Posts by Fred Flintstone 3108 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2009
.. I'd have to go and find the &^% car because it drove off by itself.
I just realised that this is going to introduce an entirely new type of car theft: some hacker in China activating your smart home's garage door, then telling your car to drive itself to the nearest mechanic to be stripped down for parts.
Just when you think you'll pay less insurance because of an (apparently) lower risk of accidents, up goes the risk of theft.
Oops.
Not to mention and perhaps more pertinently, from a distance it would be quite difficult for a potential watch nabber to pick out a Rolex from among the Citizens, Seikos and generic brand bling watches et al so their chances of selecting a rewarding target for their wrist-snatch job (oo-er missus) are pretty slim.
I suspect that of someone specialises in this sort of activity they will have also developed an eye for the right watch. The clues are not just the watch, but also generally what the target wears.
Can you just use a photo of your iris? Because that's really not secure at all.
I think it's too early to tell, but in my opinion you're looking at a clever volume test of new technology that Fujitsu is developing, smartphones are a really quick way to do a mass rollout of something that is still subject to improvement. In case you didn't know, Fujitsi also develops sensors for palm recognition, and how these work may give a clue as to why eye recognition may actually work.
For a start, these are depth readers, so they look "beyond" your skin for vein patterns, and a picture won't do. Next, they had to simplify analytics already as the original ones produced so much data that a pass/fail took seconds (if I recall correctly the first ones took well over 10 seconds) so they may have found a new balance between resolution and security and may have ported all that learning to this phone and iris scanning.
I'm now entering the realm of speculation, but I think it's plausible to assume that this eye scanner may look for vein patterns instead of iris matrix. They may swell up after a night out, but AFAIK the pattern doesn't change (anyone with a medical background? Is this correct?). Alternatively, few are focusing on iris recognition of late, so Fujitsu may have come up with something new.
As for how to use that, there are already various deployment models out there that don't require your biometrics to travel off the device - you'd just use a locally stored hash of the biometrics to open a credentials strongbox in the phone (which is where all the more traditional challenges hide :) ).
So, based on past performance, I reckon this may indeed be interesting enough to keep an eye on, so to speak :)
It's not about where your data is hosted, it's about where your legal agreement with the company is hosted.
It's a bit more complex than that, because the company also has to comply with the laws where it is located, and on top of that you also have the jurisdictions of all the countries through which your data travels - a factor you usually have no control over but which could in Europe involve countries such as Sweden where the FRA law was only tuned down a bit after protest.
Actually, he could be wrong this time.
It is apparently Apple who may be the assisting party..
there's something that doesn't quite up there
That wouldn't be the first time..
The one with the Casio FX 602P, thanks.
.. on the superbly appropriate picture leading this article.
Honestly, this is the proverbial case where that one picture speaks a thousand words. Not that I didn't enjoy reading the article, mind, but my personal feelings about the impact this bill will have are pretty much summed up by that image.
Excellent choice.
The biggest benefit of the in car system is the availability of power, the biggest issue is the usual lack of updates
In-car systems also tend to have access to wheel motion detectors. That in combination with a magnetic compass allows an in-car nav system to continue guidance in, for instance, long tunnels. The TomTom kit like the app in my phone tends to sort of make things up for a while :).
What I really like of the phone version is that it checks the route for traffic jams and tries to reroute me if possible, but I suspect it's not hard to add that to modern car media systems (especially since they may have to dial 112 in the future, so the electronics will already be available).
but I can't think of anything that airbus knows how to do that Boeing, for instance, doesn't
It doesn't have to be technical. Just having knowledge of their bidding process and plans is enough to create an advantage for Boeing by underbidding them by a percentage. Of course, if Airbus dreams up something that Boeing wants it's handy yo have the spying already in place, but financials and bids in that industry are worth the effort alone.
Speaking as someone who operates an American software company actively considering a corporate move to the EU, I can say that this kind of activity makes me want to move over there that much quicker.
It may actually be your only option to still get revenue if it goes on like this - EU companies have to follow privacy laws too, and they're not going to buy services that put them in a position where they can be accused of breaking the law, which is the case by default with US located facilities. That's the big elephant in every Silicon Valley boardroom.
We've been asked to execute a few moves like this now - not by design, but as soon as we profiled the corporate legal exposures, the boards got nervous because there are not that many ways to reduce that exposure other than moving the company HQ, main functions and service platforms (usually, a sales & support subsidiary is left behind to offer local support). As a former US company it is easier to retain access to the US market and also sell to the EU than it is for a US based company to sell into Europe, so the next step is usually gaining shareholder agreements and then planning the migration.
It's quite an exercise to do it right, so good luck with your move.
Yes, got a Bluetooth proximity lock for OSX as well. Very handy when working on site, and an easy way to impress the natives :).
I once had this in Paris - nobody had told me that the site we were going to visit needed ID, so I had all of that locked away at the hotel. Duh.
Much to my surprise, a business card was acceptable too, so I took one out of my pocket. Only as my hand moved towards the desk did I notice that it was someone else's business card (someone I met the day before).
Like a true professional, I decided to go with the flow and sure enough, I got away with it :).
Ah, but it doesn't seem to be about solving a problem. It's more likely doing something for the sake of doing it, just because they can. Design awards and press buzz as a bonus.
I rather like the stubbornness of not giving up on an idea just because it happens to be difficult or even pointless. It reminds me of the Useless machines. They truly do nothing useful, but it's fun nevertheless.
My personal favourite has always been Quinting. I recall stopping mid stride after walking past a shop in the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, because my brain had only then registered that was something weird with the watch I just glanced at - there was seemingly nothing driving the arms in this totally see-through watch.
It doesn't come out well in some pictures, but you can look through them - there is no mechanism visible as it's all in the edge.
But I think there would be a market for really top quality watch faces being sold for not insignificant amounts of money.
I suspect that market would collapse soon, either under the weight of IP lawyers or by the release of an SDK so people can cook up their own watch faces (that is probably the watch app development equivalent of "Hello world").
The EU has just published a couple of interesting YouTube explainers that tackles "nothing to hide" excuses etc:
For citizens, an explainer with annoying fashionable tingle-tangle music, and a more business focused version.
In that context it's brutally ironic they rely on we-track-anything-that-moves Google based services, but hey, it's a start. The full STOA "Mass surveillance of IT Users" reports can be found on the LIBE main page under "highlights".
There is probably some serious data somewhere (think airforce or NASA studies) about how long it takes a human to grok information from displays.
I know from experience that you can translate an angle (analogue) much quicker to a too high/too low assessment than a digital number - that's also why I dislike digital speedometers (I was about to say "speedos", but somehow that conjured up a different image :) ).
You touch on another aspect of this story: the 'so what?' part. I see a lot less of YouTube since it got saturated with unavoidable ads (AdBlockers don't work against ads inserted into your video stream), and that's on a laptop.
Despite having a smart TV, I have as yet not used anything of the built in apps, simply because I bought the thing for being big, not for being connected (unfortunately, it's impossible to find a decent size TV without this crud).
If there is one thing that's mislabelled on these units, it's the "Smart" part. The UI is terrible (at least on a Samsung), and the only way to fix that is to connect a keyboard and mouse .. at which point I'm basically back in laptop land, and that is easier if I just punt the stream straight into the wireless link and play back via the AppleTV unit (the non-Apple kit runs Airparrot 2 so it can do the same - excellent for meetings).
So, in conclusion, personally not really bothered about these plans, but I must admit I'm surprised that Google is willing to cut off so many eyeballs from its advertising and data collection efforts.
Yes, it seems to have sunk without a trace (sorry :).
I suspect that it's possibly a heck of a lot harder to do this in a data centre used by all sorts of different people because they all have different needs, but liquid cooling in itself seemed to be far more efficient at transferring heat to where you could vent it all. It doesn't reduce the *amount* of heat you need to get rid of, just makes transport more efficient.
Interesting question - would love to hear of anyone who has an insight into that one.
.. Demented Reality. Mainly because the people who try to sell me this technology seem to have entirely different ideas about what my reality needs to augmented with than I do.
My preferred augmentation is not augmentation at all in the dictionary sense: it's reduction. Most AR projects add data to sensory overload which is not exactly helpful. What I'd like to see is AR that takes away irrelevant data (maybe use the tech that allows you to lift an unloved person out of pictures) and only then add information to stuff that matters.
A sensibly design IoT oven would not allow independent control of those items from outside
Let's take a step back: a sensibly designed APPLIANCE would not accept instructions that would override some basic safety measures. It's not like this is a new concept - SCADA environments with components that can cause serious trouble tend to have an isolated, wholly independent ESD (Emergency ShutDown) segment which you cannot touch from the outside: when that triggers, it will independently do what is safest to shut things down (which could be a sequence to shut down a complete plant).
If a supplier brought out an IoT gas oven which enabled unsafe situations through a hack or otherwise it would be sued into oblivion, hopefully even before the thing made its first victim. If something can possibly say "boom" and make victims, the term "negligence" tends attracts criminal aspects. I think *that* is at least not a worry.
a better idea would have been to allow the sale but ensure the chips are sufficiently degraded to give false results.
Err - it's Intel you're talking about. That occasionally happens even by accident. :)
Should lead to a whole new set of breakthroughs as china invents its own line of chips instead of just buying Xeons.
Like when we banned US companies from launching satelites on Chinese rockets and so the chinese built their own satelites.
It's very nice of them to stimulate other economies, really. They denied Russia decent computers, so the Russians became *very* good at efficiently eking the last erg of power out of what they had. They denied the Japanese a sufficient allocation of IP4 addresses, so they are now over a DECADE ahead in the use of IPv6.
Well done, very generous of them.
</sarcasm>
Fun theory, but it's hardly 'nearby'. Other end of High Holborn, and beyond.
On the Internet, there isn't such a thing as distance. Only ping times and latency :).
I think the theory has merit, though, it's *exactly* because it's not next door that it makes sense - you wouldn't want to have the emergency services on top of you when you're pulling off a heist like that, you want them elsewhere engaged.
But for the moment it remains a theory AFAIK - I haven't seen anything tie the two together other than timing.
Personally, I thought the interview was clumsily handled and John Oliver did himself no favours with his playing to 'the Russians are gonna get me' cold war gags. Normally very fond of his shows, this one not so much.
To be honest, that's what I originally thought too, but I have changed my mind (took a fresh one from the freezer etc etc). I'm the first to agree the interview was far from perfect and I am frankly still stumped to find a real focus point in the whole duration, but it did one thing that nobody else has bothered with: it started to address the "so what?" factor for Joe Public.
The topic privacy has been made very, very complicated, not exactly helped by technical people slinging jargon at it as if that improves the quality of their warez. As with the finance industry, I am reaching the conclusion that that complexity is not by accident. People eventually go numb, even if the topic at hand has the potential to negatively affect their lives, and I have spoken with various journalists who have detected a sort of "Snowden fatigue", not helped by the fact that the average tabloid reader (of which there are many) has been trained to have the attention span of a mosquito on acid.
The mechanism was IMHO very crude (but that may be me being old fashioned) but what he did was strip out all the BS, all the stuff that plays peripherally but distracts, and make it real for people without going completely into "think of the children" pictures-of-your-teenage-daughter mode - also because it would otherwise lose its audience (it's still comedy, albeit with a more realistic edge). Sometimes, knowing too much doesn't help getting the message across.
The result was that, on reflection, the interview has more value than I originally picked up, because the current problem with privacy (as amply demonstrated by the interviewees, selective or not) is that the majority of people are not really aware of what is happening and what the consequences are, and even in a pretend democracy, the "majority of people" means the majority vote (it saves having to rig the voting system with all the risks inherent, but e-voting discussions are for another day).
Was this a good interview? No, it was only moderately entertaining, but for a first attempt at bringing something down to a level for mass consumption I do think it worked - now this approach needs refining (and maybe a bit less crude). Privacy matters, but the collective *we* (of which I deem myself part after enough coffee) need to find more tools to communicate exactly WHY. In that context, I liked the interview.
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