Because, as Chrisq claims (we'll take the claim as true for now, I have no idea on the actual statistics), the phones are usually sold (probably on eBay or something) overseas for cheap. So, you get the following instead:
If a phone is stolen with no kill switch, user buys a second phone (and the stolen one is sold overseas so the carrier doesn't care). Company sold 2 phones total. If no phone is stolen, you keep your phone (the person who would have bought the stolen phone doesn't matter to the carrier). Company sold 1 phone total.
I bet you can do the math on the kill switch versions (hint: they look exactly like the situations above, since the stolen phone is already gone from the carrier's perspective). Just remember that with the kill switch in place, the number of thefts goes down. So the number of replacements - the only situation where the carrier makes more than 1 phone's worth of money per subscriber - goes down.
Um, no... There are two ways to pay toward replacing stolen cell phones: 1) The outright cost of replacing phones, paid by the victim individually but only in the case of actually being robbed. 2) The money collectively paid to the insurance companies who replace phones for victims, most of which comes from people other than the victim.
The numbers make perfect sense if, for example, 3.5 times as many people (you can't even do basic math, apparently) who get their phone stolen had insurance covering theft than didn't. It's sad how rare basic reading comprehension is...
There's something very, very funny about suggesting using a broken, cryptographically insecure hash function to verify that a cryptographic program hasn't been tampered with?
Oh, and where do you get the original (that is, verified-and-found-safe version) to run your hash on anyhow?
Honestly, while I agree, I'd like to see more comments on the ones that *aren't* in the top 3 or so, because *everybody* metnions those. It's a big echo chamber.
It might be hard to say whether this counts as "focused on" Data, since it's *about* him without actually making his character a central aspect, but The Measure of a Man was *excellent* both as speculative fiction in general and as a chance to give some Star Trek actors a chance to show their stuff.
Really? I rather liked "Relics", personally. Might be because we got Scotty, we got to see the difference between him and Geordi, and we got to see a Dyson sphere (granted that it was the impractical rigid variant, but c'est la vie). I thought they did a good job on the "man out of his time" work (the old "if you took Leonardo DaVinci out of time and put him in the modern world, he'd flip his shit" idea, over a shorter time span).
It's distressing how many of those I've literally never even heard of. I'm not talking about "never say even a trailer for" or "it aired while I was living without TV" or "I heard some people talk about it, but that's it". This is literally the first time I have heard of "The 4400", "Kyle XY", or "Mutant X". Some of the rest (Falling Skies, The 100, and SW:TCW) fall into the categories quoted above.
Besides, you don't even mention Babylon 5! I mean, yeah, it duels with DS9 on more than just when it was running, and it's got flaws of its own, but it is *good*! Fewer wasted episodes (barring season 5, which has a lot of crap for perfectly valid reasons involving them not expecting to *get* a season 5) than any of the Trek series I can think of.
There are so, so many ways around this. A simple one, for example, is to only perform certificate validation past a date in the future when you will have the cert ready for testing (ideally shortly before publication). That's an easy check to perform in a custom validation function (which happens to be the same way you turn validation *off*, in most cases, so it's a truly trivial amount of extra effort). Or you can have the validation disabled in debug builds, but enabled for any "release" build (including the final pre-release tests). Or you can pin a given certificate (might even be a self-signed one) and not worry about the CAs at all. Or you can do some combination of the above.
Any of them are better than just being lazy and insecure.
E can't prove it, no. Because it's bullshit. Don't get me wrong, CAs as a single point of failure is stupid. Trusting *all* CAs for any given connection is also stupid. On the hand, trusting any random certificate is much, much stupider. There are solutions for the problems with the CA system...
The obvious one, in the case of mobile apps, is certificate pinning. That's not a new idea, or even terribly hard to implement. Make sure you pin a backup as well, and if you want to you can pin at the intermediate CA level rather than at the host cert level (handy if you want to rotate host certs, or if different hosts have different certs for some reason). Don't turn off validation, though. In fact, turn on things like CRL checking and so on if they're disabled by default.
For other situations, there are alternative trust models. HTTP Public Key Pinning gives trust-on-first-use, for example, and can even be implemented client-side without server support if you're willing to accept the risk that the server will change certs for completely legit reasons. Web-of-trust isn't hugely practical in something like the web, but works fine for email and the like where you usually have other methods of communication with the people you're talking to. Secure Remote Password has a bootstrapping problem, but once you're past that it provides another method for secure authentication and key exchange.
You are an idiot, and dragging down the collective intelligence of this entire thread. Just for your information, in case you weren't yet aware...
IT IS A MOBILE APP! The developers *DO* control what CAs are trusted by the app. In fact, they do it through *exactly* the same mechanism as turning off cert validation entirely: they implement a custom validator function, instead of having the app use the platform's built-in validation.They can control the CA that is trusted. They can pin the certificates (or just the public key, in case they want to re-issue the certificate with different details but keep the pinning). They can implement a backup pin. They don't even need to check the CA chain of trust; they could use a self-signed cert if they wanted to and just make sure it is the one the app expects.
Hard-coding the public key comes *close* to being correct, while simultaneously completely missing the mark. What if the private key becomes compromised and needs to be rotated? What if you want to rotate it anyhow, just as a defensive measure? What if you want to switch to a stronger key? What if an attacker steals the key and starts using it to intercept traffic, and the app has no way to check for revocation?
Seriously, you are - much like un-validated encryption - worse than useless. You post like you know what you're talking about, and yet obviously do not.
So... mobile apps aren't a real-world scenario? You know, where cert pinning is used *all the time* because the same developer provides both client and server? You know, the entire context of this discussion?
Do you even *try* and think before posting bullshit on the Internet?
By the way, it is entirely possible to implement public key TOFU in browsers. It's called HTTP Public Key Pinning. Chrome is already supporting it, I believe. It could also be achieved through browser extension/plugin pretty easily.
This is an app, not a browser. There *IS* no "yes" to click in an app. Cert not valid? Connection closed, user gets "connection is probably being tampered with" error message. No "shoot self in foot" option is needed, because the same developer owns both the client and the server.
Sigh... the sheer amount of stupidity (mostly in the form of people trying to ack like they know what they're talking about) in this thread is painful!
It's also not free, for non-commercial use or otherwise. It's cheaper than the other paid editions, especially since it allows installation on multiple machines with a single license, but it does still cost money.
I still wouldn't like it. That would decrease the extent of the problem I had with it, though. Nobody said anything in TFA, so I assumed (apparently, incorrectly) that it had been the choice of "this dude" to make the donation known.
Freedom of speech is not, never has been, and must never be freedom from consequences of speech. It limits the extent of those consequences (for example, the government can only prosecute you for very specific classes of harmful speech, such as slander or the classic "'Fire!' in a crowded theater" example). It mandates that you will always be free to express even unpopular opinions (such as anti-gay-rights, which is unpopular at a pro-equality company like Mozilla). It does *not* mean that people won't call for your removal from a highly visible position which also carries great authority, though. In fact, that's *their* freedom of speech!
I'm not sure if you completely misread what I wrote or are just intentionally being obstreperous. To clarify: If you don't want people raising a stink over you doing things which conflict with company values, don't do those things and then become CEO.
The way that Jobs dressed was not, generally speaking, seen as a negative for the company (quite the opposite, really; his charisma and the "think different" aspect of it made it iconic). Similarly, Tim Cook being gay isn't seen as a problem for the company because their policies are extremely supportive of the LGBTQ community (although it may be offputting to some of their potential customers and/or investors, which is unfortunately a valid potential concern). If the next CEO had a history of opposing gay rights, you can be sure there'd be an uproar over it too, as that would mean having a CEO whose values conflict with those of the company and its employees.
Now, a company has every right to change its values and its policies. However, the employees also have the right to resist such changes, even pre-emptively. The company furthermore has the right to decide it can do without the services of those employees, just as the employees have the right to leave the company.
Just don't expect that to happen without people getting upset about it!
Ah, my bad. I certainly can't argue that people should be able to finance such things invisible. I hadn't realized the public knowledge of his actions was due to a third-party though.
Exactly why should they leave the *country*? That's some random bullshit of the finest sort. It may have escaped your notice, but Prop 8 was actually overturned by the government...
But as for the part about quitting, that's fair enough. I'd be tempted to quit in that situation myself, and I'm neither gay nor Californian. That's a reflection of policies and probable motivations I would be extremely concerned to see at the head of my company too!
Yeah. Funny how people care a lot more about preventing government-mandated institutionalized discrimination than about respecting the people who publicly support such a thing. You are entitled to your opinion. You are even entitled to advocate public policies that support your opinion. You are *not* entitled to immunity from reputational harm when you advocate for trampling the rights of millions of people.
Tolerance does not require that we treat the intolerant the same as everybody else. Condemning intolerance is completely compatible with promoting tolerance; after all, you're not really promoting tolerance if you do so in a way that (even tacitly) also promotes intolerance!
I don't *ask* about the political opinions of my superiors. If they *told* me they contributed to Prop 8, though, yeah I'd have a bloody big problem with that!
Also, "agree" and "disagree" are not a simple binary state. For example, I don't agree with the religious views of some of my friends. That's OK, we don't talk religion. Now, if I found out they were funding efforts to inject religious beliefs into public school curriculum, yeah, *THAT* would be a problem. (It seems unlikely they would, from the little we've talked about the subject, though I've never asked).
There are lots of things way less important to me than marriage equality (I'm straight, but a lot of my friends are not). I will be a lot more upset over somebody publicly and financially avowing support for a policy like Prop 8 than I will be over, say, a similar level support for bank bailouts (which I also disagree with, but which there's at least some argument to be made for)
"Asked to step down" != "fired". He was promoted from inside the company, and they feel that he shouldn't have been.
Oh, and if you don't want your political contributions to become a big deal in the workplace, I have a couple recommendations: 1) Don't become a CEO. The CEO represents the company. The policies of a new CEO are assumed, with reason, to be the intended policies of the company. People care about that stuff, in ways that they're never going to care about one AC on Slashdot. 2) Don't do it publicly! A few thousand dollars quietly donated to one cause or another isn't generally going to alter anybody's opinion of you, because they won't know. A few thousand dollars publicly and visibly donated to a very controversial, discriminatory cause? Well, that's going to grab some attention. It still won't make headlines though, unless people have reason to believe you're in a position to discriminate against others going forward. See #1...
Leaving aside "hacked" consoles (where yes, you can do this, although things like "wallhacks" with partially-transparent textures are also possible), you can (or perhaps could, before they started putting more encryption in the way?) intercept the network traffic between the console and the router. There's also controller "hacks" (although those are more of a grey area on permissibility) which can do things like send repeated trigger pulls faster than any human ever could or have macros for perfect rocket jumps or the like.
The inter-player Gamerscore ranking system is one of the attractions of the Xbox Live system for a significant portion of the playerbase. Even the mom of the autostic kid in question eventually admitted they'd lied and the kid had just flat-out been trying to game the system, in violation of the rules. Their system, their rules. If you don't like it, don't buy into it. *You* may not like what MS did, but quite a lot of their customers do. The system works as designed.
Hyperbole aside, this is arguably a valid point: the TSA can't do their job even when their target is in multiple warning databases. They are worthless, a drain on public funds and American lifetimes. They do far more harm than good... in fact, so far as I can tell they do no good at all. They have changed their policies reactively to several terrorists who made it past them, but they have yet to actually catch one!
One can say the same thing about the surveillance state, of course. They *might* be doing better on catching people, but again it's a huge drain on public funds (never mind the blight on notional principles) for unjustifiably low benefit.
People die. It's a fact of life. If you want to reduce the risk of people dying, put that money into cancer research and automotive safety and stuff like that. It will pay far higher dividends.
Repair? Tesla themselves, free of charge in many cases. They'll even come get the car for you if needed, most dealerships won't do that. Regular maintenance? *What* regular maintenance? Les Schwab or your preferred local alternative can rotate the tires and check the brakes for you. Not much else is needed... no oil, no spark plugs, no transmission (in the conventional sense), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, as Chrisq claims (we'll take the claim as true for now, I have no idea on the actual statistics), the phones are usually sold (probably on eBay or something) overseas for cheap. So, you get the following instead:
If a phone is stolen with no kill switch, user buys a second phone (and the stolen one is sold overseas so the carrier doesn't care). Company sold 2 phones total.
If no phone is stolen, you keep your phone (the person who would have bought the stolen phone doesn't matter to the carrier). Company sold 1 phone total.
I bet you can do the math on the kill switch versions (hint: they look exactly like the situations above, since the stolen phone is already gone from the carrier's perspective). Just remember that with the kill switch in place, the number of thefts goes down. So the number of replacements - the only situation where the carrier makes more than 1 phone's worth of money per subscriber - goes down.
Um, no... There are two ways to pay toward replacing stolen cell phones:
1) The outright cost of replacing phones, paid by the victim individually but only in the case of actually being robbed.
2) The money collectively paid to the insurance companies who replace phones for victims, most of which comes from people other than the victim.
The numbers make perfect sense if, for example, 3.5 times as many people (you can't even do basic math, apparently) who get their phone stolen had insurance covering theft than didn't. It's sad how rare basic reading comprehension is...
There's something very, very funny about suggesting using a broken, cryptographically insecure hash function to verify that a cryptographic program hasn't been tampered with?
Oh, and where do you get the original (that is, verified-and-found-safe version) to run your hash on anyhow?
The episode you reference is http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik.... It was already mentioned above as one of the best.
Honestly, while I agree, I'd like to see more comments on the ones that *aren't* in the top 3 or so, because *everybody* metnions those. It's a big echo chamber.
It might be hard to say whether this counts as "focused on" Data, since it's *about* him without actually making his character a central aspect, but The Measure of a Man was *excellent* both as speculative fiction in general and as a chance to give some Star Trek actors a chance to show their stuff.
Really? I rather liked "Relics", personally. Might be because we got Scotty, we got to see the difference between him and Geordi, and we got to see a Dyson sphere (granted that it was the impractical rigid variant, but c'est la vie). I thought they did a good job on the "man out of his time" work (the old "if you took Leonardo DaVinci out of time and put him in the modern world, he'd flip his shit" idea, over a shorter time span).
It's distressing how many of those I've literally never even heard of. I'm not talking about "never say even a trailer for" or "it aired while I was living without TV" or "I heard some people talk about it, but that's it". This is literally the first time I have heard of "The 4400", "Kyle XY", or "Mutant X". Some of the rest (Falling Skies, The 100, and SW:TCW) fall into the categories quoted above.
Besides, you don't even mention Babylon 5! I mean, yeah, it duels with DS9 on more than just when it was running, and it's got flaws of its own, but it is *good*! Fewer wasted episodes (barring season 5, which has a lot of crap for perfectly valid reasons involving them not expecting to *get* a season 5) than any of the Trek series I can think of.
There are so, so many ways around this. A simple one, for example, is to only perform certificate validation past a date in the future when you will have the cert ready for testing (ideally shortly before publication). That's an easy check to perform in a custom validation function (which happens to be the same way you turn validation *off*, in most cases, so it's a truly trivial amount of extra effort). Or you can have the validation disabled in debug builds, but enabled for any "release" build (including the final pre-release tests). Or you can pin a given certificate (might even be a self-signed one) and not worry about the CAs at all. Or you can do some combination of the above.
Any of them are better than just being lazy and insecure.
E can't prove it, no. Because it's bullshit. Don't get me wrong, CAs as a single point of failure is stupid. Trusting *all* CAs for any given connection is also stupid. On the hand, trusting any random certificate is much, much stupider. There are solutions for the problems with the CA system...
The obvious one, in the case of mobile apps, is certificate pinning. That's not a new idea, or even terribly hard to implement. Make sure you pin a backup as well, and if you want to you can pin at the intermediate CA level rather than at the host cert level (handy if you want to rotate host certs, or if different hosts have different certs for some reason). Don't turn off validation, though. In fact, turn on things like CRL checking and so on if they're disabled by default.
For other situations, there are alternative trust models. HTTP Public Key Pinning gives trust-on-first-use, for example, and can even be implemented client-side without server support if you're willing to accept the risk that the server will change certs for completely legit reasons. Web-of-trust isn't hugely practical in something like the web, but works fine for email and the like where you usually have other methods of communication with the people you're talking to. Secure Remote Password has a bootstrapping problem, but once you're past that it provides another method for secure authentication and key exchange.
You are an idiot, and dragging down the collective intelligence of this entire thread. Just for your information, in case you weren't yet aware...
IT IS A MOBILE APP! The developers *DO* control what CAs are trusted by the app. In fact, they do it through *exactly* the same mechanism as turning off cert validation entirely: they implement a custom validator function, instead of having the app use the platform's built-in validation.They can control the CA that is trusted. They can pin the certificates (or just the public key, in case they want to re-issue the certificate with different details but keep the pinning). They can implement a backup pin. They don't even need to check the CA chain of trust; they could use a self-signed cert if they wanted to and just make sure it is the one the app expects.
Hard-coding the public key comes *close* to being correct, while simultaneously completely missing the mark. What if the private key becomes compromised and needs to be rotated? What if you want to rotate it anyhow, just as a defensive measure? What if you want to switch to a stronger key? What if an attacker steals the key and starts using it to intercept traffic, and the app has no way to check for revocation?
Seriously, you are - much like un-validated encryption - worse than useless. You post like you know what you're talking about, and yet obviously do not.
So... mobile apps aren't a real-world scenario? You know, where cert pinning is used *all the time* because the same developer provides both client and server? You know, the entire context of this discussion?
Do you even *try* and think before posting bullshit on the Internet?
By the way, it is entirely possible to implement public key TOFU in browsers. It's called HTTP Public Key Pinning. Chrome is already supporting it, I believe. It could also be achieved through browser extension/plugin pretty easily.
This is an app, not a browser. There *IS* no "yes" to click in an app. Cert not valid? Connection closed, user gets "connection is probably being tampered with" error message. No "shoot self in foot" option is needed, because the same developer owns both the client and the server.
Sigh... the sheer amount of stupidity (mostly in the form of people trying to ack like they know what they're talking about) in this thread is painful!
It's also not free, for non-commercial use or otherwise. It's cheaper than the other paid editions, especially since it allows installation on multiple machines with a single license, but it does still cost money.
I still wouldn't like it. That would decrease the extent of the problem I had with it, though. Nobody said anything in TFA, so I assumed (apparently, incorrectly) that it had been the choice of "this dude" to make the donation known.
Freedom of speech is not, never has been, and must never be freedom from consequences of speech. It limits the extent of those consequences (for example, the government can only prosecute you for very specific classes of harmful speech, such as slander or the classic "'Fire!' in a crowded theater" example). It mandates that you will always be free to express even unpopular opinions (such as anti-gay-rights, which is unpopular at a pro-equality company like Mozilla). It does *not* mean that people won't call for your removal from a highly visible position which also carries great authority, though. In fact, that's *their* freedom of speech!
I'm not sure if you completely misread what I wrote or are just intentionally being obstreperous. To clarify:
If you don't want people raising a stink over you doing things which conflict with company values, don't do those things and then become CEO.
The way that Jobs dressed was not, generally speaking, seen as a negative for the company (quite the opposite, really; his charisma and the "think different" aspect of it made it iconic). Similarly, Tim Cook being gay isn't seen as a problem for the company because their policies are extremely supportive of the LGBTQ community (although it may be offputting to some of their potential customers and/or investors, which is unfortunately a valid potential concern). If the next CEO had a history of opposing gay rights, you can be sure there'd be an uproar over it too, as that would mean having a CEO whose values conflict with those of the company and its employees.
Now, a company has every right to change its values and its policies. However, the employees also have the right to resist such changes, even pre-emptively. The company furthermore has the right to decide it can do without the services of those employees, just as the employees have the right to leave the company.
Just don't expect that to happen without people getting upset about it!
Ah, my bad. I certainly can't argue that people should be able to finance such things invisible. I hadn't realized the public knowledge of his actions was due to a third-party though.
Exactly why should they leave the *country*? That's some random bullshit of the finest sort. It may have escaped your notice, but Prop 8 was actually overturned by the government...
But as for the part about quitting, that's fair enough. I'd be tempted to quit in that situation myself, and I'm neither gay nor Californian. That's a reflection of policies and probable motivations I would be extremely concerned to see at the head of my company too!
Yeah. Funny how people care a lot more about preventing government-mandated institutionalized discrimination than about respecting the people who publicly support such a thing. You are entitled to your opinion. You are even entitled to advocate public policies that support your opinion. You are *not* entitled to immunity from reputational harm when you advocate for trampling the rights of millions of people.
Tolerance does not require that we treat the intolerant the same as everybody else. Condemning intolerance is completely compatible with promoting tolerance; after all, you're not really promoting tolerance if you do so in a way that (even tacitly) also promotes intolerance!
I don't *ask* about the political opinions of my superiors. If they *told* me they contributed to Prop 8, though, yeah I'd have a bloody big problem with that!
Also, "agree" and "disagree" are not a simple binary state. For example, I don't agree with the religious views of some of my friends. That's OK, we don't talk religion. Now, if I found out they were funding efforts to inject religious beliefs into public school curriculum, yeah, *THAT* would be a problem. (It seems unlikely they would, from the little we've talked about the subject, though I've never asked).
There are lots of things way less important to me than marriage equality (I'm straight, but a lot of my friends are not). I will be a lot more upset over somebody publicly and financially avowing support for a policy like Prop 8 than I will be over, say, a similar level support for bank bailouts (which I also disagree with, but which there's at least some argument to be made for)
"Asked to step down" != "fired". He was promoted from inside the company, and they feel that he shouldn't have been.
Oh, and if you don't want your political contributions to become a big deal in the workplace, I have a couple recommendations:
1) Don't become a CEO. The CEO represents the company. The policies of a new CEO are assumed, with reason, to be the intended policies of the company. People care about that stuff, in ways that they're never going to care about one AC on Slashdot.
2) Don't do it publicly! A few thousand dollars quietly donated to one cause or another isn't generally going to alter anybody's opinion of you, because they won't know. A few thousand dollars publicly and visibly donated to a very controversial, discriminatory cause? Well, that's going to grab some attention. It still won't make headlines though, unless people have reason to believe you're in a position to discriminate against others going forward. See #1...
Leaving aside "hacked" consoles (where yes, you can do this, although things like "wallhacks" with partially-transparent textures are also possible), you can (or perhaps could, before they started putting more encryption in the way?) intercept the network traffic between the console and the router. There's also controller "hacks" (although those are more of a grey area on permissibility) which can do things like send repeated trigger pulls faster than any human ever could or have macros for perfect rocket jumps or the like.
The inter-player Gamerscore ranking system is one of the attractions of the Xbox Live system for a significant portion of the playerbase. Even the mom of the autostic kid in question eventually admitted they'd lied and the kid had just flat-out been trying to game the system, in violation of the rules. Their system, their rules. If you don't like it, don't buy into it. *You* may not like what MS did, but quite a lot of their customers do. The system works as designed.
Hyperbole aside, this is arguably a valid point: the TSA can't do their job even when their target is in multiple warning databases. They are worthless, a drain on public funds and American lifetimes. They do far more harm than good... in fact, so far as I can tell they do no good at all. They have changed their policies reactively to several terrorists who made it past them, but they have yet to actually catch one!
One can say the same thing about the surveillance state, of course. They *might* be doing better on catching people, but again it's a huge drain on public funds (never mind the blight on notional principles) for unjustifiably low benefit.
People die. It's a fact of life. If you want to reduce the risk of people dying, put that money into cancer research and automotive safety and stuff like that. It will pay far higher dividends.
Repair? Tesla themselves, free of charge in many cases. They'll even come get the car for you if needed, most dealerships won't do that.
Regular maintenance? *What* regular maintenance? Les Schwab or your preferred local alternative can rotate the tires and check the brakes for you. Not much else is needed... no oil, no spark plugs, no transmission (in the conventional sense), etc.