Posts by Christian Berger

Well probably not as durable as the marketing blurb says

I mean we all have destroyed DNA, for example by cooking food. Ultraviolet radiation also is a problem. Essentially you'd get a storage medium which might hold its data for millions of years, but will quickly degrade when left out in the sun, or at temperatures higher than 40 degrees Celsius. It's also very susceptible to chemicals. Just about the only advantage is that you can make copies very easily. (even without a living being)

Actually that's not the reason why you should be worried

The reason is that it apparently cannot get traction in areas where you could already use memristor memory. After all you can already buy 16 kilobyte chips, and there probably are usecases for this.

And again, that was already done in Germany

There was a Bavarian TV show in which you would watch an astrophysicist and a philosopher dining. It was filmed from outside a restaurant through the window.

The criticism about Gnome isn't about missing features

The main criticism is that it's simply overcomplex. I mean if you look at it realistically the feature set you'd want from a GUI is roughly the one you got from Windows 3.1. I mean Windows 3.1 even had it's own OOP-style process communications named OLE.

Now you have an overcomplex system which doesn't do much more, but somehow managed to require _way_ more lines of code.

My guess is that there is now a whole generation of people having grown up without gaining any experience in making working designs. After all many universities now teach C++-style OOP as if that's the only way to make software. They see "Open Source" as a way to advance their career. As recruiters typically cannot tell good from bad code, they just stuff their code in where ever they can.

Meritocracy in the UK?

I'm sorry, but what countries are they moving from. From all I hear the UK seems to be rather bad in that regard. After all you recruit your leaders nearly exclusively from special private schools. Certain positions are even down right reserved for people who were born into the right families.

Of course I can only see this from the outside, but at least from my German perspective it doesn't seem to be a particularly attractive place to move to.

And this is why we need to teach the "hacker ethic" in school.

After all, working for a secret service greatly contradicts the rule of avoiding centralization. The whole idea about a secret service is to gather information and only let information flow towards a centre. It also contradicts the rule that information should be free, as all information passing through such an agency becomes more and more secret, even if it's based on "open source intelligence" (newspapers and such).

Then the military is rarely interested in defense strategies when it comes to IT. After all defense is utterly trivial when you have that much money. Just make your computers as simple as you can, and encrypt everything, preferably on additional secure devices. You don't need to have exploit writers to get your software more secure. What you need is to have programmers which are aware of where the security issues are they need to avoid. So essentially they concentrate on the offense. They try to exploit bugs. They try to destroy the integrity of those computers, essentially robbing people of their right of free (as in speech) access to computers.

Now the big problem is, that there are not many jobs for smart people, so it's likely that even smart people will have trouble finding a decent job.

Hmm....

Well commercial satellite operators probably already have such systems to inform them of nearby objects, after all once you have the kepler data of those objects (which is usually freely available) you can just predict where they are. Or they just don't care about small objects as those aren't in the databases anyhow.

Furthermore, satellite operators can actually look up and see what's going on there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIesWBTUeiI

The targets aren't single individuals

Nobody will pay money for your heart rate, but when you have the heart rates of 10 million people you surely will come up with some pseudo business model raising your stock value.

The problem with such mass-produced devices aren't "hackers", the problem is the company you have a contract with, the company you give access to intimate details of your life. The current company might actually do an OK job at keeping your privacy, but whenever they fold, they are sure as hell going to sell off that data to the highest bidder. After all it's an asset in their books.

If a business model requires money to come into the organization, you are likely to be the product, not the customer, as you can always get more money by selling your data, even though you already paid.

It's certainly not the worst way of teaching someone to program

I mean the "real" programming languages are often designed by people sitting in their room being tired of having to solve trivial problems. So they come up with special language features you'll probably never need. Those features are then taught to people who will never need them and struggle even understanding them. They still try because those features are hyped. Eventually all they do is struggling with the language, learning new features while not actually getting anything done on time. It's one of the reasons so many software projects fail.

Instead we should give children, and perhaps even professional programmers, systems that are appropriate. Children might need shiny IO features like controlling a robot or a grapics card. Adults might never need the complexity of C++-style OOP, but could work with a simple underlying principle like the UNIX-Philosophy. We must learn to use the tools we should use, not the ones we are being told to use.

If we would just address the underlying problem...

... and simply ban DRM. I mean you can also copy a physical book, that's what book scanners and printers are for.

I'm skeptical

File system code requires a certain kind of programmer which is determined to write error free code, and also has the ability to write near error free code. File systems are rather delicate parts of the kernel, after all if you mess up your scheduler or memory management, your system likely will just crash. If you mess up your file system, it's likely you end up with corrupt data on your disks without noticing.

I don't know if Apple still has the right people. After all in recent years it focused much on bad UI design (relying on the transparency of fingers) and turning their products into lifestyle products. Actual engineering didn't play a big role. I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers suitable of doing this have since then moved on to different companies or retirement.

Please please please more RAM

If they could squeeze a megabyte of RAM onto it that product would have had a chance as you could at least run DOS on it.

So you just have bog standard microcontroller which is barely large enough for C, and hard to program in Assembler.

It's all to difficult

I mean the early web still was acceptably easy to code for. Essentially you had HTML which was a moderately simple markup language and you had no way of determining how it would actually look on the browser. And if you weren't smart enough for that, you could use Netscape Navigator Gold, which could not just display, but also edit web pages. You then uploaded the result onto the FTP-server of your ISP and had a website.

Today websites seem to be more and more complex. It's not just HTML, but also a completely different language (CSS) to define how it should look like. And today your browser expects you to actually design how it looks like. To make it work on differently sized screens, you actually need to use yet another language (JS) to mess with your layout. I don't know if HTML GUI editors still exist, but I doubt you can translate the complexity into them.

The result is that people don't make their own websites any more. If they want to blag into the world, they use a blog hoster. If they want to offer details of their life, they use a social network, etc.

Obligatory Knight Rider reference

https://youtu.be/kki3MjmGtY0?t=226

Again, that's why we need minimal systems

The things they are trying to achieve doesn't need a Windows 10 update function... and probably none of the many features that are exclusive to Windows. We need to learn to have minimal systems again.

If we just want to use some specialized applications we should be able to run those applications on top of a slim stack of software. Ideally something like a "sign" program would just start up your Windows with the "sign" as the only executable executing. On Linux that would be the system booting up to a shell script starting up your X11 server and then your software.

If you don't need certain functionality, just try to avoid it. Should you need it later you can always boot in a different configuration.

Of course its utter bullshit

If they actually wanted to build a secure device they would not use a complex operating system like Android (or iOS or Blackberry OS, or Windows phone...) They would instead have a minimal operating system acting as a "smart terminal" with as simple as possible protocols. For a budget for $14k they would also include alternative radio technologies to ease the problem of being tracked. Certainly they would also shield the GSM parts from the rest of the system.

So yes, it would be feasible to build a much more secure device for that kind of money, but there is no indication of added security on that device. In fact it even runs _more_ software than your usual device and has added black box "security chips", which usually mean that they want to leak the key. ("security chips" are useless if you can just get that chip to sign, en- or decrypt any message by changing the code around it during runtime)

I think there is a certain limit to how much "thought" you can get done

After all you have only a limited number of people with a limited amount of intelligence. Even if you add more people, the additional friction might cancel out the amount of additional work you get done.

So you have lots of things to consider when designing such a system. For example it needs to do its basic function. If it doesn't work, the project certainly has failed. Then you have other things you need to do, examples are the user interface to set it up and security considerations. Adding to that there are self-made tasks, for example trying out a new feature of your language, or adding licensing measures. This all has to be done on a limited work budget.

The big problem with this comes when you have inexperienced people. Those people will only know certain types of technology. For example when it comes to configuration many people think of having an embedded web server. After all that's how their home router is configured. Those people have never seen simple console based configuration interfaces, or file formats that can be read from an SD-card and written with a text editor. They don't know what the alternatives are, therefore they effectively waste work on things they could have done simpler.

Attribution is near impossible

You cannot tell where software comes from... or to be more precise you can always fake that. Just install a Chinese version of your development platform and compile your software there.

We will see how this is used. If the banks now simply increase their actual security, for example by banning "Office" software, HTML-mail and using other cheap but effective tricks, it may have been criminals.

If instead people use this to lobby for more Cyberwar, it is very likely a false flag operation. After all passive defense is simple and cheap, war is much more profitable.

Actually they have such printers

They have printers for "digital printing" which can work with the same types of ink you have at companies printing money. So it should be possible, given the right paper and inks, to print money.

No they don't have the right to DRM

DRM systems essentially mean that I as a user have to give up my right to "integrity and confidentiality" of my computer, since I need to run code which works against me.

There are severe technical limitations

First of all, all "high bandwidth" components like the CPU and RAM won't be replacable easily, those would have to be in a single module as external connectors would increase the capacitive load which would drain the battery rather quickly.

Then there is a "magic triangle" of connectors. You can make them cheap, small or durable, but not all three at the same time. So you'll either have modules that are huge, expensive or will have connectors that break quickly rendering the module unusable. You can work around this a bit by having low pincount interfaces which are generally cheaper, but this cannot be done for every component.

At best you could hope for a small "basic" device with the screen built in, you could slide into a larger part with extra components like batteries, SDRs or a clamshell keyboard. Maybe that part could also hold the GSM/UMTS/LTE parts since those could be done via a simple low pincount interface.

Actually a DRAM phone sounds like a very interesting idea

I mean phones typically have power 24/7 since they have a battery... plus it would make it easy and cheap to implement meaningful security measures, like making it erase its contents when it's opened or the temperature suddenly drops. Since those things can be done mostly in software you could sell "high security" phones for a decent premium without it costing you much more.

"Ultramobile premium"

For Garner that probably means "Ultrabooks" which are huge slaps of a laptop... for some reason optimized to be thin. That's not portable. A portable device would be like a Palmtop.

Also all we are seeing right now is the "home computer" crowd moving towards tablets and "smart"phones. Those are the people who used to have traditional home computers and TV-sets connected to them. As PCs became cheaper, they moved to them, causing in part the "Windows Boom" in the 1990s. Now they move away from that market. What is left are more professional users, people who want to actually work with their computers...

and those people don't care about pre-loaded crap. They want to have the operating system they want, not whatever Microsoft considers fashionable at the time.