The most frightening part is that Tesla's Autopilot, in addition to relying on less hardware compared to more autonomous vehicle like Google's (Level 2 vs. Level 3/4), is even relying on less hardware than LESS autonomous cars. (Tesla's Level2 is relying on a single Camera, Whereas Level1 like Volvo add laser lidar in addition to camera, and several brands including mercedes have been adding stereo cameras for quite some time).
But on the scale of the price of the whole car (I mean, on scale on the price of the whole battery to which the strap a free car as a bonus~:-P ) does reducing the hardware has really a significant impact ?
A private sector company can cut their cost by integrating as much as possible themselves the production pipe-line, and only relying upstream on common of-the-shelf parts. (SpaceX isn't smelting their own aluminum ore, nor making their own silicon for embed electronics, but pretty much handle a lot above that).
This gives some significant cost reduction due to being lean, that they can pass of in the form of slightly reduced price compared to the competition, in the hope that by selling it a bit cheaper they can manage to land more contracts. (They won't try to slap as much profit as possible up to the point of a government contract. They still need to "seem competitive enough from the outside" to attract customers. They'll need a fine balance between profits and being attractive in the market place).
A government project, they'll going to subcontract parts of the work to a high number of sub-contracting groups (they can't produce 100% themselves from the ground up neither). There will be a ton a different academic department in university involved (for science !) which is a good thing, perhaps. But there are also going to be tons of private companies small and big, for various reasons. Multiple companies to "spread the load and spread the charge and to avoid favouring a single player" (king of makes sense). But also multiple companie selected for politics (company wants a slice of the public money pork pie, politician wants campaign donations). And the multiple companies generate overhead, might have tons of incompatibilities (didn't standardise on the same interfaces). And the whole will need to be orchestrated by an avalanche of committees.
The end result is far from lean, every one wants their share of money, budget will get extended anyway, and ends up costing a lot of money.
So in the end, there arguments for both approach:
- private sector can be cheaper by being lean and better integrated. - public sector can have the advantage to be ablte to tackle problems that are important, but not profitable (yet)
No, kid under age will not actually click the "16+" button on WhatsApp's authorisation page...
...for the simple reason that they don't use WhatsApp. They tend to hang out on SnapChat.
(Which is the reason why the Zuck is nervous about them : there the only successful social app that he didn't manage to buy like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.)
I find it funny that FOSSies were super worried about access to the source code (never mind that several proprietary games have been hand-hacked using hex editors with great results, without the need for a line of source code)
The problem is that all the hand-hacks that you mention, even if successfully done in practice, are theoretically against copyright and other DCMA-alike laws (though in some jurisdictions they are expressly covered by local "fair use"-alike exception. I think you *could* be allow to bypass security to access your own device that you own in several European countries).
So even if it was done, it's something that in theory we would not be allowed to. The whole idea behind copyleft licenses (like the GPL family) is to expressly allow end-users to modify the code running on device they own in this way.
and the real threat to user freedom came from a GPL kernel locked behind locked bootloaders and locked root access. Nice foresight there Mr Stallman!
Yeah, and if you were paying attention, Stallman did not only foresee it, he was even the one to come up with a name for that : he suggested "tivoization" named after the first device with widespread public knowledge to have such signed firmware locking the access.
The whole reasons to release a new "version 3" of the GPL was exactly to complain agaisnt companies who abuse GPL code by locking it behind signature checks in the bootloader. It's for company that pretend to follow the letter of GPLv2 (by publishing the code) while at the same time violating its spirit (finding a loophole so the users is free to study and modify the code, just not the peculiar install that is running on the company's hardware that the user has bought. You could modify the code published by Tivo, but you could only install it on a self-built PVR/PCTV, you cannot upload your mods to your own Tivo).
But hey, you were probably among the first to complain about the "restictiveness" of GPLv3, how it's even more an evil virus than the previous GPLs, etc.
(NOTE: Linus refused to switch Linux to GPLv3.
- for a practical reason, because currently the Linux license says "GPL version 2" without adding the optionnal "or any future". So switching to GPLv3 would have required to comb through the git log to find every single last developer/patch submitter/Etc. that is still responsible for lines of codes that are still present in the modern linux (survived later patching and code removal), and then ask every single one of them to confirm accepting the license change.
- for theoretical reasons : Linus considers himself a pragmatist. Current GPLv2 already allows users to at least see the code, and play around with it and learn from what the publishers have modified. The maker of the device gets to decide what goes with their device (barring user access using signatures). The user get to vote with their wallet and decide which maker they want to support).
(Also, I suspect that the forking that did happen back in recent history around controversial re-licensing (see XFree86 vs Xorg). Also, GPLv3 was seen as controversial by some companies. See Apple : even if the newer GPLv3-ed GCC are popular elsewhere, Apple did decide to stick with pre-GPLv3 older GCC 4.2, and has been progressively replacing everything with LLVM as their default supported compiler. Given that, Linus might have been right to be afraid of losing marketshare / mindshare by switching to GPLv3)
Cue in eternal debates of corporate developers finding that BSD is more free because more permissive, and end users finding that GPL is more free because it enforces the end-users' freedoms being kept.
Now excuse me, an Android phone of mine crapped its own/system partition and I cannot reinstall the OS (like I can with evil non-free Windows) because locked bootloader. No, honestly.
US AV brands are doing that the US gov totally approves of?
They are not white-listing Russian malware ?
Same as EU vendors aren't white-listing Chinese malware ?
Slowly reaching the point where going the VirusTotal/MetaScan/etc. route is the best : throw as many different AV engine at it, and hope that at least one of these engine won't have it on the whitelist mandated by their local government.
Even if it's just personal correspondence with friends and family, getting into that account reveals all their email addresses, information about their schedules, their writing styles and habits (great for spear phising attacks), all kinds of stuff.
In practice, given how seldom encryption is used in e-mail, that information isn't very well protected to begin with.
Nearly nobody outside off/. ers uses GPG, and S/MIME is only used in some peculiar corporate settings. Thus nearly all e-mail are clear during the exchange.
Also not every single e-mail server uses encryption. You might have setup your email client to use, e.g.: IMAPS and SMTP with STARTLS. But there's no guarantee that you correspondent will have done similar (or uses a webmail over HTTPS). And no guarantee either that the various machines along the chain between your SMTP server and your correspondent IMAP server will all use TLS/SSL secured links.
So a lot of what you've mention can be gather simply by looking at un-encrypted traffic, no need to hack anyone's computer.
Aside from the embarrassment of having an @aol.com email address, they don't support a lot of basic security tech like 2 factor auth and apparently don't give their support staff any security training, so should not be used for any purpose.
That's the major problem in my opiion : - AOL is stuck in "early 90s" style of internet security. - it's not the kid who should get locked in. it's AOL who should be fined for awefully bad security practices.
Yes, in theory ratios less wide than 16:9 (like the 16:10 the used to be popular back during the first wide screen LCD pannels for computer : 1280x800, 1600x1000, 1920x1200) give more screen estate for tool bars, etc.
(And despite all the criticism Ubuntu's Unity is otherwise taking, at least their idea of a side dock is definitely a good one to conserve screen estate in the vertical direction. And why KDE-based linux distro tend nowadays to reduce the taskbar to a much thinner size. And why "tabs and menus in the title bar" (like chromium and some firefox versions) are getting popular.)
The problem is that, for manufacturers, these resolutions are weird and unusual. TV world has standardized on 16:9 a long time ago as the ratio for wide screen. Keeping the same 16:9 ratio on computer monitors enables flat-screen panel makers to use the same parts in both TVs and computer screens, instead of needing to produce smaller separate runs of panels with "weird" resolutions just for the computer screen line of products.
That's why most of the common mass produced cheap computer screen use the same ratio as TV screen : reusing cheap TV parts.
Which is also the reason why most of those cheap computer screens also stick to common TV resolutions : 720p, 1080p, etc. and why until the recent "4k" TV resolution fad these computer screen were stuck at sucky low resolutions that CRTs had already surpassed a decade ago. a.k.a the quest ion"Why are we stuck qith 1080p ? My CRT from early 2000s did already 1600x1200 !" (you used to need to fork a significant amount for more expensive pro models to get beyond 1080p - simply because these used custom parts and not mass-produced TV pannels).
you might think it's snake oil, but there are reasons for the "American Drugs" examples you give.
- Regarding peppers: These will increase the secretion of the mucosae (i.e.: they'll cause your eye to produce more tear and will get your nose more runny. all this additional water you'll produce wil basically help washing your nose/sinuses) (most of the traditional cures for upper respiratory tract infections work the same way) several nasal spray work the same way but more directly (saline water to help wash out the nose). (the remaining types of sprays tend to also pack in addition a vaso-constricting agents)
- regarding alcohol in cough syrup : some substance are better dissolved in an alcohol solution than in pure water. Out of the top of my head: codeine doesn't like cold water, if i remember correctly. that's a common antitussive - suppressor of the cough reflex (a class of deug useful in case of dry cough - irritation causing you to cough even if there's nothing to expel). (wether the active molecules dissolved in the alcohol will actually help you is another question altogether. but alcohol is a key component for the syrup to actually be a syrup and not some undissolved powder at the bottom of a water bottle)
- artificially bitter taste of drugs: yes, in some circumstances, some active molecules which taste sweet might end up in preparation made bitter-tasting on purpose. usually the reason is to diminish the risk of it being accidentally ingested by children or pets. so no, the purpose is not (only) to make you think it's a drug by making it taste like a drug, but to avoid making it taste too close to candy and have a children OD on it.
so there are actual non marketing uses for the above
(but yes, mint in toothpaste has no other purposes than making you feel fresh).
there is no legal way to download the Google Play Store and there is no legal way to download the google apps outside the Play Store.
There no legal ways to download those, yes. There's a bout a gazillion of (illegal under US law) ways to download those. Those ways are illegal in the US, but are very unlikely to be illegal in any country (like China) that doesn't give much fucks about anything intellectual-property-related (like copyrights, in this case).
An URL that links to some Chinese website hosting APKs for the above software and sideloads them is all about it takes.
Some custom ROMs ship with the google apps, which is illegal, but Google turns a blind eye on this practice. This will not be the case with ZTE.
But unlike the custom ROMs, ZTE's solution could be hosted outside of any legal reach from google. A sideloadable APK hosted on a service located in a jurisdiction where Google is unable to file a complaint is all it takes.
And that's completely ignoring legal alternatives like Micro G - an opensource re-implementation of the services that Google provides in closed blobs. (And all the various APK downloaders that could then be used to side-load apps that normally are only hosted on Google Play) (But let's be serious, ZTE is more likely to take the pirate route and provide an "otherwise considered illegal in the US" installation option of the real Google deal, than to take the route of financially support microG developers and maintain legally compatible services)
but I absolutely RESENT having things taken from me.
On the other hand, would you resent also having things offered to you for free ?
(Random example of things that you get for free in most of the countries in the developed world, like in Finland ?) Like the ability to go to university and get a degree for you do have the mental capability, for which your parents didn't save massive amounts of money to pay for ? Like having a public health system that can help you pay your medical bills - because nobody does choose to become sick and even more so, nobody choose on purpose to have the most complicated and expensive to treat disease on purpose ? Like having an unemployement system that can cover your back if you happen to lose your job ? Like living in a country where there's an effective police force that is good at keeping the criminality low, to the point that you con't need to constantly be carrying a gun around ?
For these things come for free to you should you need them, the government should be able to pay for them, and for the government to be able to pay for them it needs money, that is taken in the form of taxes.
If Bob can't get a job, because there is nothing useful for him to do but Ted has a job and the fancier car, bigger house, more meals out etc that come with it Bob will be jealous! Bob will either demand productive people like Ted provide him these things as well leading to an inflationary cycle where UBI must be forever increased
You know that the "B" in "UBI" stands for "Basic" ? It is here to cover for the Basic needs of the population. (Cheap housing, cheap but still healthy food, etc.) It's aiming at the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid
Until the possession of a fancy car can clearly be considered as a basic need that every single member of the human popular absolutely needs to be covered, the UBI won't inflate to please Bob. (Maybe one day it will. There used to be a past when even shelter and food wouldn't be taken for granted. In several modern European countries, it's hard to *NOT* be obtaining them. Maybe in the future the society will evolve to the point where every single citizen is entitled to own a car. But for now, public transportation system is considered to be covering most of the needs every one has).
Its really better for all of us if we occupy Bob doing something....
Don't worry, TV and Internet are very good at keeping Bob busy. (except that advertisement might also be very good at keeping bob persuaded that it his god-given natural right to own ${SOME ULTRA EXPENSIVE PRODUCT} )
Of these, only 3 or 4 are directly involved in steering the ship: The captain, and a couple of deck officers, all of whom have other duties as well.
And the article mentions that the current systems are only semi-autonomous.
Means you won't be completely replacing the whole 3-4 guys steering the ship. The captain will still be around, probably at least one of the deck officers, in order to overwatch the semi-autonomous system whenever it requires human supervision.
Compared to all the money involved in shipping cargo on huge container ship, the difference of salaries will barely register.
IKEA is cheaper because the customer does the assembly at home.
Yeah. And I sense here that the business plan is to ship robots at home that will do the assembly for you : - You still get the cheap flat boxes of furniture from IKEA - But you delegate the assembly to the robot.
And as you don't constantly need having furniture assembled, you don't actually need to permanently own assembling robots. You could rent the robots instead. You could have them shipped to you on the week-end when you plan to buy and assemble new IKEA furniture. To make things cheaper, the robots could be shipped in cheap flat boxes (it'll just require some quick assembl...
Your health insurance and you in the end pay for it!
The story mentions Amazon trying to sell drugs in 47 of the U.S. states. Not Europe. What is this strange thing called "health insurance" you're speaking about ?~~:-D
Hospital is a middle man - they get markup on what they sell. They have no incentive to lower that cost.
On the other hand, the pharma companies and middle men upstream along the chain have an ultra-strong incentive to dramatically cut their prices and even sell at a loss some of their prescription drugs when making deals with big hospitals : - Hospital will be interested in making business with the middle man that gives them the biggest volume sales. - Middle men and pharma companies are interested in being *the hospital's official drug* that young MD trainee get used to prescribe while doing they hospital interships, because they'll develop a habit/brand loyalty and keep prescribing that drug later in their carrier from their doctor's practice office. - Middle men and pharma companies are interested in being *the hospital's official drug* that most patient get prescribed at the hospital, because chances are higher they'll ask for the same drug when getting a prescrirbtion from their family doctor.
So middle men and pharmacompany would be losing some money when making deals with hospital, but making it back with all the people which keeps using the exact same drug out of the hospital.
(NOTE: Never investigated the thing in depth. I just noticed less usual and more expensive brands for prescription drugs in hospital settings)
Which was also one of the reasons why some pirates wore eyepatch. (note because of wounds, but to keep the covered eye sensitive in the darkness as soon as the ship needs to hide in the shadow and manoeuvre in the darkness of a shaded creek / of a large cave, etc.).
So closing an eye so an light sensitive contact len worn inside the car / UV-sensitive contact len worn in a convertible doesn't darken and keeps you able to see and navigate your car in the darkness of a tunnel is *litteraly" driving like a pirate.
Early 1980s already had chip cards, mostly used for phone booth (remember, back in the dinosaur era when your phone couldn't fit in your pocket and you needed to call from public ones). Wikipedia mentions in french the "Télécate" in France in 1983 as a first massive deployement beyond local tests . The patent itself dates back from 1974.
The first chip payment system is the "Carte Bleure" in France, 1986 according to wikipedia (and by 1992 there were nothing else but chip cards) Germany also had GeldKarte as a local older chip payment system.
But yeah, the EMV standard came much later, in the 1990s. So lots of payment system were still magstripe. But in 1980s there were already chips. Just not as widespread.
but all shipping parts are vulnerable to spectre and the followons.
Remember that they are 2 different vulnerabilities named "spectre".
Spectre variant1 affects AMD as it affects virtually any CPU under the sun that does speculative execution. But relatively to the other vulnerability, it's much more moderate, it's the CPU speculatively access data to which the current process HAS access anyway. (e.g.: getting pass a size check and reading from another array of the same thread). There are very few corner case where a thread should not read data to which is normally has access to (mostly in situations of JITed 3rd-party provided code - e.g. Javascript downloaded from the web - running in the same context as some sensitive data - e.g.: you password manager plugin) and proper process separation is the correct long term strategy anyway.
Spectre variant2 abuses the way speculative indirect branching is done (jumping to a location which is not known in advance : jump tables like C++ virtual methods, some possible C's "switch" implementations, etc.), and it's extremely CPU dependant as each CPU has a different way to speculate that. It's much more scary than Spectre v1, because one process of the attacker (e.g.: a program that the attacker has uploaded into an Amazon EC2 VM - something that he should be able to do), can cause an entirely unrelated process to speculatively jump and execute arbitrary locations (e.g.: the *hypervisor* handling that VM could be forced to jump to selected pieces of code, and thus doing some return-oriented-programming. Again that's the hypervisor we're talking about, a completely different piece of code to which the attacker should never have had access in the first place). - On Intel hardware (Xeons), spectre v2 exploit have been demonstrated successfully by Google's project zero - AMD hardware can do speculative branching (so AMD has marked their hardware as potentially affected), but as of today nobody has manager so successfully demonstrate a usable exploit, and the jury is still out whether this actually exploitable (might be that the peculiar implementation AMD CPUs use to branch speculatively cannot be abused in any useful way to begin with) (so AMD is still indicating exploitability as very probably unlikely).
So currently, on AMD you're still safe regarding Meltdown (AMD hardware doesn't read data it doesn't have actually access to), and Spectre v2 (there are probably no way to abuse indirect branch prediction to achieve anything meaningful).
Apparently, we geeks on/. don't have the same search needs as the big mass of joe six packs.
Like, when we input a weird sequence of letters, we mean that we look for exact occurence of this weird sequence because, e.g., it's the call-sign of a protein sequence and we're looking for article mentioning that peculiar cell receptor. But google decides that it's some misspelled common word. You end up needing to constantly encircle every single word of your query between quotes.
yeah, putting this into practice would mean tracking and burning every single copy of every single newspaper that happened to report on the case, etc.
not gonna happen. the guy should learn to deal with the fact that his name can be associated with the case forever (just maybe not on google). but potential future employer/business partners/etc need also to learn that it stupid to count on such old information, the gus havinv served their time and paid your due to society.
I am not sure they even know how blockchains work..
I am not sure you even know how a cryptocurrency exchange platform works.
Most keep their own internal journal of the exchange transaction happening on the platform itself.
They only accept payment on the blockchain to their platform's wallet when exchange's users pour money in, and pay BTCs out on the blockchain out of their platform's wallet when the exchange's users decide to cash out.
But every exchange it self happens internally and has no visibility on the blockchain it self.
(There are exceptions, some exchange platform trying to run on ACTUAL blockchains themselves. I think there was some Ethereum powered platform at some point)
Isn't this why so many people trust Bitcoin "security" to begin with? So you can trace any and all transactions back to the inception of the bitcoins used themselves?
Seems rather pointless if you can just delete any records. Sounds more like a scam every time I read something new about them.
That is true on the blockchain itself, regarding exchange of BTC on the public bitcoin protocol. You can't "delete" anything, unless the majority of the nodes on the network all agree together to roll back the blockchain. (Which happens every now or then when a newcomer cryptocurrency has a massive blunder leading to abuses and theft. Some time the whole network of that currency agree to roll back to before the blunder and use the new patched software).
But here, it's not the blockchain it self that got deletes.
There are transaction going from various owner to the wallet of the exchange platform, there are other transaction going from the above mentioned exchange's wallet to other accounts.
But whatever happens on the exchange platform itself happens "behing closed doors" as long as the crypto-currency protocol is concerned. An exchange platform might keep track of who exchanged which cryptocurrency with whom, so that at the end, when that user decide to withdraw their earnings, the platform knows how much to send from the platform's bitcoin wallet. But that entirely internal book keeping. And is completely left at how the platform feels appropriate. For all the cryptocurrency protocols cares, it could also be a gambling platform. Or some "artist's happenning" that completely burns and destroy bitcoins.
Here, hacker managed to get hold of the exchange platform server and persuade it to pay them out a good chunk of the BTCs held on the platform's bitcoin wallet, no matter what the server log held.
Not one day passes without a multi-million dollar Bitcoin heist
It supposed to be secured
The cryptography actually still works as it should. None of those heist is due to the cryptography being broken. It's good old hacking of insecure servers, etc. Not somebody managing to forge a signature on the blockchain and sign to himself a huge chunk of somebody else's money.
But the 'security' itself turns out to be the fatal flaw
Yes, its cryptocurrencies turning out to be fatal to themselves. But the security of the cryptography isn't the culprit.
The problem arise from the base premises : It's supposed to be a decentralized system for exchanging number, with no single central authority.
It's big advantage for people wanting free exchange with no obstruction (see controversies about Visa and Mastercard freezing some donation to wikileaks, back when bitcoin started to gain popularity). Same as with cash, nobody can prevent you to decide who you'll be handing a banknote.
But that means the obvious drawback that there's not simple central way to exerce regulations on all actors (unlike a bank in the banking system that needs to follow a ton of regulation before being able to itself a "Bank"). Same as with cash, nobody can warn you that the person whom you're handing a banknote is a crook. You have to realize that, and as a consequence, remember to exercise brain before taking any decision, because the government cannot (by design for such decentralized scheme) protect you from your own stupidity.
If you're transferring BTCs (or whatever is the hipest cryptocurrency du jour) to some company that pretends to be an "exchange", you get no inherent safety guarantee regarding if the exchange platform follows at least a minimal required level of secure practice. Or if it's a complete scam all-together. (Nobody can do that control for you, by design of the system).
It's a double edged sword. If you want to have "muh freedomz" and be able to do whatever you want with your numbers, unrestrained by a central authority (no banks nor government involved), then don't come crying when it turned out you're a sucker and gave out all your earnings to some scammer. You asked for unrestained exchange possibility, assume its consequences now.
Slashdot Mirror
The most frightening part is that Tesla's Autopilot, in addition to relying on less hardware compared to more autonomous vehicle like Google's (Level 2 vs. Level 3/4), is even relying on less hardware than LESS autonomous cars.
(Tesla's Level2 is relying on a single Camera,
Whereas Level1 like Volvo add laser lidar in addition to camera,
and several brands including mercedes have been adding stereo cameras for quite some time).
But on the scale of the price of the whole car (I mean, on scale on the price of the whole battery to which the strap a free car as a bonus~ :-P ) does reducing the hardware has really a significant impact ?
The opposite argument could also be done :
A private sector company can cut their cost by integrating as much as possible themselves the production pipe-line, and only relying upstream on common of-the-shelf parts.
(SpaceX isn't smelting their own aluminum ore, nor making their own silicon for embed electronics, but pretty much handle a lot above that).
This gives some significant cost reduction due to being lean, that they can pass of in the form of slightly reduced price compared to the competition, in the hope that by selling it a bit cheaper they can manage to land more contracts.
(They won't try to slap as much profit as possible up to the point of a government contract. They still need to "seem competitive enough from the outside" to attract customers. They'll need a fine balance between profits and being attractive in the market place).
A government project, they'll going to subcontract parts of the work to a high number of sub-contracting groups (they can't produce 100% themselves from the ground up neither).
There will be a ton a different academic department in university involved (for science !) which is a good thing, perhaps.
But there are also going to be tons of private companies small and big, for various reasons. Multiple companies to "spread the load and spread the charge and to avoid favouring a single player" (king of makes sense). But also multiple companie selected for politics (company wants a slice of the public money pork pie, politician wants campaign donations). And the multiple companies generate overhead, might have tons of incompatibilities (didn't standardise on the same interfaces).
And the whole will need to be orchestrated by an avalanche of committees.
The end result is far from lean, every one wants their share of money, budget will get extended anyway, and ends up costing a lot of money.
So in the end, there arguments for both approach:
- private sector can be cheaper by being lean and better integrated.
- public sector can have the advantage to be ablte to tackle problems that are important, but not profitable (yet)
No, kid under age will not actually click the "16+" button on WhatsApp's authorisation page...
...for the simple reason that they don't use WhatsApp.
They tend to hang out on SnapChat.
(Which is the reason why the Zuck is nervous about them : there the only successful social app that he didn't manage to buy like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.)
I find it funny that FOSSies were super worried about access to the source code (never mind that several proprietary games have been hand-hacked using hex editors with great results, without the need for a line of source code)
The problem is that all the hand-hacks that you mention, even if successfully done in practice, are theoretically against copyright and other DCMA-alike laws (though in some jurisdictions they are expressly covered by local "fair use"-alike exception. I think you *could* be allow to bypass security to access your own device that you own in several European countries).
So even if it was done, it's something that in theory we would not be allowed to. The whole idea behind copyleft licenses (like the GPL family) is to expressly allow end-users to modify the code running on device they own in this way.
and the real threat to user freedom came from a GPL kernel locked behind locked bootloaders and locked root access. Nice foresight there Mr Stallman!
Yeah, and if you were paying attention, Stallman did not only foresee it, he was even the one to come up with a name for that : he suggested "tivoization" named after the first device with widespread public knowledge to have such signed firmware locking the access.
The whole reasons to release a new "version 3" of the GPL was exactly to complain agaisnt companies who abuse GPL code by locking it behind signature checks in the bootloader.
It's for company that pretend to follow the letter of GPLv2 (by publishing the code) while at the same time violating its spirit (finding a loophole so the users is free to study and modify the code, just not the peculiar install that is running on the company's hardware that the user has bought. You could modify the code published by Tivo, but you could only install it on a self-built PVR/PCTV, you cannot upload your mods to your own Tivo).
But hey, you were probably among the first to complain about the "restictiveness" of GPLv3, how it's even more an evil virus than the previous GPLs, etc.
(NOTE: Linus refused to switch Linux to GPLv3.
- for a practical reason, because currently the Linux license says "GPL version 2" without adding the optionnal "or any future". So switching to GPLv3 would have required to comb through the git log to find every single last developer/patch submitter/Etc. that is still responsible for lines of codes that are still present in the modern linux (survived later patching and code removal), and then ask every single one of them to confirm accepting the license change.
- for theoretical reasons : Linus considers himself a pragmatist. Current GPLv2 already allows users to at least see the code, and play around with it and learn from what the publishers have modified. The maker of the device gets to decide what goes with their device (barring user access using signatures). The user get to vote with their wallet and decide which maker they want to support).
(Also, I suspect that the forking that did happen back in recent history around controversial re-licensing (see XFree86 vs Xorg).
Also, GPLv3 was seen as controversial by some companies. See Apple : even if the newer GPLv3-ed GCC are popular elsewhere, Apple did decide to stick with pre-GPLv3 older GCC 4.2, and has been progressively replacing everything with LLVM as their default supported compiler.
Given that, Linus might have been right to be afraid of losing marketshare / mindshare by switching to GPLv3)
Cue in eternal debates of corporate developers finding that BSD is more free because more permissive, and end users finding that GPL is more free because it enforces the end-users' freedoms being kept.
Now excuse me, an Android phone of mine crapped its own /system partition and I cannot reinstall the OS (like I can with evil non-free Windows) because locked bootloader. No, honestly.
Yup, so why don't you go and hand hexedit it wi
US AV brands are doing that the US gov totally approves of?
They are not white-listing Russian malware ?
Same as EU vendors aren't white-listing Chinese malware ?
Slowly reaching the point where going the VirusTotal/MetaScan/etc. route is the best :
throw as many different AV engine at it, and hope that at least one of these engine won't have it on the whitelist mandated by their local government.
Even if it's just personal correspondence with friends and family, getting into that account reveals all their email addresses, information about their schedules, their writing styles and habits (great for spear phising attacks), all kinds of stuff.
In practice, given how seldom encryption is used in e-mail, that information isn't very well protected to begin with.
Nearly nobody outside off /. ers uses GPG, and S/MIME is only used in some peculiar corporate settings.
Thus nearly all e-mail are clear during the exchange.
Also not every single e-mail server uses encryption.
You might have setup your email client to use, e.g.: IMAPS and SMTP with STARTLS.
But there's no guarantee that you correspondent will have done similar (or uses a webmail over HTTPS).
And no guarantee either that the various machines along the chain between your SMTP server and your correspondent IMAP server will all use TLS/SSL secured links.
So a lot of what you've mention can be gather simply by looking at un-encrypted traffic, no need to hack anyone's computer.
Aside from the embarrassment of having an @aol.com email address, they don't support a lot of basic security tech like 2 factor auth and apparently don't give their support staff any security training, so should not be used for any purpose.
That's the major problem in my opiion :
- AOL is stuck in "early 90s" style of internet security.
- it's not the kid who should get locked in. it's AOL who should be fined for awefully bad security practices.
Yes, in theory ratios less wide than 16:9 (like the 16:10 the used to be popular back during the first wide screen LCD pannels for computer : 1280x800, 1600x1000, 1920x1200) give more screen estate for tool bars, etc.
(And despite all the criticism Ubuntu's Unity is otherwise taking, at least their idea of a side dock is definitely a good one to conserve screen estate in the vertical direction.
And why KDE-based linux distro tend nowadays to reduce the taskbar to a much thinner size.
And why "tabs and menus in the title bar" (like chromium and some firefox versions) are getting popular.)
The problem is that, for manufacturers, these resolutions are weird and unusual.
TV world has standardized on 16:9 a long time ago as the ratio for wide screen.
Keeping the same 16:9 ratio on computer monitors enables flat-screen panel makers to use the same parts in both TVs and computer screens, instead of needing to produce smaller separate runs of panels with "weird" resolutions just for the computer screen line of products.
That's why most of the common mass produced cheap computer screen use the same ratio as TV screen : reusing cheap TV parts.
Which is also the reason why most of those cheap computer screens also stick to common TV resolutions : 720p, 1080p, etc. and why until the recent "4k" TV resolution fad these computer screen were stuck at sucky low resolutions that CRTs had already surpassed a decade ago.
a.k.a the quest ion"Why are we stuck qith 1080p ? My CRT from early 2000s did already 1600x1200 !"
(you used to need to fork a significant amount for more expensive pro models to get beyond 1080p - simply because these used custom parts and not mass-produced TV pannels).
also, ob. xkcd ref.
you might think it's snake oil, but there are reasons for the "American Drugs" examples you give.
- Regarding peppers:
These will increase the secretion of the mucosae (i.e.: they'll cause your eye to produce more tear and will get your nose more runny. all this additional water you'll produce wil basically help washing your nose/sinuses)
(most of the traditional cures for upper respiratory tract infections work the same way)
several nasal spray work the same way but more directly (saline water to help wash out the nose).
(the remaining types of sprays tend to also pack in addition a vaso-constricting agents)
- regarding alcohol in cough syrup :
some substance are better dissolved in an alcohol solution than in pure water. Out of the top of my head: codeine doesn't like cold water, if i remember correctly. that's a common antitussive - suppressor of the cough reflex (a class of deug useful in case of dry cough - irritation causing you to cough even if there's nothing to expel).
(wether the active molecules dissolved in the alcohol will actually help you is another question altogether. but alcohol is a key component for the syrup to actually be a syrup and not some undissolved powder at the bottom of a water bottle)
- artificially bitter taste of drugs: yes, in some circumstances, some active molecules which taste sweet might end up in preparation made bitter-tasting on purpose. usually the reason is to diminish the risk of it being accidentally ingested by children or pets.
so no, the purpose is not (only) to make you think it's a drug by making it taste like a drug, but to avoid making it taste too close to candy and have a children OD on it.
so there are actual non marketing uses for the above
(but yes, mint in toothpaste has no other purposes than making you feel fresh).
Aids or other STD's? Yes.
Windows 10? Yes.
Money? Probably not.
Windows 7 license? The more the merrier!
Methinks you need to stop viewing the world in a binary context -- context IS what is important, not "only" the choices.
Yup, and here context was "things that the government can make available for free, thanks to the budget it obtains through taxes".
Notice how the single thing on your list that a government provides for free ("Money ?")* is on the the things you like ("Probably not {resent}").
(*) : as social warfare to assist individual going through hard time (e.g.: unemployement service)
there is no legal way to download the Google Play Store and there is no legal way to download the google apps outside the Play Store.
There no legal ways to download those, yes.
There's a bout a gazillion of (illegal under US law) ways to download those.
Those ways are illegal in the US, but are very unlikely to be illegal in any country (like China) that doesn't give much fucks about anything intellectual-property-related (like copyrights, in this case).
An URL that links to some Chinese website hosting APKs for the above software and sideloads them is all about it takes.
Some custom ROMs ship with the google apps, which is illegal, but Google turns a blind eye on this practice. This will not be the case with ZTE.
But unlike the custom ROMs, ZTE's solution could be hosted outside of any legal reach from google.
A sideloadable APK hosted on a service located in a jurisdiction where Google is unable to file a complaint is all it takes.
And that's completely ignoring legal alternatives like Micro G - an opensource re-implementation of the services that Google provides in closed blobs. (And all the various APK downloaders that could then be used to side-load apps that normally are only hosted on Google Play)
(But let's be serious, ZTE is more likely to take the pirate route and provide an "otherwise considered illegal in the US" installation option of the real Google deal, than to take the route of financially support microG developers and maintain legally compatible services)
but I absolutely RESENT having things taken from me.
On the other hand, would you resent also having things offered to you for free ?
(Random example of things that you get for free in most of the countries in the developed world, like in Finland ?)
Like the ability to go to university and get a degree for you do have the mental capability, for which your parents didn't save massive amounts of money to pay for ?
Like having a public health system that can help you pay your medical bills - because nobody does choose to become sick and even more so, nobody choose on purpose to have the most complicated and expensive to treat disease on purpose ?
Like having an unemployement system that can cover your back if you happen to lose your job ?
Like living in a country where there's an effective police force that is good at keeping the criminality low, to the point that you con't need to constantly be carrying a gun around ?
For these things come for free to you should you need them, the government should be able to pay for them, and for the government to be able to pay for them it needs money, that is taken in the form of taxes.
If Bob can't get a job, because there is nothing useful for him to do but Ted has a job and the fancier car, bigger house, more meals out etc that come with it Bob will be jealous! Bob will either demand productive people like Ted provide him these things as well leading to an inflationary cycle where UBI must be forever increased
You know that the "B" in "UBI" stands for "Basic" ? It is here to cover for the Basic needs of the population.
(Cheap housing, cheap but still healthy food, etc.)
It's aiming at the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid
Until the possession of a fancy car can clearly be considered as a basic need that every single member of the human popular absolutely needs to be covered, the UBI won't inflate to please Bob.
(Maybe one day it will. There used to be a past when even shelter and food wouldn't be taken for granted. In several modern European countries, it's hard to *NOT* be obtaining them.
Maybe in the future the society will evolve to the point where every single citizen is entitled to own a car.
But for now, public transportation system is considered to be covering most of the needs every one has).
Its really better for all of us if we occupy Bob doing something....
Don't worry, TV and Internet are very good at keeping Bob busy.
(except that advertisement might also be very good at keeping bob persuaded that it his god-given natural right to own ${SOME ULTRA EXPENSIVE PRODUCT} )
...it's assembly turtles all the way down !
Need to somehow find a way to fit "3D Printing" into this and we win the buzzword bingo (and a sudden inrush of VC investements)
Of these, only 3 or 4 are directly involved in steering the ship: The captain, and a couple of deck officers, all of whom have other duties as well.
And the article mentions that the current systems are only semi-autonomous.
Means you won't be completely replacing the whole 3-4 guys steering the ship.
The captain will still be around, probably at least one of the deck officers, in order to overwatch the semi-autonomous system whenever it requires human supervision.
Compared to all the money involved in shipping cargo on huge container ship, the difference of salaries will barely register.
IKEA is cheaper because the customer does the assembly at home.
Yeah.
And I sense here that the business plan is to ship robots at home that will do the assembly for you :
- You still get the cheap flat boxes of furniture from IKEA
- But you delegate the assembly to the robot.
And as you don't constantly need having furniture assembled, you don't actually need to permanently own assembling robots.
You could rent the robots instead.
You could have them shipped to you on the week-end when you plan to buy and assemble new IKEA furniture.
To make things cheaper, the robots could be shipped in cheap flat boxes (it'll just require some quick assembl...
...Wait ! Something went wrong here.
Your health insurance and you in the end pay for it!
The story mentions Amazon trying to sell drugs in 47 of the U.S. states. Not Europe. :-D
What is this strange thing called "health insurance" you're speaking about ?~~
Hospital is a middle man - they get markup on what they sell. They have no incentive to lower that cost.
On the other hand, the pharma companies and middle men upstream along the chain have an ultra-strong incentive to dramatically cut their prices and even sell at a loss some of their prescription drugs when making deals with big hospitals :
- Hospital will be interested in making business with the middle man that gives them the biggest volume sales.
- Middle men and pharma companies are interested in being *the hospital's official drug* that young MD trainee get used to prescribe while doing they hospital interships, because they'll develop a habit/brand loyalty and keep prescribing that drug later in their carrier from their doctor's practice office.
- Middle men and pharma companies are interested in being *the hospital's official drug* that most patient get prescribed at the hospital, because chances are higher they'll ask for the same drug when getting a prescrirbtion from their family doctor.
So middle men and pharmacompany would be losing some money when making deals with hospital, but making it back with all the people which keeps using the exact same drug out of the hospital.
(NOTE: Never investigated the thing in depth. I just noticed less usual and more expensive brands for prescription drugs in hospital settings)
Drive like a pirate! Arrr!
Which was also one of the reasons why some pirates wore eyepatch.
(note because of wounds, but to keep the covered eye sensitive in the darkness as soon as the ship needs to hide in the shadow and manoeuvre in the darkness of a shaded creek / of a large cave, etc.).
So closing an eye so an light sensitive contact len worn inside the car / UV-sensitive contact len worn in a convertible doesn't darken and keeps you able to see and navigate your car in the darkness of a tunnel is *litteraly" driving like a pirate.
Early 1980s already had chip cards, mostly used for phone booth (remember, back in the dinosaur era when your phone couldn't fit in your pocket and you needed to call from public ones).
Wikipedia mentions in french the "Télécate" in France in 1983 as a first massive deployement beyond local tests .
The patent itself dates back from 1974.
The first chip payment system is the "Carte Bleure" in France, 1986 according to wikipedia (and by 1992 there were nothing else but chip cards)
Germany also had GeldKarte as a local older chip payment system.
But yeah, the EMV standard came much later, in the 1990s. So lots of payment system were still magstripe.
But in 1980s there were already chips. Just not as widespread.
but all shipping parts are vulnerable to spectre and the followons.
Remember that they are 2 different vulnerabilities named "spectre".
Spectre variant1 affects AMD as it affects virtually any CPU under the sun that does speculative execution.
But relatively to the other vulnerability, it's much more moderate, it's the CPU speculatively access data to which the current process HAS access anyway. (e.g.: getting pass a size check and reading from another array of the same thread).
There are very few corner case where a thread should not read data to which is normally has access to (mostly in situations of JITed 3rd-party provided code - e.g. Javascript downloaded from the web - running in the same context as some sensitive data - e.g.: you password manager plugin) and proper process separation is the correct long term strategy anyway.
Spectre variant2 abuses the way speculative indirect branching is done (jumping to a location which is not known in advance : jump tables like C++ virtual methods, some possible C's "switch" implementations, etc.), and it's extremely CPU dependant as each CPU has a different way to speculate that.
It's much more scary than Spectre v1, because one process of the attacker (e.g.: a program that the attacker has uploaded into an Amazon EC2 VM - something that he should be able to do), can cause an entirely unrelated process to speculatively jump and execute arbitrary locations (e.g.: the *hypervisor* handling that VM could be forced to jump to selected pieces of code, and thus doing some return-oriented-programming. Again that's the hypervisor we're talking about, a completely different piece of code to which the attacker should never have had access in the first place).
- On Intel hardware (Xeons), spectre v2 exploit have been demonstrated successfully by Google's project zero
- AMD hardware can do speculative branching (so AMD has marked their hardware as potentially affected), but as of today nobody has manager so successfully demonstrate a usable exploit, and the jury is still out whether this actually exploitable (might be that the peculiar implementation AMD CPUs use to branch speculatively cannot be abused in any useful way to begin with) (so AMD is still indicating exploitability as very probably unlikely).
So currently, on AMD you're still safe regarding Meltdown (AMD hardware doesn't read data it doesn't have actually access to), and Spectre v2 (there are probably no way to abuse indirect branch prediction to achieve anything meaningful).
Apparently, we geeks on /. don't have the same search needs as the big mass of joe six packs.
Like, when we input a weird sequence of letters, we mean that we look for exact occurence of this weird sequence because, e.g., it's the call-sign of a protein sequence and we're looking for article mentioning that peculiar cell receptor.
But google decides that it's some misspelled common word.
You end up needing to constantly encircle every single word of your query between quotes.
..."Oh, snap !" cried the users~~
yeah, putting this into practice would mean tracking and burning every single copy of every single newspaper that happened to report on the case, etc.
not gonna happen.
the guy should learn to deal with the fact that his name can be associated with the case forever (just maybe not on google).
but potential future employer/business partners/etc need also to learn that it stupid to count on such old information, the gus havinv served their time and paid your due to society.
I am not sure they even know how blockchains work..
I am not sure you even know how a cryptocurrency exchange platform works.
Most keep their own internal journal of the exchange transaction happening on the platform itself.
They only accept payment on the blockchain to their platform's wallet when exchange's users pour money in,
and pay BTCs out on the blockchain out of their platform's wallet when the exchange's users decide to cash out.
But every exchange it self happens internally and has no visibility on the blockchain it self.
(There are exceptions, some exchange platform trying to run on ACTUAL blockchains themselves.
I think there was some Ethereum powered platform at some point)
Isn't this why so many people trust Bitcoin "security" to begin with? So you can trace any and all transactions back to the inception of the bitcoins used themselves?
Seems rather pointless if you can just delete any records. Sounds more like a scam every time I read something new about them.
That is true on the blockchain itself, regarding exchange of BTC on the public bitcoin protocol.
You can't "delete" anything, unless the majority of the nodes on the network all agree together to roll back the blockchain. (Which happens every now or then when a newcomer cryptocurrency has a massive blunder leading to abuses and theft. Some time the whole network of that currency agree to roll back to before the blunder and use the new patched software).
But here, it's not the blockchain it self that got deletes.
There are transaction going from various owner to the wallet of the exchange platform,
there are other transaction going from the above mentioned exchange's wallet to other accounts.
But whatever happens on the exchange platform itself happens "behing closed doors" as long as the crypto-currency protocol is concerned.
An exchange platform might keep track of who exchanged which cryptocurrency with whom, so that at the end, when that user decide to withdraw their earnings, the platform knows how much to send from the platform's bitcoin wallet.
But that entirely internal book keeping.
And is completely left at how the platform feels appropriate.
For all the cryptocurrency protocols cares, it could also be a gambling platform.
Or some "artist's happenning" that completely burns and destroy bitcoins.
Here, hacker managed to get hold of the exchange platform server and persuade it to pay them out a good chunk of the BTCs held on the platform's bitcoin wallet, no matter what the server log held.
Not one day passes without a multi-million dollar Bitcoin heist
It supposed to be secured
The cryptography actually still works as it should. None of those heist is due to the cryptography being broken.
It's good old hacking of insecure servers, etc.
Not somebody managing to forge a signature on the blockchain and sign to himself a huge chunk of somebody else's money.
But the 'security' itself turns out to be the fatal flaw
Yes, its cryptocurrencies turning out to be fatal to themselves.
But the security of the cryptography isn't the culprit.
The problem arise from the base premises :
It's supposed to be a decentralized system for exchanging number, with no single central authority.
It's big advantage for people wanting free exchange with no obstruction (see controversies about Visa and Mastercard freezing some donation to wikileaks, back when bitcoin started to gain popularity). Same as with cash, nobody can prevent you to decide who you'll be handing a banknote.
But that means the obvious drawback that there's not simple central way to exerce regulations on all actors (unlike a bank in the banking system that needs to follow a ton of regulation before being able to itself a "Bank"). Same as with cash, nobody can warn you that the person whom you're handing a banknote is a crook.
You have to realize that, and as a consequence, remember to exercise brain before taking any decision, because the government cannot (by design for such decentralized scheme) protect you from your own stupidity.
If you're transferring BTCs (or whatever is the hipest cryptocurrency du jour) to some company that pretends to be an "exchange", you get no inherent safety guarantee regarding if the exchange platform follows at least a minimal required level of secure practice. Or if it's a complete scam all-together.
(Nobody can do that control for you, by design of the system).
It's a double edged sword.
If you want to have "muh freedomz" and be able to do whatever you want with your numbers, unrestrained by a central authority (no banks nor government involved),
then don't come crying when it turned out you're a sucker and gave out all your earnings to some scammer.
You asked for unrestained exchange possibility, assume its consequences now.