...then these people really, really, really screwed up. Like absolutely clueless about security. Unfortunately, that seems to be the standard with most EEs doing security these day.
From my experience, this is entirely credible. The things you find in some commercial software are staggering in the incompetence they imply. I agree that a multi-year (at least) ban from the shop for them and related parent and child companies is probably the only thing that will help. There are also high-quality vendors, but these tend to be expensive and often do not sell to the general public. The general public is probably best served with FOSS of good reputation.
Common sense is successfully applied intelligence for plausibility checking, no cultural aspect. As to scam artists, have a look into the world and you see scams everywhere. You are probably just blind to them or naive.
It is basically a mixture of sabotage (e.g. as IPsec was sabotaged by the NSA by making it very complicated), too cheap development, incompetent developers and management, "Not Invented Here" stupidity and KISS violations. SSH-Tunneling via OpenSSH has had no vulnerabilities for a long time now, but it also has had no new features, because it does not need them.
All this is well-known and you even find these effects in the literature on software engineering. But the people making these bad decisions and designing and implementing these bad implementations are typically completely unaware.
Well, to be fair the data-type used in bitcoin is finite in its resolution, it is just so fine-granular it does not matter. Same, incidentally, as any classical pyramid-scheme is finite, as there is only a finite amount of currency available. In both case, you can do a meaningless extension to the infinite, for classical pyramid by predicting that money can be printed (or electronically) in larger and larger volumes and for bitcoin by predicting a move to a representation of smaller sub-divisions. Both things do not make sense, except to those with absolutely no understanding of reality (like, for example, the crypto-currency believers).
It should be. But the Greater Fool Theory is pretty obvious and easily researched, so I doubt these people will understand that they are following it even if taught about it academically. And only a faction will have gotten those loans for studies in economics. Educational success depends on some base level common-sense, insight and understanding of self being there, otherwise it does not work.
You describe one faction of the marker. There are enough other ones that need PCs and will remain large enough that they will be kept available. Do not forget that there was a nice market for PCs with pretty reasonable hardware selection 30 years ago, when all this was much, much smaller. The PC may eventually go niche (but not anytime soon due to gaming), but it will not go away in the foreseeable future.
And that is just it. A lot of "old tech" does not go away but stays and new things are just complementing it for special uses. PCs will stay around for a long, long time, for example for all the gaming smaller devices cannot really do. Sure, smaller devices can do a lot today, but they are (and will remain) inferior in all areas were performance matters for a long time, and maybe forever as computing power has hit a brick wall some 5...10 years ago or so.
Basically 3-4 mainboard manufacturers and 2 CPU/GPU manufacturers are entirely enough, especially as things have massively slowed down performance-wise. That means hardware designs live longer and hence design cost is lower. Manufacturing cost is not that much of an issue either, as savings from large volumes only go so far. Even if the PC market drops down to 10% of its current volume, it will not go away. And since PC gaming is also not going away, it will remain much larger.
My take is the "end of the PC" stories are and always have been just clueless "journalists" looking for some doom-and-gloom story to write.
It will be interesting to see how much money laundering was really going on. I think it was quite a bit, but nobody seems to have hard data. I do expect some bright PhD student will wrest this info from the blockchain eventually, at least as a reasonable approximation.
Was bound to happen eventually. This is the classic behavior of every pyramid scheme: At some time you have all the morons with money in there and do not find enough new ones. Then the whole thing comes crashing down.
Will be interesting to see ho it happens here, because crypto currencies (not "crypto", _that_ is something else) are a bit differently structured than the classical pyramid schemes. They are fundamentally the same though.
Sure. And you can bet they discarded any alternatives that were not (or far less so) in the search process. They have to ensure the cash keeps piling up, after all.
Indeed. Reminds me of when BMW (I think) started to make cars in the US. The main problem they had was worker and engineer skill. They ended up to have to transplant German engineers and line-workers (!) to get at least the critical components on an acceptable quality level. Of course, that basically killed the advantages of manufacturing in the US.
The second problem with the tariffs is that China understand the problem and can out-escalate Trump. And when they call his bluff, he and the US have a ton of egg on their faces. In the end, this will make the US significantly weaker.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as people can remember to go to that special store to give them all their money, Apple is probably fine with that.
...then these people really, really, really screwed up. Like absolutely clueless about security. Unfortunately, that seems to be the standard with most EEs doing security these day.
From my experience, this is entirely credible. The things you find in some commercial software are staggering in the incompetence they imply. I agree that a multi-year (at least) ban from the shop for them and related parent and child companies is probably the only thing that will help. There are also high-quality vendors, but these tend to be expensive and often do not sell to the general public. The general public is probably best served with FOSS of good reputation.
Common sense is successfully applied intelligence for plausibility checking, no cultural aspect. As to scam artists, have a look into the world and you see scams everywhere. You are probably just blind to them or naive.
That sounds like an automated attack. You probably were behind on patching or made a common configuration mistake. At least you noticed.
It is basically a mixture of sabotage (e.g. as IPsec was sabotaged by the NSA by making it very complicated), too cheap development, incompetent developers and management, "Not Invented Here" stupidity and KISS violations. SSH-Tunneling via OpenSSH has had no vulnerabilities for a long time now, but it also has had no new features, because it does not need them.
All this is well-known and you even find these effects in the literature on software engineering. But the people making these bad decisions and designing and implementing these bad implementations are typically completely unaware.
Well, to be fair the data-type used in bitcoin is finite in its resolution, it is just so fine-granular it does not matter. Same, incidentally, as any classical pyramid-scheme is finite, as there is only a finite amount of currency available. In both case, you can do a meaningless extension to the infinite, for classical pyramid by predicting that money can be printed (or electronically) in larger and larger volumes and for bitcoin by predicting a move to a representation of smaller sub-divisions. Both things do not make sense, except to those with absolutely no understanding of reality (like, for example, the crypto-currency believers).
And you are idiot with no insight. No implementation of a pyramid scheme is infinite. Seriously.
It should be. But the Greater Fool Theory is pretty obvious and easily researched, so I doubt these people will understand that they are following it even if taught about it academically. And only a faction will have gotten those loans for studies in economics. Educational success depends on some base level common-sense, insight and understanding of self being there, otherwise it does not work.
You describe one faction of the marker. There are enough other ones that need PCs and will remain large enough that they will be kept available. Do not forget that there was a nice market for PCs with pretty reasonable hardware selection 30 years ago, when all this was much, much smaller. The PC may eventually go niche (but not anytime soon due to gaming), but it will not go away in the foreseeable future.
That is a person that does complicated computations for science and engineering. Recently they all lost their jobs and were replaced with machines.
And that is just it. A lot of "old tech" does not go away but stays and new things are just complementing it for special uses. PCs will stay around for a long, long time, for example for all the gaming smaller devices cannot really do. Sure, smaller devices can do a lot today, but they are (and will remain) inferior in all areas were performance matters for a long time, and maybe forever as computing power has hit a brick wall some 5...10 years ago or so.
Basically 3-4 mainboard manufacturers and 2 CPU/GPU manufacturers are entirely enough, especially as things have massively slowed down performance-wise. That means hardware designs live longer and hence design cost is lower. Manufacturing cost is not that much of an issue either, as savings from large volumes only go so far. Even if the PC market drops down to 10% of its current volume, it will not go away. And since PC gaming is also not going away, it will remain much larger.
My take is the "end of the PC" stories are and always have been just clueless "journalists" looking for some doom-and-gloom story to write.
It will be interesting to see how much money laundering was really going on. I think it was quite a bit, but nobody seems to have hard data. I do expect some bright PhD student will wrest this info from the blockchain eventually, at least as a reasonable approximation.
To be fair, anybody investing their student loan in crypto-currencies would probably not have benefited from an academic education anyways....
Was bound to happen eventually. This is the classic behavior of every pyramid scheme: At some time you have all the morons with money in there and do not find enough new ones. Then the whole thing comes crashing down.
Will be interesting to see ho it happens here, because crypto currencies (not "crypto", _that_ is something else) are a bit differently structured than the classical pyramid schemes. They are fundamentally the same though.
Oh? Got any proof of that?
Pathetic.
Really? Are you stupid?
Offering anything to you is futile. You cannot actually evaluate what is offered, so you will just claim it is bad. You are Dunnig-Kruger far left.
Probably what the Roman Empire looked like towards the end....
Sure. And you can bet they discarded any alternatives that were not (or far less so) in the search process. They have to ensure the cash keeps piling up, after all.
Indeed. Reminds me of when BMW (I think) started to make cars in the US. The main problem they had was worker and engineer skill. They ended up to have to transplant German engineers and line-workers (!) to get at least the critical components on an acceptable quality level. Of course, that basically killed the advantages of manufacturing in the US.
The second problem with the tariffs is that China understand the problem and can out-escalate Trump. And when they call his bluff, he and the US have a ton of egg on their faces. In the end, this will make the US significantly weaker.
You know, that could be a rare case where outsourcing actually improves the product.
Trump is not anything but an admirer of himself. I doubt he even has any meaningful friendships.