Neither will the charger, the outlet it's plugged into, the 12- or 14-ga wire feeding the outlet, the fuse or breaker that wire is fed from, the bus bar that fuse or breaker connects with, the main breaker, or the feeder line to the building. But all of those, including that cable, will happily pass 4000A for long enough to toast your trolling ass.
It *IS* USB. The adapter you speak of receives data, via the USB protocol, from the phone and decodes it to the correct outputs for the various pins of the 30 pin connector, much like the cable receives data, via the USB protocol, from the phone and passes it along to the USB connector on the other end. The video-out connector is a neat trick involving reassigning the pins; something consumer-grade cameras and Android phones have been doing for years by now. The only thing the lightning connector is bringing to the table is DRM, the ability to plug in either way, and a complete lack of protection from shorting (the *LIVE* contacts are exposed, unlike any other consumer device).
The exposed contacts on the connector are also easier to short out. It's a poorly-engineed design, despite the one good feature (reversibility) it brings to the table. You can do the same pin-reassignment on USB that Apple is doing with Lightning to achieve video-out and all the other shit; consumer-grade cameras and Android phones have been doing it for years.
Don't let the total number of pins on the cable fool you, it's nohing more than a differently-designed USB connector. Pins 1 and 5 are power, pins 2 and 3 OR 6 and 7 are data (while there are two pair lanes, only one can be used at a time), the other 2 pins are there for the authentication chip. Remove the authentication chip and the (useless) extra data lane and you've got 4 pins. Add a shield around it to keep it from being shorted out easily and you've got a USB cable.
People are being electrocuted by cheaper malfunctioning CHARGERS. The cable will happily transmit whatever voltage and current you ask it to, regardless of whether or not it's able to authenticate itself to the phone beforehand.
If I CHOOSE to upgrade, I have to upgrade THE WHOLE MACHINE and not just the CPU or GPU. That's Apple's fault, not mine. It's also why I don't own an Apply desktop. It's the same thing with laptops no matter who you buy from, except that many still come with socketed CPUs, so you can at least upgrade them a bit without replacing the whole machine. And that's why I still own a MacBook Pro (Late 2011 17" model, the last one they made that really caught my eye).
You're right, it's not like anyone was electrocuted by using an unauthorized cable. It was a knockoff charger and, most likely, the cable used was the one that shipped with the phone.
We care about the lockdown, which is why we don't own Apple products. Well, most of us do, actually; I, for example, love my MacBook Pro, which I can still use however I damned well please; we just don't own the locked-down shit Apple peddles.
They let people trade the knockoff chargers because those chargers were failing in catastrophic and dangerous ways and it was a good PR move for them to offer a no-cost remedy for their users. The cables, not so much.
The authentication chip authenticates the cable, not the charger, to the phone. You can still just as easily use an aftermarket charger with an "authentic" Apple cable, so that's not why they do this.
Oh... I forgot... The One could connect to a monitor (VGA, this was before HDMI was common on laptops) just like the Vaio, as well. Oh, and it had built-in wireless and ethernet, just like an ultrabook (does the Air have ethernet anymore, or would htat make it too thick?). Oh, and a mic and headphone port. And a webcam. And a card reader. And a 10"-class screen. And a too-small keyboard. Am I leaving anything out?
Did you notice that netbooks disappeared when ultrabooks hit the market? Having owned an Acer Aspire One (netbook) and currently owning a Sony Vaio Duo 11, I can tell you that, despite having 3x the RAM, an 4x the SSD storage (the One had an SSD as well), and 4x the CPU cores running at 2x the clockspeed, the only functional difference is that the Vaio collapses into tablet mode.
Ultrabooks are netbooks, my friend. Very. Expensive. Netbooks.
You're going to assume that I have poor power quality rather than a large number of drives. How cute.
SSDs are just as prone to controller (or other chip) failures as spinning disks, and those are the failures most likely to be caused by poor quality power. If that were the cause, wouldn't I be seeing SSDs fail at the same rate? I'm not quite sure how you arrived at your conclusion; however, I can assure you, as I glance over at my power distribution rack, that it is incorrect.
Off-topic but... I bought my wife a new MacBook Pro a couple months ago because I couldn't afford one in 2011 when they last made the 17" models and they haven't made a laptop worth buying since (the MacBook Air is a netbook... and netbooks were never worth buying). I took her late-2011 17" and love it; she always said it was too bulky, so it was a win for both of us.
To bring it back on topic: I've killed quite a few hard drives; I seem to lose one every year, on average, and have for as long as I've owned a computer with a hard drive (that is to be read as I've lost as many 5yr old drives). With a 1:1 ratio of SSDs to spinning disks in my home for the last 2 years, I'm still losing HDDs at the same rate, but the SSDs seem to be holding up. I don't mind the diminished capacity; that's offset by the extremely improved performance and replacing the DVD drive with a HDD caddy for bulk file storage; combined with network storage (and VPN for remote access) and automated backups, I still have all of my data.
The res increase is still cheaper, since it's not followed by a subsequent scale operation. Also, once the pixels shrink enough so as to be imperceptibly small at typical viewing distance, the perceived color resolution of the display increases exponentially for every pixel that "combines" in the user's field of view.
That latter bit is a trick I've been exploiting for years now to make the file sizes of my full-HD wallpapers smaller; I actually make them 3840x2160 8-bit and let the OS make use of, essentially, 32 bits of color information per rendered pixel (with an effective 4-or-32-bit alpha channel, if present, depending on whether the image is saved with a 1-bit or 8-bit alpha channel). Of course, that method requires that the source image be a multiple of the screen resolution; when you move the color blending from the GPU to the user's native hardware (the user's eyes when viewing a higher-than-viewable-resolution display), you can achieve the same trick with a native-resolution image and no processing overhead on the display device. On your typical 6-or-8-bit-per-subpixel LCD, obviously, you don't get the full effect and, instead, only get 18-or-24-bits per pixel; but, on a higher-than-viewable-resolution display, the effective bit-depth is a function of the bit-depth of the available color palette and the number of pixels the users sees as one.
As someone with a 4.7" 1080p display, I can tell you exactly why. It's friggin' beautiful, even without anti-aliasing. And skipping anti-aliasing means more performance with less power from your GPU. While a 5" display won't look quite as nice, slightly fewer dots per inch and all, I'm betting it'll still be damn beautiful.
Except that this, the very case that's "starting it all", is also the exact reason why this is not the right way to do things. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, as sometimes it is the actions of one person which need to be punished, but it is more often the actions of the company as a whole, the culture behind how the company operates, that needs to be addressed.
This man did nothing wrong; he sold a product that was not safe for kids to use and labeled it as not safe for kids to use. He should not be liable for the actions of the employees of the toy stores who sold them to kids, nor for the actions of the employees of the distribution houses that sold them to the toy stores who hired employees who then sold them to kids. He didn't sell them to kids himself, and he didn't sell them to toy stores where he'd only reasonably expect that they'd be sold to kids. He labeled them as not safe for kids and clearly did not intend for them to be sold to, or used by, kids. Blame all of the irresponsible parties for any children harmed by these things, for sure; let's start with the parents who bought these for their kids or left their own set where their kids could get to them (they're labeled quite clearly and should be locked away from young children, and only used by older children under close supervision, just like any other dangerous item), then the purchasing agent at the toy store who thought it would be a good idea to sell an item labeled as not safe for children in a place where things are bought primarily by and for children, then the distribution house employee(s) who thought selling unsafe items to toy stores would be a great way to make a buck. And that's where it should stop.
No operating system requires a password safe for any purpose. Many include one and offer it to you as a convenience so that you do not have to type in common passwords e.g. for network shares and such, but you are not required to use it. It is also not intended to keep them safe, just to keep them; though most do encrypt the passwords in some way, even if only to prevent casual snooping. However, if what you were trying to say is that the password safe used by most Linux distros still has to encrypt passwords to keep them safe... well fuckin' duh! You have to encrypt *ANYTHING* to keep it safe. I don't care what OS you're running, if your data is in plaintext in the disk, *MY* OS can read it, so *YOUR* OS becomes irrelevant at that point.
As for Linux requiring a firewall... any system that runs network services you wish to control access to requires a firewall, it's just how the world works. Most consumer Linux distros ship with all services disabled (sometimes you'll find one that has SMB enabled) by default, but you can usually turn a few of them on (namely SSH) during install. Most server distros ship with SSH enabled and that's all. It would be reasonable to run one of these systems in a default state (no network services, or only SSH) with no firewall, since there's no point of attack anyway. If you've running an SQL server, a local web server, SMB, or anything else you want to control access to, then a firewall is only necessary if you don't configure the services to only listen on the appropriate interfaces and only listen for the appropriate IP ranges. If you run any services that don't give you that level of configuration, or any consuler-grade software that interacts with the network on any level, that software may expose its own services and vulnerabilities, which, really, is why you need a firewall in the first place. It's nothing to do with the OS at all.
I would also like to point out that, as far as self-replicating viruses go, Linux anti-virus apps detect Windows and Mac OS viruses; they do not detect Linux viruses; one would have to exist first. As far as user-initiated malware, detection is the only option for automated protection; you can't stop the user from downloading a random binary and giving it their root password, but you can warn them not to. Okay, well, you *can* stop the user from downloading a random binary and giving it their root password, but didn't a team of security researchers just prove that you can slip just about anything past the iOS App Store reviewers if you delay activation of those routines?
How much malware has been found on iOS? Not all of it, because those who would look for it aren't allowed the tools to do so. You can rest assured that there is plenty. All because there is no way to detect it, all because Apple doesn't allow anti-virus apps into the App Store, all because you're supposed to trust them to keep you safe, even though they've proven they can't (and aren't even really trying).
That's not a knock at Apple or iOS, either. It's an illustration of why these basic security measures are important and how insecure any system actually is that tells you you don't need them.
A full electric certainly does have a transmission. It may be a CVT, so you don't feel it actually shifting, but it doesn't have to be; and I'll remind you that the T in CVT stands for Transmission, and the CVTs on the market right now are some of the least reliable transmissions out there. Even if you were right and full electrics didn't have transmissions, there's still a differential transferring power to the wheels. Do you have any idea how often transmission service also (or only) means a differential service? If done right, every single time.
Shit I'm not even a crypto expert and it wasn't news to me. If you know what part of a stream of data is supposed to look like and you know where in the stream that part of the data should be, you can attack that part of the stream to determine at least a portion of the decryption key. From there, you try the partial key at set intervals within the datastream and look for anything else familiar, such as file headers or plain ol' empty space, additional patches of data you can fill in from things you already know. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have the whole key.
I'm not ignoring that point, I addressed it directly when I mentioned the mirroring the NSA already does at every telecom switch in the US, which is well documented public information.
That you were trying to make one point does not preclude me from addressing other points you have also made, nor from defending myself when others (you) make personal attacks, which is what I have done here.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither will the charger, the outlet it's plugged into, the 12- or 14-ga wire feeding the outlet, the fuse or breaker that wire is fed from, the bus bar that fuse or breaker connects with, the main breaker, or the feeder line to the building. But all of those, including that cable, will happily pass 4000A for long enough to toast your trolling ass.
It *IS* USB. The adapter you speak of receives data, via the USB protocol, from the phone and decodes it to the correct outputs for the various pins of the 30 pin connector, much like the cable receives data, via the USB protocol, from the phone and passes it along to the USB connector on the other end. The video-out connector is a neat trick involving reassigning the pins; something consumer-grade cameras and Android phones have been doing for years by now. The only thing the lightning connector is bringing to the table is DRM, the ability to plug in either way, and a complete lack of protection from shorting (the *LIVE* contacts are exposed, unlike any other consumer device).
The exposed contacts on the connector are also easier to short out. It's a poorly-engineed design, despite the one good feature (reversibility) it brings to the table. You can do the same pin-reassignment on USB that Apple is doing with Lightning to achieve video-out and all the other shit; consumer-grade cameras and Android phones have been doing it for years.
Don't let the total number of pins on the cable fool you, it's nohing more than a differently-designed USB connector. Pins 1 and 5 are power, pins 2 and 3 OR 6 and 7 are data (while there are two pair lanes, only one can be used at a time), the other 2 pins are there for the authentication chip. Remove the authentication chip and the (useless) extra data lane and you've got 4 pins. Add a shield around it to keep it from being shorted out easily and you've got a USB cable.
People are being electrocuted by cheaper malfunctioning CHARGERS. The cable will happily transmit whatever voltage and current you ask it to, regardless of whether or not it's able to authenticate itself to the phone beforehand.
If I CHOOSE to upgrade, I have to upgrade THE WHOLE MACHINE and not just the CPU or GPU. That's Apple's fault, not mine. It's also why I don't own an Apply desktop. It's the same thing with laptops no matter who you buy from, except that many still come with socketed CPUs, so you can at least upgrade them a bit without replacing the whole machine. And that's why I still own a MacBook Pro (Late 2011 17" model, the last one they made that really caught my eye).
You're right, it's not like anyone was electrocuted by using an unauthorized cable. It was a knockoff charger and, most likely, the cable used was the one that shipped with the phone.
We care about the lockdown, which is why we don't own Apple products. Well, most of us do, actually; I, for example, love my MacBook Pro, which I can still use however I damned well please; we just don't own the locked-down shit Apple peddles.
They let people trade the knockoff chargers because those chargers were failing in catastrophic and dangerous ways and it was a good PR move for them to offer a no-cost remedy for their users. The cables, not so much.
The authentication chip authenticates the cable, not the charger, to the phone. You can still just as easily use an aftermarket charger with an "authentic" Apple cable, so that's not why they do this.
Certainly. When you've got as many platters as I do spinning around in an enclosed space, you'd best be conscious of cooling and power stability.
Oh... I forgot... The One could connect to a monitor (VGA, this was before HDMI was common on laptops) just like the Vaio, as well. Oh, and it had built-in wireless and ethernet, just like an ultrabook (does the Air have ethernet anymore, or would htat make it too thick?). Oh, and a mic and headphone port. And a webcam. And a card reader. And a 10"-class screen. And a too-small keyboard. Am I leaving anything out?
Did you notice that netbooks disappeared when ultrabooks hit the market? Having owned an Acer Aspire One (netbook) and currently owning a Sony Vaio Duo 11, I can tell you that, despite having 3x the RAM, an 4x the SSD storage (the One had an SSD as well), and 4x the CPU cores running at 2x the clockspeed, the only functional difference is that the Vaio collapses into tablet mode.
Ultrabooks are netbooks, my friend. Very. Expensive. Netbooks.
You're going to assume that I have poor power quality rather than a large number of drives. How cute.
SSDs are just as prone to controller (or other chip) failures as spinning disks, and those are the failures most likely to be caused by poor quality power. If that were the cause, wouldn't I be seeing SSDs fail at the same rate? I'm not quite sure how you arrived at your conclusion; however, I can assure you, as I glance over at my power distribution rack, that it is incorrect.
An article about open software with no source? Oh, the irony!
Off-topic but... I bought my wife a new MacBook Pro a couple months ago because I couldn't afford one in 2011 when they last made the 17" models and they haven't made a laptop worth buying since (the MacBook Air is a netbook... and netbooks were never worth buying). I took her late-2011 17" and love it; she always said it was too bulky, so it was a win for both of us.
To bring it back on topic: I've killed quite a few hard drives; I seem to lose one every year, on average, and have for as long as I've owned a computer with a hard drive (that is to be read as I've lost as many 5yr old drives). With a 1:1 ratio of SSDs to spinning disks in my home for the last 2 years, I'm still losing HDDs at the same rate, but the SSDs seem to be holding up. I don't mind the diminished capacity; that's offset by the extremely improved performance and replacing the DVD drive with a HDD caddy for bulk file storage; combined with network storage (and VPN for remote access) and automated backups, I still have all of my data.
The res increase is still cheaper, since it's not followed by a subsequent scale operation. Also, once the pixels shrink enough so as to be imperceptibly small at typical viewing distance, the perceived color resolution of the display increases exponentially for every pixel that "combines" in the user's field of view.
That latter bit is a trick I've been exploiting for years now to make the file sizes of my full-HD wallpapers smaller; I actually make them 3840x2160 8-bit and let the OS make use of, essentially, 32 bits of color information per rendered pixel (with an effective 4-or-32-bit alpha channel, if present, depending on whether the image is saved with a 1-bit or 8-bit alpha channel). Of course, that method requires that the source image be a multiple of the screen resolution; when you move the color blending from the GPU to the user's native hardware (the user's eyes when viewing a higher-than-viewable-resolution display), you can achieve the same trick with a native-resolution image and no processing overhead on the display device. On your typical 6-or-8-bit-per-subpixel LCD, obviously, you don't get the full effect and, instead, only get 18-or-24-bits per pixel; but, on a higher-than-viewable-resolution display, the effective bit-depth is a function of the bit-depth of the available color palette and the number of pixels the users sees as one.
Nifty, eh?
or have 20/8 vision...
As someone with a 4.7" 1080p display, I can tell you exactly why. It's friggin' beautiful, even without anti-aliasing. And skipping anti-aliasing means more performance with less power from your GPU. While a 5" display won't look quite as nice, slightly fewer dots per inch and all, I'm betting it'll still be damn beautiful.
He marketed them as toys for adults, clearly labeled as not for kids.
As long as he gets utterly rich if everything goes according his plans, he must be the one cleaning the mess if his company throws shit to a fan
Agreed. The problem here is that it wasn't his company that threw the shit, it was just his fan it was thrown into.
Except that this, the very case that's "starting it all", is also the exact reason why this is not the right way to do things. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, as sometimes it is the actions of one person which need to be punished, but it is more often the actions of the company as a whole, the culture behind how the company operates, that needs to be addressed.
This man did nothing wrong; he sold a product that was not safe for kids to use and labeled it as not safe for kids to use. He should not be liable for the actions of the employees of the toy stores who sold them to kids, nor for the actions of the employees of the distribution houses that sold them to the toy stores who hired employees who then sold them to kids. He didn't sell them to kids himself, and he didn't sell them to toy stores where he'd only reasonably expect that they'd be sold to kids. He labeled them as not safe for kids and clearly did not intend for them to be sold to, or used by, kids. Blame all of the irresponsible parties for any children harmed by these things, for sure; let's start with the parents who bought these for their kids or left their own set where their kids could get to them (they're labeled quite clearly and should be locked away from young children, and only used by older children under close supervision, just like any other dangerous item), then the purchasing agent at the toy store who thought it would be a good idea to sell an item labeled as not safe for children in a place where things are bought primarily by and for children, then the distribution house employee(s) who thought selling unsafe items to toy stores would be a great way to make a buck. And that's where it should stop.
No operating system requires a password safe for any purpose. Many include one and offer it to you as a convenience so that you do not have to type in common passwords e.g. for network shares and such, but you are not required to use it. It is also not intended to keep them safe, just to keep them; though most do encrypt the passwords in some way, even if only to prevent casual snooping. However, if what you were trying to say is that the password safe used by most Linux distros still has to encrypt passwords to keep them safe... well fuckin' duh! You have to encrypt *ANYTHING* to keep it safe. I don't care what OS you're running, if your data is in plaintext in the disk, *MY* OS can read it, so *YOUR* OS becomes irrelevant at that point.
As for Linux requiring a firewall... any system that runs network services you wish to control access to requires a firewall, it's just how the world works. Most consumer Linux distros ship with all services disabled (sometimes you'll find one that has SMB enabled) by default, but you can usually turn a few of them on (namely SSH) during install. Most server distros ship with SSH enabled and that's all. It would be reasonable to run one of these systems in a default state (no network services, or only SSH) with no firewall, since there's no point of attack anyway. If you've running an SQL server, a local web server, SMB, or anything else you want to control access to, then a firewall is only necessary if you don't configure the services to only listen on the appropriate interfaces and only listen for the appropriate IP ranges. If you run any services that don't give you that level of configuration, or any consuler-grade software that interacts with the network on any level, that software may expose its own services and vulnerabilities, which, really, is why you need a firewall in the first place. It's nothing to do with the OS at all.
I would also like to point out that, as far as self-replicating viruses go, Linux anti-virus apps detect Windows and Mac OS viruses; they do not detect Linux viruses; one would have to exist first. As far as user-initiated malware, detection is the only option for automated protection; you can't stop the user from downloading a random binary and giving it their root password, but you can warn them not to. Okay, well, you *can* stop the user from downloading a random binary and giving it their root password, but didn't a team of security researchers just prove that you can slip just about anything past the iOS App Store reviewers if you delay activation of those routines?
How much malware has been found on iOS? Not all of it, because those who would look for it aren't allowed the tools to do so. You can rest assured that there is plenty. All because there is no way to detect it, all because Apple doesn't allow anti-virus apps into the App Store, all because you're supposed to trust them to keep you safe, even though they've proven they can't (and aren't even really trying).
That's not a knock at Apple or iOS, either. It's an illustration of why these basic security measures are important and how insecure any system actually is that tells you you don't need them.
A full electric certainly does have a transmission. It may be a CVT, so you don't feel it actually shifting, but it doesn't have to be; and I'll remind you that the T in CVT stands for Transmission, and the CVTs on the market right now are some of the least reliable transmissions out there. Even if you were right and full electrics didn't have transmissions, there's still a differential transferring power to the wheels. Do you have any idea how often transmission service also (or only) means a differential service? If done right, every single time.
Shit I'm not even a crypto expert and it wasn't news to me. If you know what part of a stream of data is supposed to look like and you know where in the stream that part of the data should be, you can attack that part of the stream to determine at least a portion of the decryption key. From there, you try the partial key at set intervals within the datastream and look for anything else familiar, such as file headers or plain ol' empty space, additional patches of data you can fill in from things you already know. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have the whole key.
I'm not ignoring that point, I addressed it directly when I mentioned the mirroring the NSA already does at every telecom switch in the US, which is well documented public information.
That you were trying to make one point does not preclude me from addressing other points you have also made, nor from defending myself when others (you) make personal attacks, which is what I have done here.