The only problem? The computers were out of the box new.
Okay, so maybe neither the tech nor the "PC Health Check" software knew the difference between a virus and the crapware that's on the system "out of the box" (and no, I don't mean the bare-bones Windows 10, I mean all the slow-your-system-down add-ons the manufacturers put on there). Why am I not surprised.
More likely, the software was dumb and the tech was pretending to be dumb to meet quota.
When I'm in an area with low-bandwidth, I'd rather have lower-resolution with smooth video than high-resolution choppy video.
Ditto if I'm in an area with high-speed-but-crappy/dropout-prone service, as I can buffer enough to not notice if I'm watching at low-resolution.
I put "win" in quotes because while this seems like a win for the customer, it's really a way for AT&T to not have to spend money as fast improving their network. So it's a real win for them and a "win" for customers.
margin for error as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.
For fixed-point unobstructed line-of-sight this isn't so difficult, especially if you use lasers to do your initial calibration.
The problems happen if you have obstructions (trees, rain) or movement (buildings move in the wind, so top-of-skyscraper to top-of-skyscraper would be hard to maintain). But for indoor use or near-ground-level use for tens or hundreds of meters, this might work. If you have a way of keeping calibration despite movement, these limits may be relaxed.
I can see this as a possible way to connect one end of a long factory to the other end without having to run wires. This assumes the places where you put the transmit- and receive antennas isn't subject to vibrations from the factory, of course.
The current system of the House choosing the President with each state delegation getting 1 vote and the Senate choosing the Vice President is antiquated.
If we are going let Congress decide the winner if the electoral college can't, then give all 535 Senators and Representatives 1 vote each and have them vote on a single ticket.
Is it gonna happen any time soon? Not if small states have anything to say about it (ironically, they won't in the proposal listed in the summary, but that will fail for different reasons).
So, if we are stuck with it, we should:
* Eliminate the "electoral voter" i.e. the person from the equation so "faithless electors" are impossible. The "electoral vote" will become a bookkeeping entry.
* Eliminate "winner take all," at least in states with more than 3 electoral votes. Either apportion the electoral votes fractionally (fairer), or split them by Congressional District with 2 votes going to the statewide winner like Maine and Nebraska do (probably more politically feasible).
There is a legitimate place for DRM: Where you and the customer WANT someone other than the end user or person with physical access to the device to control the software and, by extension, the hardware.
Examples would be: * Corporate environments, where IT will want control. * Devices used by children, where parents or schools will want control. * Devices which are loaned out or leased, such as a leased car or rental car, where the leasing agency may want to disable the entertainment system if a payment is missed (and the person renting the car is told this up front, of course). In the case of a car, of course, DRM's functions would be limited to tamper-protection and to disabling non-essential features like entertainment while the car is not in the possession of the leasing agency. * The "utility side" of a device such as cell phone, electric meter, cable modem, or cable-TV box, where the end user clearly understands that "part of the box" is intended to be outside of their control by design, no matter who owns the metal-and-plastic (this is similar to the way telephones were in the mid-1970s in the USA: you "owned" the shell, but "leased" the inside from Ma Bell and weren't allowed to tinker with it). In this case, DRM or similar things should be allowed on the "utility side" but prohibited on the "customer side." In the case of a cell phone, this means just the cell-network interface. Regulations would prohibit the use of DRM to gather or keep info that the company would not be entitled to gather or keep otherwise.
There are first names and family names that are disproportionately common among African-Americans.
http://names.mongabay.com/data... shows over 50% of those with a surname of Jackson self-identify as "Black" (data is from the 2000 US census). Over 40% of Americans with the surname Williams, Harris, Robinson, and Coleman self-identify as "Black."
Washington is the "big winner" with over 80% of Americans with that last name self-identifying as "Black."
It's time for cameras, microphones, and other sensors as well as the various radios to have hardware-on/off switches.
Yes, that would require you to turn the mic on by hand when you answer the phone, but the phone should be smart enough to know "if a call is coming in and the user turns the mic ON, answer the phone" (by default of course - this behavior should be user-controlled).
Heck, I'd even want one for my speaker and "flashlight/camera flash" to make it harder for a rogue app from using sound or light to exfiltrate data.
For instance, my job (a videogame programmer) simply didn't exist a generation ago,
And a generation or two from now the bulk of the "programming" will be done by a computer, and the only human part of making a video game will be design and high-level programming (what we call architecture or high-level design today) and some artwork.
In other words, just as the late-1970s/early-1980s video-game programmer writing in assembly language would barely recognize the day-to-day work done by people who make today's big-hit video games, today's programmers will barely recognize what passes for "programming" video games 30-40 years from now.
In some parts of the USA, landowners own the mineral rights "to the center of the earth" but with a twist: They can "sever" the mineral rights from the surface rights.
This means they can sell the mineral rights to another person, or they can sell the land and keep the mineral rights.
In some states, the mineral rights are "superior" to the surface rights: The owner of the mineral rights can force the owner of the surface rights to make necessary accommodations for drilling or mining, provided that he reimburse the surface-rights owner for the fair market value of the accommodations. In other words, if the mineral-rights owner needs to have a building torn down, he has to pay the fair-market value of the building (but not the acreage) and the cost of removing it. If he needs to drill and there will be so much noise that the surface-owner's home is unlivable for several weeks while the drill is being drilled, the mineral-rights owner may have to put the homeowner and his family up in a hotel until the drilling is finished.
In most states, the person who owns the mineral rights - whether it is the government, a landowner, or a "mineral-rights" owner, will lease specific mineral rights to drillers or miners, with the lease being renewable unless the well or mine is inactive for an extended period of time.
There is another catch: In some states, certain underground resources, notably water but also oil, gas, and other fluids that can be "sucked out" from a neighbor's well, are treated differently than "solid" minerals like gold or coal.
... other extremely useful tools will be used "indefinitely," including the number 2 pencil, the paper clip, the ballpoint pen, soap, and the list goes on.
... at trial and all of the appeals, I wonder if they will just pull out of Tennessee entirely?
More likely, they will lobby either the Tennessee legislature to change the law or lobby Congress to make sure state laws like this don't apply to them unless they "have a physical presence" in that state, then they will make sure they don't have such a presence in Tennessee so the law won't apply to them in the future.
After all, if it weren't for that bug bounty enticing him....
Seriously, this guy needs a firm slap on the wrist and a year or two of probation, not prison time.
When it comes to carelessness, this ranks up there with the Robert T. Morris Sendmail worm of 1988. Heck, I'd hold Morris to a higher standard than this guy since he (Morris) was a graduate student at the time and presumably knew what he was doing more than Desai.
By the way, Morris was elected Fellow of the ACM in 2014.
Actually, they do. They can market lower-density, more-expensive-to-manufacture RAM which has spacing or other "rowhammer-protecting design elements" between rows for use in "high- but-not-quite-military-grade-security" applications.
For example, if off-the-shelf equipment would have been approved for a high-security application but for the vulnerability to rowhammer and similar attacks then the product vendor can substitute the more expensive, lower-density, more-secure RAM and sell his product to the customer rather than lose the sale entirely.
As for military-grade applications, I'm not going to pretend to know what their requirements are or how to address them.
This thing was around before Pluto got demoted, so we should call it "planet 10" or "planet X" and leave "Planet 9" as "deleted" from the list to avoid confusion.
For communities relatively close to another community that already has or will soon have a good Internet connection such as from an undersea cable, microwave towers may provide an effective bridge.
This assumes reliable electrical power and the ability to construct tall-enough-to-see-each-other towers at both ends.
The combination of sea-port fiber connections and microwave connections to "nearby" communities should reduce the number of people who rely only on a single satellite connection, but it's not the solution for everyone: Setting up a microwave-tower network like the US had from the 1950s to the 1990s, with towers spaced every 30-or-so miles, would likely be cost-prohibitive due to lack of existing electrical or generator-fuel-delivery infrastructure.
Other than having two birds in the sky - either in orbit or flying around in the atmosphere - I don't see any way to give everyone redundancy without being cost-prohibitive.
By the way, for low-bandwidth communications such as voice-grade telephony, texting, and email, or even very simple/bandwidth-optimized web browsing (the modern-day equivalent of a BBS-connection or mainframe-TTY with local echo turned on), shortwave-or-lower-band terrestrial radio should be able to get the job done.
Insist that because future projects "may" require a security clearance and that the company wants flexibility to move people around, all applicants must be able to pass the "initial gate-keeper" steps of getting a security clearance, including "must be a US citizen or demonstrate ability to get a security clearance despite not being a US citizen."
This will weed out most people who were neither born here nor have been here long enough to get citizenship, including disproportionate numbers of people of Asian descent.
Is this legal? Very likely. Is it slimey? Assuming it's a cover for discrimination and you really aren't going to need a workforce where everyone can get a security clearance in short order, yes.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem? The computers were out of the box new.
Okay, so maybe neither the tech nor the "PC Health Check" software knew the difference between a virus and the crapware that's on the system "out of the box" (and no, I don't mean the bare-bones Windows 10, I mean all the slow-your-system-down add-ons the manufacturers put on there). Why am I not surprised.
More likely, the software was dumb and the tech was pretending to be dumb to meet quota.
From The Marketer's Dictionary and Book of Phrases:
Innovative: Adj., used to describe a thing worth reading about.
Worth reading about: see: worth buying
Worth buying: something marketed to gullible people with money
Translation from maketspeak:
Innovative: something marketed to gullible people with money.
When I'm in an area with low-bandwidth, I'd rather have lower-resolution with smooth video than high-resolution choppy video.
Ditto if I'm in an area with high-speed-but-crappy/dropout-prone service, as I can buffer enough to not notice if I'm watching at low-resolution.
I put "win" in quotes because while this seems like a win for the customer, it's really a way for AT&T to not have to spend money as fast improving their network. So it's a real win for them and a "win" for customers.
margin for error as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.
For fixed-point unobstructed line-of-sight this isn't so difficult, especially if you use lasers to do your initial calibration.
The problems happen if you have obstructions (trees, rain) or movement (buildings move in the wind, so top-of-skyscraper to top-of-skyscraper would be hard to maintain). But for indoor use or near-ground-level use for tens or hundreds of meters, this might work. If you have a way of keeping calibration despite movement, these limits may be relaxed.
I can see this as a possible way to connect one end of a long factory to the other end without having to run wires. This assumes the places where you put the transmit- and receive antennas isn't subject to vibrations from the factory, of course.
The current system of the House choosing the President with each state delegation getting 1 vote and the Senate choosing the Vice President is antiquated.
If we are going let Congress decide the winner if the electoral college can't, then give all 535 Senators and Representatives 1 vote each and have them vote on a single ticket.
Is it gonna happen any time soon? Not if small states have anything to say about it (ironically, they won't in the proposal listed in the summary, but that will fail for different reasons).
So, if we are stuck with it, we should:
* Eliminate the "electoral voter" i.e. the person from the equation so "faithless electors" are impossible. The "electoral vote" will become a bookkeeping entry.
* Eliminate "winner take all," at least in states with more than 3 electoral votes. Either apportion the electoral votes fractionally (fairer), or split them by Congressional District with 2 votes going to the statewide winner like Maine and Nebraska do (probably more politically feasible).
There is a legitimate place for DRM: Where you and the customer WANT someone other than the end user or person with physical access to the device to control the software and, by extension, the hardware.
Examples would be:
* Corporate environments, where IT will want control.
* Devices used by children, where parents or schools will want control.
* Devices which are loaned out or leased, such as a leased car or rental car, where the leasing agency may want to disable the entertainment system if a payment is missed (and the person renting the car is told this up front, of course). In the case of a car, of course, DRM's functions would be limited to tamper-protection and to disabling non-essential features like entertainment while the car is not in the possession of the leasing agency.
* The "utility side" of a device such as cell phone, electric meter, cable modem, or cable-TV box, where the end user clearly understands that "part of the box" is intended to be outside of their control by design, no matter who owns the metal-and-plastic (this is similar to the way telephones were in the mid-1970s in the USA: you "owned" the shell, but "leased" the inside from Ma Bell and weren't allowed to tinker with it). In this case, DRM or similar things should be allowed on the "utility side" but prohibited on the "customer side." In the case of a cell phone, this means just the cell-network interface. Regulations would prohibit the use of DRM to gather or keep info that the company would not be entitled to gather or keep otherwise.
They could've turned off the heating at a polling location in the United States. Everyone would be blaming Putin even if he didn't do it.
There are first names and family names that are disproportionately common among African-Americans.
http://names.mongabay.com/data... shows over 50% of those with a surname of Jackson self-identify as "Black" (data is from the 2000 US census). Over 40% of Americans with the surname Williams, Harris, Robinson, and Coleman self-identify as "Black."
Washington is the "big winner" with over 80% of Americans with that last name self-identifying as "Black."
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/top... shows some of the "whitest" and "blackest" names.
It's time for cameras, microphones, and other sensors as well as the various radios to have hardware-on/off switches.
Yes, that would require you to turn the mic on by hand when you answer the phone, but the phone should be smart enough to know "if a call is coming in and the user turns the mic ON, answer the phone" (by default of course - this behavior should be user-controlled).
Heck, I'd even want one for my speaker and "flashlight/camera flash" to make it harder for a rogue app from using sound or light to exfiltrate data.
For instance, my job (a videogame programmer) simply didn't exist a generation ago,
And a generation or two from now the bulk of the "programming" will be done by a computer, and the only human part of making a video game will be design and high-level programming (what we call architecture or high-level design today) and some artwork.
In other words, just as the late-1970s/early-1980s video-game programmer writing in assembly language would barely recognize the day-to-day work done by people who make today's big-hit video games, today's programmers will barely recognize what passes for "programming" video games 30-40 years from now.
Have gnu, will travel.
Gnu is not Unix, but it is ungulate.
Also related: Wildebeest is not Windows.
In some parts of the USA, landowners own the mineral rights "to the center of the earth" but with a twist: They can "sever" the mineral rights from the surface rights.
This means they can sell the mineral rights to another person, or they can sell the land and keep the mineral rights.
In some states, the mineral rights are "superior" to the surface rights: The owner of the mineral rights can force the owner of the surface rights to make necessary accommodations for drilling or mining, provided that he reimburse the surface-rights owner for the fair market value of the accommodations. In other words, if the mineral-rights owner needs to have a building torn down, he has to pay the fair-market value of the building (but not the acreage) and the cost of removing it. If he needs to drill and there will be so much noise that the surface-owner's home is unlivable for several weeks while the drill is being drilled, the mineral-rights owner may have to put the homeowner and his family up in a hotel until the drilling is finished.
In most states, the person who owns the mineral rights - whether it is the government, a landowner, or a "mineral-rights" owner, will lease specific mineral rights to drillers or miners, with the lease being renewable unless the well or mine is inactive for an extended period of time.
There is another catch: In some states, certain underground resources, notably water but also oil, gas, and other fluids that can be "sucked out" from a neighbor's well, are treated differently than "solid" minerals like gold or coal.
... other extremely useful tools will be used "indefinitely," including the number 2 pencil, the paper clip, the ballpoint pen, soap, and the list goes on.
... at trial and all of the appeals, I wonder if they will just pull out of Tennessee entirely?
More likely, they will lobby either the Tennessee legislature to change the law or lobby Congress to make sure state laws like this don't apply to them unless they "have a physical presence" in that state, then they will make sure they don't have such a presence in Tennessee so the law won't apply to them in the future.
After all, if it weren't for that bug bounty enticing him....
Seriously, this guy needs a firm slap on the wrist and a year or two of probation, not prison time.
When it comes to carelessness, this ranks up there with the Robert T. Morris Sendmail worm of 1988. Heck, I'd hold Morris to a higher standard than this guy since he (Morris) was a graduate student at the time and presumably knew what he was doing more than Desai.
By the way, Morris was elected Fellow of the ACM in 2014.
References:
https://scholar.google.com/sch...
http://awards.acm.org/award_wi...
And the not-always-reliable reference, Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
but RAM makers have no incentive to fix it
Actually, they do. They can market lower-density, more-expensive-to-manufacture RAM which has spacing or other "rowhammer-protecting design elements" between rows for use in "high- but-not-quite-military-grade-security" applications.
For example, if off-the-shelf equipment would have been approved for a high-security application but for the vulnerability to rowhammer and similar attacks then the product vendor can substitute the more expensive, lower-density, more-secure RAM and sell his product to the customer rather than lose the sale entirely.
As for military-grade applications, I'm not going to pretend to know what their requirements are or how to address them.
This thing was around before Pluto got demoted, so we should call it "planet 10" or "planet X" and leave "Planet 9" as "deleted" from the list to avoid confusion.
I prefer "X" because "X" is cool.
Duh!
Simple explaination:
Affected customers read the ingredient list.
Windows is not mature or safe enough to be used on the bare metal.
Sure it is.
Oh, wait, did you mean "... on the bare metal, on the Internet."?
OK, I see your point now.
... it opens up another surface for attacks.
I will probably install something like this at some point, but please don't put this on a non-isolated system without understanding the risks.
For communities relatively close to another community that already has or will soon have a good Internet connection such as from an undersea cable, microwave towers may provide an effective bridge.
This assumes reliable electrical power and the ability to construct tall-enough-to-see-each-other towers at both ends.
The combination of sea-port fiber connections and microwave connections to "nearby" communities should reduce the number of people who rely only on a single satellite connection, but it's not the solution for everyone: Setting up a microwave-tower network like the US had from the 1950s to the 1990s, with towers spaced every 30-or-so miles, would likely be cost-prohibitive due to lack of existing electrical or generator-fuel-delivery infrastructure.
Other than having two birds in the sky - either in orbit or flying around in the atmosphere - I don't see any way to give everyone redundancy without being cost-prohibitive.
By the way, for low-bandwidth communications such as voice-grade telephony, texting, and email, or even very simple/bandwidth-optimized web browsing (the modern-day equivalent of a BBS-connection or mainframe-TTY with local echo turned on), shortwave-or-lower-band terrestrial radio should be able to get the job done.
Not only is it not fit for its advertised purpose, it's unsafe to use.
Insist that because future projects "may" require a security clearance and that the company wants flexibility to move people around, all applicants must be able to pass the "initial gate-keeper" steps of getting a security clearance, including "must be a US citizen or demonstrate ability to get a security clearance despite not being a US citizen."
This will weed out most people who were neither born here nor have been here long enough to get citizenship, including disproportionate numbers of people of Asian descent.
Is this legal? Very likely. Is it slimey? Assuming it's a cover for discrimination and you really aren't going to need a workforce where everyone can get a security clearance in short order, yes.