots. Even Windows has implemented NTP (albeit a crappy implementation that's "only" good to within a second or two) by default for more than a decade now.
wiping out a phone's ability to make phone calls, for instance (8.0.1, iPhone 6), is somewhat of a faux pas
Somewhat? Sounds more like "the biggest faux pas you can make where a phone is concerned.":-P
Only if you're in the small minority of people that still appreciate an old fashioned phone call. I know people that can count on one hand how many phone calls they make in a month from their smartphones...
Mitigating this it technically of course possible, but completely unfeasible
It's perfectly feasible to foreclose the lion's share of amplification attacks. All that's needed is for network operators to drop packets with source addresses that don't originate from their networks. This problem has been discussed for decades now but lazy network operators still can't be bothered to engage basic egress filter rules. My ISP will happily pass along packets with source addresses that they don't own; hell, I can send out packets with source addresses that don't even belong to ARIN and my North American ISP will happily pass them along.
The goblet connector on my blender sheared. I could have gone out and bought a replacement blender for €150. Instead I ordered a part online for €9.50 which arrived two days later and took ten minutes to fit. If the motor had failed, I would probably have bought a new blender (of a different make).
You have a €150 blender? I dare say that's not the norm in the vast majority of households. Mine cost $19.95.....
I will never understand why every single one of the cookies in a bag of American cookies has to come in a plastic bag of it's own and I don't remember Bounty bars tasting any worse when they came wrapped in paper.
My Great-Grandfather used to swear that plastic was going to be the death of civilization. I'm not willing to go that far (it's hard to imagine modern medicine without plastics, amongst other applications) but I really really really wish we could go back to paper and glass for our foodstuffs; it just tastes better, in my not so humble opinion. Don't even get me started on the wastefulness of the plastic grocery bag....
There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."
Even better was the fact that a friend of ours had recently purchased the same car, something we mocked him incessantly about, and this was just extra fuel for the fire.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I consider all religions nonsense but certainly support the right of people to be able to have whatever stupid beliefs they have.
I think we've identified the source of your complete lack of sympathy. I suspected as much of course but thanks for confirming it.
However, there is a line that needs to be drawn somewhere when people don't just hold their own thoughts but interact with each other - i.e. how much immigrants need to adapt and how far the EU accommodates to their preferences
Dictating the manner in which someone can dress in public serves no legitimate reason other than to marginalize them. Personally I find it incredibly fucking irritating when youth wear baggy pants that expose their undergarments but legislation against such behavior in the United States is rightfully struck down on freedom of expression laws. My style of dress does not cause you harm and you have no right to try and control it.
Accommodating too much to religion causes resentment among agnostics and atheists and that's what the vast majority of young people in Europe are.
You're not accommodating anything by allowing people to dress as they choose, unless of course you offend so easily that merely seeing a religious person is enough to make you run to your MP. Just call it what it is: thinly veiled bigotry, against a people and faith that you can't be bothered to understand. And if you're going to legislate such bigotry into law do both yourselves and them a favor and stop letting them into your countries in the first place. My country would be happy to take them in and we'll emerge stronger and better for it.
People who brave enough to flee their country of birth are exactly the sort that the West needs to remain viable in the 21st century. It's a pity that you can't see that or what's going to happen to the EU if you don't address your demographics problem. Have fun paying for that social safety net you're so proud of when you have no young people to pay into the system.
But I repeat, concealing your face is just as obscene to some as full nudity to others. Should both be allowed?
Public breastfeeding offends some people but I'm fairly certain such behavior is protected and even encouraged in the EU. Again, you're just choosing to use secularism as a cloak for bigotry. I'm not buying it and neither are your un-assimilated immigrants. To answer your stupid question though, yes, both should be allowed. Seeing a naked person does not harm me. Neither does seeing someone totally covered. Of course private property owners should be free to set whatever standards they wish for admittance onto their property.
I stopped taking you seriously at the STASI comparison, just so you know, but I'll respond anyway to this point:
All it takes to be on the radar is to (knowingly or not) communicate with someone who (also knowingly or not) communicated with someone who is either of interest or who has been confused with someone who is of interest. And of interest need not be limited to foreign nationals working with terrorists. We know they give tips to the DEA and FBI as well. Are you sure you have never talked to anyone who talked to someone who knows a drug dealer?
The only difference between NSA and a classical gumshoe detective is that the latter's activities aren't easily automated. If you're two degrees removed from a drug dealer you were always going to land on law enforcement's desk. You'll quickly leave that desk when they determine that the lead is a dead end. The Federal Government of the United States isn't going to compromise your SSH server because you called somebody who called somebody who called a terrorist. They aren't even likely to give you more than a cursory look.
Fantasy land: "Oh no! sjames called this guy who ordered a pizza from this place that once sold a pizza to a terrorist! I need his file on my desk YESTERDAY. Find out who his high school sweetheart was; I want her in here for an interview ASAP. Get me his Facebook and Slashdot credentials while you're at it. Don't forget to put this in the President's Daily Brief, this needs to go to the top STAT."
Real world: "Hmm, the computer says we got a hit. Oh, that's a pizza delivery place. Next."
That's pure genius right there. I'm going to share that with some people. :)
She's had a few times where she started chatting to a [obvious] muslim couple when hiking and they've been pretty uncomfortable
Finnish people behave in a similar manner when confronted with pointless small talk; is it okay to deliberately annoy the shit out of them too?
The average person should be more worried about their sexual partner(s) going through their SMS history than the NSA doing the same. I know it's a shock to the ego but very few of us are interesting enough to be on the radar of any intelligence agency. The lion's share of the population is fat and unimportant.
Not being allowed to cover your face completely is not the same as telling people what they can and cannot wear
Yes, actually it is. Justify it however you want; it's a manifestation of France's hostility towards religion and if you had bothered to follow both links you would have noted that they target such policies at Jews as well as Muslims. In any event, it's not my place to tell the French how to run their country, but if they're going to bellyache about resentment amongst immigrant populations you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself where such resentment is coming from.
I don't live in a part of the United States with a large Muslim community (Upstate New York) but even I occasionally see people wearing face coverings in public. Guess what? It doesn't hurt me or mine one damned bit. Why the French feel the need to legislate this is beyond me. Send the immigrants to the United States if you don't like them so much; we'll take them in and make them our own. Meanwhile France's (actually the EU as a whole) demographic problem will continue to get worse and worse. The EU has a binary choice at the end of the day: Have more babies or welcome immigrants.
However, it doesn't change the fact that it is a foreign language to them and since it's your native language, they're already making an effort to accommodate you and if you didn't show that you appreciate it, it's hardly surprising that you got hostility in return.
I didn't say I got "hostility"; I said I saw treatment of immigrant communities that was shocking to my North American sensibilities. The Canadians I knew made the same observation so it wasn't some uniquely American perspective that I had which was offended. On balance I had positive experiences; I'd go back there in a New York Minute. All I'm saying is I can see how easily it is for immigrant communities in the EU to feel marginalized, and Finland is one of the best EU countries with regards to the integration of new arrivals.
To be fair again, the US has a bit of a problem with integration, specifically with Latino populations.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that; all of the second or later generation Latinos I know are at least as "American" as I am, if not more so. It's hard to define what "American" means exactly but in this context I'm referring to assimilation; they've thoroughly assimilated by the time of the second generation. Even the first generation immigrations I know are fairly well assimilated after a few years here; whatever barriers remain there are typically more related to age than culture, for example, the Grandparents of my Mexican friends would find a lot in common with my own Grandparents with regards to cultural conservatism.
Thing is, if you want to *stay* in France, Germany, the UK, etc, one would think that integration would be a top priority, if only for success and stature within your local society.
Culture changes over time even without immigration. Those who cling to past romanticized ideals of their own culture are doomed to disappointment and resentment.
yet suspicious of whether these are really good recommendations.
Some of them are good. Then there's this:
Set up Tor hidden services for your SSH servers. This has multiple advantages. It provides an additional layer of encryption and server authentication. People looking at your traffic will not know your IP, so they will be unable to scan and target other services running on the same server and client.
That seems like a huge tradeoff in usability for not much security benefit, IMHO, particularly if the box is running services that are far more likely to be probed than ssh. Nor do I much care for the notion of having to rely on Tor if I need to manage a critical system.
It's kind of silly to wrap these common sense suggestions in the cloak of NSA surveillance. If you're on the radar of any major nation-state's signals intelligence agency you've got bigger problems than SSH. Any significant intelligence agency is apt to have the resources to gain physical access to your hardware without your knowledge, which is game over in any conceivable scenario. SSH is and always was intended primarily to protect one from nosy network operators running packet sniffers.
The fact that you can move files between the directory structures means there's SOMETHING (a file manager in Android, Explorer in Windows, a shell of some sort in Linux) that has access to the root file system. What will you do when malware starts to target that as an infection vector?
There's also the training burden that's going to come with teaching people (many of whom do not even know what a file or directory is) how to use such a system. For the same amount of hassle you could instruct them in the necessary steps to avoid getting infected in the first place. I would submit that you've lost the battle as soon as the ad/mal/randomware is installed on one of your devices regardless of how good or bad your underlying security model is.
Long story short, this is a hell of a lot more complex than you make it out to be, and points to a growing problem throughout the EU. The US sees only a small fraction of this issue (see also the town of Dearborn, MI) by comparison.
That's because the EU treats their immigrants like shit in comparison to the United States. France goes so far as to tell people what they can and can not wear in public spaces then wonders why they have a backlash from their non-assimilated immigrant populations. I lived in the EU for a time (Finland) and the treatment I saw there of the immigrant population was genuinely shocking. Hell, I encountered some of it myself, as a temporary resident, while being a white person of European descent who shared a common language with the locals. I can only imagine the day to day experiences of someone trying to establish themselves there permanently, with a complete language barrier to overcome and open contempt/hostility directly towards their faith.
The United States is far from perfect but we do a much better job of integrating immigrants than Europe. You don't see nearly as many disaffected second or even third generation immigrants leaving the United States to join ISIS or similar organizations. The EU needs to confront this reality and deal with it sooner rather than later.
Inviting inflammatory discussion?
If the first two threads are any indication....
Now we can have the obligatory "Islam sucks" conversation, which will lead to the inevitable "all religion sucks" conversation, both of which are infinitely more enjoyable than simply leaving it at "Crazy people suck."
There's a low but non-zero chance that we might actually have an insightful conversation about free speech and the costs thereof but I wouldn't hold my breath. One of the new civil rights is the right not to be offended by anything at anytime....
Then you can click a box saying 'yes, I really want to let this app save this file to this location'.
So you're going to use an annoying UAC-like pop-up that will rapidly be ignored by 99.9% of the population because it appears so often as to be nearly useless?
Does the Facebook app even let you save other people's pictures?
Yes it does, but that's beside the point. Don't get hung-up on the particular example of Facebook, I only used it because it's an app used by the mainstream that needs access to the file structure for legitimate purposes. There are countless others, big and small, and if you're serious about this idea you're going to have to take them all into account and find a way to do it that isn't overly annoying or cumbersome to non-technical end users. Smarter people than either one of us have tried and failed to solve this problem....
For a start, an app like Facebook should only have read-only access to your photos.
What if I want to save photos posted by a friend to my device? Now Facebook needs write access to the file structure. Do you propose having multiple directory structures and chroot jails for something as simple as photos? With nothing being able to access / except for the OS?
No software should have access to anything it doesn't need access to.
I agree with you in principle but I'm playing devil's advocate to try and illustrate the point that it's not as cut and dry as we would like it to be. I used the example of Android because it's an OS that was created by intelligent people in the day and age where these threats are well known. It also has the theoretical advantage of being an OS where apps don't typically have to interact with the data stored by other apps (the obvious exception is photos), which should make it easier to chroot them, but as soon as you drill down into the nuts and bolts you realize that doing so would eliminate all manner of useful functionality.
Keep in mind your end user target audience too. How hard was it for Microsoft to get the MSCE crowd used to user account control? UAC was not a new concept but the introduction of it into the Microsoft world threw many of their most knowledgeable users into a confused tailspin. It was even worse for the end/home users without technical backgrounds. Now imagine the headache of trying to introduce chroot'ing into a consumer grade OS and making it the default behavior for applications. Want to import that chart from Excel into Word? Here's a UAC-like pop-up asking for permission. Need to insert that clip art you just downloaded in your browser into your PowerPoint presentation? Here's another UAC-like pop-up asking for permission. Do you see the problem?
Maybe then we'll get proper application whitelisting / sandboxing by default in a desktop OS. And, hell, why do applications get the run of every file I use under my account? Should they not have to request such things first? Even on Unix-likes, if you get on as my user, you can trash all my data - why?
The answer is functionality. Let's consider the example of Android, an OS with a fairly recent security model, built on top of Linux which provides for chroot. Why not put apps into their own chroot jail by default? Seems like a good idea, right? How do you explain to Grandma why she can't upload photos from her camera's image gallery to Facebook? Oh, you'll solve that problem by putting the photos in a public directory? Okay, that eliminates the functionality concern, but now you're right back where you started with exposure to ransomware....
People think I overreact when I just remote-off the machine (or tell them to pull the plug) and just re-image for even the most basic of adware.
It's not an overreaction, that's y response as well but I would have to ask you why you're getting adware in your environment? In the gigs where I've worked as in-house IT I can count the number of ad/malware infections we've had over the years on one hand. I'm fairly proactive about training my users and maintaining a solid security model. Have a decent security package, don't allow your users to be admins on their local machines, and train them in common sense steps to avoid ad/malware. That will eliminate the lion's share of infections. Conversely, when I worked in consulting it seemed like all we did was remove ad/malware; it got to the point where it was readily apparent that we were deliberately not proactive because being so would have reduced our billable hours. That's one of many reasons why I quit that job....
Even crazier though, the shareware download for this game from 1995 is 2.8MB, smaller than a single pic from my smartphone.
Thus explaining why porn in the 1990s sucked so bad. You'd wait five minutes for each photo from alt.binaries.erotica to download (1MB photo at 28.8kbit/s = ~5 minutes) only to discover that 99.9% of them sucked. Today it's much better; now you wait five minutes for each video to download (600MB video at 10mbit/s = ~5 minutes) only to discover that 99.9% of them suck. "What? They used THAT pose? Again? And what's with the lousy lighting here? Did they blow the whole budget on the script and save nothing for light bulbs? *sigh* *delete* Hey, here's another video set, this one is sure to be better.... Ugh, an hour to download. Guess I'll make some coffee and read Slashdot while I wait."
Teenagers today don't know how good they have it. ;)
It has also developed a partial PC emulator called DOSBox that contains a stripped down clone of MS-DOS. The emulator is not quite cycle-accurate, but because of variance among manufacturers' PCs, PC games tended not to demand cycle accuracy.
What's really awesome is that every old DOS game I play (there's a lot of them) runs better under DOSBox than it did back in the day on native hardware. I can only assume this is because of the abstracted hardware layer and memory management; whatever the reasons it's really awesome playing these old games without worrying about random crashes or lockups.
At least around here in Germany, everybody in the 80s had a C64/Amiga (or maybe Atari ST) for gaming (because you could trade disks at school)
Hey man, don't copy that floppy!
That POS real-time clock mechanism in your average PC holds time as good as a $10 wristwatch
NTP can keep time to within tens to hundreds of milliseconds across the public internet. Plenty good enough for 99.9999% of the applications out there. The RTC only comes into play across reboots. Even Windows has implemented NTP (albeit a crappy implementation that's "only" good to within a second or two) by default for more than a decade now.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
iTunes on Windows has also gone downhill over the last few years
iTunes for Windows has always been a bloated pig for what it does.
wiping out a phone's ability to make phone calls, for instance (8.0.1, iPhone 6), is somewhat of a faux pas
Somewhat? Sounds more like "the biggest faux pas you can make where a phone is concerned." :-P
Only if you're in the small minority of people that still appreciate an old fashioned phone call. I know people that can count on one hand how many phone calls they make in a month from their smartphones...
Mitigating this it technically of course possible, but completely unfeasible
It's perfectly feasible to foreclose the lion's share of amplification attacks. All that's needed is for network operators to drop packets with source addresses that don't originate from their networks. This problem has been discussed for decades now but lazy network operators still can't be bothered to engage basic egress filter rules. My ISP will happily pass along packets with source addresses that they don't own; hell, I can send out packets with source addresses that don't even belong to ARIN and my North American ISP will happily pass them along.
The goblet connector on my blender sheared. I could have gone out and bought a replacement blender for €150. Instead I ordered a part online for €9.50 which arrived two days later and took ten minutes to fit. If the motor had failed, I would probably have bought a new blender (of a different make).
You have a €150 blender? I dare say that's not the norm in the vast majority of households. Mine cost $19.95.....
I will never understand why every single one of the cookies in a bag of American cookies has to come in a plastic bag of it's own and I don't remember Bounty bars tasting any worse when they came wrapped in paper.
My Great-Grandfather used to swear that plastic was going to be the death of civilization. I'm not willing to go that far (it's hard to imagine modern medicine without plastics, amongst other applications) but I really really really wish we could go back to paper and glass for our foodstuffs; it just tastes better, in my not so humble opinion. Don't even get me started on the wastefulness of the plastic grocery bag....
There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."
Even better was the fact that a friend of ours had recently purchased the same car, something we mocked him incessantly about, and this was just extra fuel for the fire. :)