Posts by Charles 9

"We did it already. It's called a train."

No, because unlike a train, a car can go between two arbitrary points without need of switches or other restricting mechanisms. As long as there's road between A and B, you can almost always reach it. That's why many people insist on a personal car: the ability to take it anywhere, anytime whenever the need arises. Unless you can do that, practically door-to-door, trains will never replace cars.

Re: Easy Peasy way to resolve the question

So why not have the Google cars take a few runs up and down Donner Pass and back in the winter? Donner Pass isn't too far away and is notoriously difficult during a blizzard.

Re: In a word - he's a moron

"To add to your point, once autonomous cars exist the usual argument for the defence - if you take my client's licence away he'll lose his job and his family will be on the street - won't be true any more."

What if the driver is a trucker?

Still not as hard as you think. No seat belts, for example, so you can fall over in a drunken stupor. Also, the suspension is usually nonexistent, so one bad rock or pit and you can be thrown off.

Re: Code could make "moral decisions" based on flag.

"a nice 120 mph cruise on the interstates drafting inches behind a long line of other automated cars would make short work of long trips"

...until the lead car suffers a spontaneous blowout. Moments later, you'll have a massive 20-car pileup on the motorway and probably more than a few fatalities. These sci-fi scenarios never take Murphy into account.

Many shop keep low tills to deter robbery. That's why they don't do cash back or limit it. And Legal Tender laws allow stores discretion when faced with large bills/notes.

Re: From this side of the Pacific....

As far as it goes, South Korea is a microcosm for the kind of cyberpunk future you might read about in William Gibson's Sprawl books or a Shadowrun sourcebook. Those chaebols carry as much if not more clout than the government, given their huge, international nature.

Not in South Korea. The chaebols go to extremes to "keep it in the family". Samsung, Hanjin, LG, Lotte...ALL of them have family at the top levels of their hierarchies.

And people wonder why South Korea is one of the the worst first-world nations in regards to suicides: worse than Japan's (and theirs are well documented for the same reasons: extreme cultural and social pressure).

According to that chart listed further down, South Korea is #2 overall and Japan #17 (but much higher once you exclude third-world countries). To compare, the US is a third of the way down the list, the UK two-thirds down.

Re: Historic?

"Also, from a quick bit of research, Samsung seems to still be a family owned business, which seems remarkable for a company with something like 17% of Korea's GDP."

Not really. This is par for the course with the chaebols. Their family-oriented nature was brought to the forefront recently with Hanjin Shipping Company's bankruptcy and with fierce family feuds over at Lotte.

Re: S/Mime

But then things BREAK and users complain. Plus, for any given signature framework, someone can STEAL the credentials (like Realtek's driver signing keys).

Re: You can't fix stupid!

...ESPECIALLY when they're over your head.

Re: Neuter the attachments, validate the links and isolate the browser

And how do you keep people over your head from complaining?

Re: Neuter the attachments, validate the links and isolate the browser

"Of course there's more to it but as such an 'efficient' attack vector and with decent user education at least a generation away email security needs to be a bit more than spam blocking."

A LOT more to it. A malware could just attack and take over the e-mail client, no matter how thin or sandboxed it may be (sandbox escape and privilege escalation are common now), and use it as a springboard to other exploits. Same with malware web links. It'll probably use a Turing Test so that it passes validation checks and ONLY infects when it detects a human in control. And they can escape the browser as easily as the e-mail sandbox (after all, escaping a Java sandbox is easy enough, too).

As for educating users, didn't a comedian once note that you can't fix stupid? And suppose the Stupid is over your head?

Re: wrong tree

"the "people" -- will gladly embrace it"

Really? Show me a real-world situation where security trumps ease of use? And don't say the front door because that was a compromise: most front doors only have ONE dead bolt.

Re: "Not really. What you can do, they can UNdo"

"The other is to not have that omnipotent root. There needs to be a disk space manager that can dole out a portion of space to the server. That manager doesn't, however, have to have the rights to read or write to that portion, nor does it have to have the rights to set up user or program IDs. It might even be the case that such a manager can only be active when booted into a safe mode."

SOMEONE has to have access to it or it's useless; the attacker just poses or takes over that someone. Plus if there's only one non-root way in or out, what happens if that way gets hosed (including any and all backups--think Murphy)? You end up with a lockout situation, and if that locked-out area has critical data, you can't just erase it and move in, either.

"Do we sacrifice some operational convenience for this sort of OS? Maybe, but it's arguable that some of our woes are the direct result of sacrificing security for convenience."

And convenience trumps security 8 days a week. Who cares about security if the job doesn't get done? The job ALWAYS comes first because your job (and the business) depend upon it first and foremost.

PS. As for Qubes, credits to milos a hypervisor attack pwns the underlayer before long.

"One quick solution is to not allow anything in email to be executed."

They'll just find an exploit and go AROUND it, say by latching to another process.

"Something more drastic would be a very different OS architecture so, for example, your ransomware can't overwrite your office suite files because the server which is the only thing that can actually access the part of the disk with those files on it only responds to the office suite programs."

Then they just go for the server instead. There MUST be a way to ACCESS it, and if you can ACCESS it, someone else can hack it.

"But the banking spam, for instance, is very unlikely to have come from a pwned machine in the bank"

Meaning that'll be EXACTLY where it comes from.

"Not the only solution. What's required is to build trustable services on top of it. That wouldn't preclude the continued existence of untrustable services."

No, because trusted services on an UNtrusted medium open you to Men in the Middle. It's the Weak Link problem. You have to secure the ENTIRE thing, end-to-end, or the weak link pwns you.

Put it this. In today's world, the operative statement is "Don't Trust ANYONE...Not Even Yourself."

Re: "Not really. What you can do, they can UNdo"

But the point is it doesn't really make things harder. If you can go AROUND the security measure (by, say, using privilege escalation) then it becomes just another hoop to jump, and hoop jumping tends to hurt users more than they help because they start to find ways AROUND the hoops. That's why houses only have ONE dead bolt typically.

"There's a good deal more that tech can do."

Not really. What you can do, they can UNdo.

"One would be to sandbox email handling so that ransomware can't get at the user's files or gain privilege to install keyloggers or whatever."

Java was designed with a sandbox and look where it is now. Fact is, sandboxes can be ESCAPED and routinely ARE escaped Even hypervisors are under attack. We're also seeing e-mails that can attack even from plain text mode, even from the preview window. What next? e-mails that pwn you (or your hypervisor) on download, before you even have the chance to see it?

"Another would be to verify message source."

Not much good when the attack came from a pwned machine. The address would likely already be verified if not an insider.

"We have a system which was built on the premise that people could be trusted and put it in the hands of those who can't and haven't really considered what has to be done to rectify that situation."

The ONLY solution is to REbuild the ENTIRE Internet from scratch, using a basis of DIStrust instead. But that would break a lot of things, not the least of which being the anonymity that allows whistleblowers and the like to speak their minds without threat from an oppressive State. Meaning a potentially disastrous unintended consequence.

Re: This is a weaselly excuse...

"The safety design of modern cars means that you should be able to walk away from a 30mph crash if you're inside the vehicle."

The thing about the tree, though, is that it could easily fall ONTO the car, crushing the cab. It would be even worse if the object in question is a concrete pole or some other very heavy top-heavy object...or instead of a tree, the only way to avoid tragedy (say an careening bus full of children) is to drive over an edge.

Re: 'Pranksters' paradise

Why bother putting their skins at risk from a car that decides to run them over? Just use life-size human-shaped balloons. I don't think car sensors are smart enough to distinguish between these and humans and will react accordingly without risk to the prankster.

Re: would you by a car which might consider killing you?

But the same can be said of the bystanders and that's covered by the First Law, too. So that's why the Trolley Problem: the First Law WILL be violated no matter what you do, so what will the automated car do: save the passengers and become a risk to bystanders (raising government scrutiny, plus it may be your spouse, kid, or relative in danger) or save the bystanders and become a risk to the passengers (posing a sales problem to the dealers)? And no, any third option will just endanger BOTH groups.

"But this is a very temporary problem, roads will not be accessible to people soon and automated will be the only, and safest, way to travel."

Don't be so sure. The Trolley problem demonstrates a significant moral angle to driving. And because of this, competent drivers tend to develop intuitive road awareness that comes practically from instinct so can't be taught to a computer...because we don't know how we come about the skills.

The Trollable Self-Driving Car

Re: Lets play a game

The Moral Machine IINM is BASED on the Trolley Problem.

Re: How is it happening now?

Legally, that's why you have trials, because things aren't always black and white and judges and juries have to assess the situation on a case-by-case basis. Common example: you killed someone in an ambush, but he'd been pursuing and shooting at you previously (meaning the aggravating circumstance of lying in wait is countered by the mitigating circumstance of immediate threat to life). It's up to the courts to determine if the loss of life was the result of deliberate action (murder), negligence (manslaughter), or some other circumstance, and if so, how much is the accused responsible for the circumstance (did the accused act willingly or was coerced, threatened, or otherwise forced into a no-win situation like the Trolley Problem). Were there other people involved? One common variation of the Trolley Problem can be called Guerillas In The Village (instead of you in a trolley, it's you encountering it's a bunch of militant guerillas about to wipe out a village and deciding for variety to let the rest of the village off if you execute one of them).

That's also why you have inquiries when tragedies hit (the inquest into the late Phillip Hughes is in the news right now), to see if things were simply fate (the inquest seems to be heading in that direction) and where things could be improved in future (perhaps there will be research into better neck protection if it doesn't hamper batsmen too much).

Re: Hard decision but Mercedes are probably right

"...it was almost certainly driving too fast in the first place."

There's no safe speed when an obstacle suddenly emerges from a blind spot less than ten feet in front of you (like the COMMON scenario of a little child, concealed by parked cars, suddenly running out into the street).

Re: Hard decision but Mercedes are probably right

"Basically, If I was buying an autonomous car, I would want it to protect ME. (humans are ultimately selfish, no matter what you say) and I would certainly not want it to be second-guessing my life over what ultimately could be just a paper bag. And humans are the customer, so this makes perfect commercial sense."

But then what happens when the person the car is approaching is your wife or kid suddenly emerging from a blind approach on a noisy, rainy day for some emergency? Now it's personal AND a situation where you could morally be inclined to go "them not I".

Re: Money

Which fighting/vicious dog owners will simply ignore. And if the law starts snooping, they'll either cut and run or let the dogs loose. What good is a fatal dog attack when the dog's found to have no chip and no way to trace it to its owner?

Re: Turn off uPNP

"Weak parenting! Kids (can) learn really quickly that wants satisfaction carries a cost."

And many CAN'T. Seen it FIRSTHAND, so I'm speaking from experience. Far too often, it's the children that trigger divorce...or worse.

"As yet not come across a game (Xbox One) that has required me to turn on uPnP on the WAN interface. Suspect if we do come across one, the Xbox will be relocated to it's own VLan."

And if you don't know how to do that and have no one to turn to? Not all of us are geeks or know geeks.

Re: telnet?

"Seriously, this needs shooting in the head now. There's no reason for _anything_ to be using telnet these days, there really isn't."

But Telnet is simply a straight-up connection between two servers. It's the basis for all the other protocols including WWW (meaning I can masquerade--badly--as a WWW browser by telnetting to some server's port 80 and hand-feeding it the appropriate commands). What's really the difference between HTTPing to port 80 and Telnetting to it?

Re: Not for me

FIRSTHAND experience? Because I've consistently gotten it to work. IN an accident situation where traffic basically stood still. With the windows up, the sound of other cars is muffled enough to make your voice still audible to a mounted tablet since the microphone is usually uncovered on one end.

BTW, the state in question is Virginia. Here's the relevant passage from the Code of Virginia (§ 46.2-1054):

"It shall be unlawful for any person to drive a motor vehicle on a highway in the Commonwealth with any object or objects, other than a rear view mirror, sun visor, or other equipment of the motor vehicle approved by the Superintendent, suspended from any part of the motor vehicle in such a manner as to obstruct the driver's clear view of the highway through the windshield, the front side windows, or the rear window, or to alter a passenger-carrying vehicle in such a manner as to obstruct the driver's view through the windshield."

I hear California has a similar code, and the cops can have pretty strict views on the definition of "clear view" based on what I've seen with traffic stops (they may not get you just for it, but if they pull you over for something else, they can nail you then). They generally want you to get things off the dash.