Posts by Chairo 716 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Nov 2012
They just need to:
- enforce secure boot
- install a hardware DRM module
- solder in the memory and glue in the battery
- make sure it self-destructs after opening
- there must be a firmware backdoor installed
- it has to lose data occasionally, because "corruption is good"
What else?
I'd say one other reason people are not trying out Win10 is privacy.
I agree. However Microsoft fixed this by sneakinginstalling the same tracking spywarefeedback features into Windows 7 and Windows 8 by security updates.
Perhaps they need to advertise this more, so people are more ready to give up their current OS. "Get over it - no need to stick to 7 or 8, we track you anyway. You will be assimilated, resistance is futile". Yeah, that'll teach them...
Edit: The scary thing is that they might really think like that...
A lesson Microsoft never seems to learn. Up to a degree I can understand it. By historical accident and aggressive sales/marketing/lobbying Microsoft managed to remove OS customer choice for more than a decade and it worked out pretty well for everyone. What they don't seem to realise is that people accepted the OS monopoly not only out of convenience, but also because Windows was seen as kind of a commodity needed for having choice in software selection and installation. They were happily using windows, because they could just buy and install everything they liked from wherever they liked with good support and no undue trouble. And software was available, because there were lots of developers that could use a wide range of stable high quality development tools.
With Windows 8 Microsoft broke the deal. They started to lock down software installation, forced an inconvenient (for the vast majority of desktop users), unloved and unwanted interface down users throat and started to push crippled programs with a impossible locked down user interface, which was ironically called "modern" and that were served in an Apple style appstore. Developing for Windows suddenly changed from a relatively straightforward process into a quickly changing mess of tools and mostly incompatible APIs.
Suddenly the OS was pushed in the focus and people realized that it stopped to be a commodity and is transformed into something they don't like at all. In short they felt betrayed and what little trust they had in Microsoft was destroyed.
Now Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 with down user's throats and hammers it in with a virtual baseball bat. Just enter "Windows 10 nagware" in any search engine and you will find millions of hits. Funnily about 44 million hits on Google and about 18000 hits on Bing.
Excellent marketing - if you want to prevent people from installing Windows 10 and destroy your brand, at least. What are they thinking? Are they really thinking?
Two thirds of women would prefer to date a bearded man over a clean-shaven man
Now, that is a bold statement. Where did they conduct the research? Papua New Guinea? And what about men with stubbly beards? I feel much more research is needed in this particular topic.
- mine's the one with the walrus moustage...
1L engines that are operated to the maximum extent of their performance envelope perform virtually identically to other companies 2.5L engines
Not so surprising. Engines, and in particular indirect injection gasoline engines operate most efficiently on full load and also have an emission minimum there. In hybrid vehicles this is used to lower the fuel consumption by artificially adding load over charging the battery. This is one of the reasons hybrid vehicles often sound "struggling", even under normal driving conditions.
Now, if you need durability, you might be better off with the 2.5l engine. Horses for courses.
Bah, all we need is to develop scrith and some way to produce it in quantity - like a matter converter. Simple (if you write a SF novel).
Anyway, if we could develop something like scrith in this time and political climate, it would probably be locked down, stay top secret and would be available for military use only.
Being number two in highly competitive markets is a pain. The number one always has more money to spend on R&D and marketing. As long as Intel doesn't do another management induced stumble like the Pentium4/RDRAM bundling deal or the "64 bit only on ITANIC" disaster, AMD will always have a tough time. Pity, that AMD wasn't able to secure their market at these occasions. Intel's marketing machine was strong enough to make up for the gaps.
The real problem they have is that these systems need to be properly looked after. They wear out, run out of urea, get fouled up. A diesel car when it's brand new is pretty clean, but after a 100,000 miles who knows? Especially if you run it on cheap diesel.
CARB has made it quite difficult for the car owner to cheat on this one. If the urea tank is empty, the vehicle will warn you a few times politely and then will refuse to start the engine. They call it "inducement action". Also if some wise guy fills in water (or any other fluid) instead of urea, the system will detect it and politely gives the driver a wedgie. As for long term emission stability, CARB forces the vehicle makers to do the homologation with aged components in the first place. In the second place they regularly check aged vehicles from the "real world", just in case. As for the bad fuel, OBD asks for quite strict emission diagnostics. You have NOx and particulate mass sensors that will find out about if the emissions drift too far out of the window.
They are quite clever chaps and take into account that vehicles are sold to normal people that might want to "cut expenses".
What they didn't account for was active cheating from the manufacturer's side.
I suppose that will change in the future,,,
why isn't Apple using signed bootloader like Winphone or some Androids
The goal of IOS jailbreaking is not to install another OS. It is about patching the system in order to enable apps to run without signature and with root rights.
This way you can run apps that Apple disapproves of (like emulators) and enable settings and functions that would otherwise be blocked.
Oh, and yes, since IOS 6 (IIRC) they also use a signed bootloader. Part of the signature is the serial number of the device, so you need to obtain a key from Apple to reflash. And Apple only provides this key for the latest IOS version, making it impossible to fall-back to a earlier IOS version, if the new version turns out to be an ugly bundle of bugs that even makes you sick (like early IOS7 did). That might be one reason, why people hesitate to update their IOS devices, lately.
The implementation of Chinese characters is really a problem in Unicode. You have simplified ones, used in Mainland China, traditional ones used in Taiwan and a slightly different subset of the traditional ones used in Japan + an additional of ~100 other characters that they use for the two other alphabets they use in Japan. All in all we talk about a set of several thousand characters for each set. It seems 16 bit Unicode is already at its limit there. Using a Chinese smartphone with Japanese web pages gives mixed results. Some of the Japanese style characters in unicode seem to be replaced with slightly different Chinese ones.
I suppose the Chinese have the same trouble, the other way around. I wonder if this is sorted out with newer implementations of Unicode.
"controlled access to source code"
Now that is a nice term. Is there perhaps a tool-chain included to make sure this code really compiles to the binaries they got? Otherwise "controlled access to source code" could well mean - "we edited out the stuff you are not supposed to see, before we handed it over".
But my guess is rather that it means "we can show you printouts which you can search while we are together with you in a meeting room and we'll collect everything afterwards" - good luck finding anything in this heap of paper!
Oh well, I guess I haven't got enough faith in humankind. Oh, wait - megacorps and gouvernment agencies are non-human entities, right?
the FBI was asking for all available personal date of all customers + IP address. And if this went out to a relatively small ISP, it can be assumed that most other ISPs got the same request with the same gag order - and complied without a fight.
They sure like collecting stuff, don't they? But for non-Americans that have to go there for business trips, this doesn't come as a surprise. The Feds are slurping our personal data all the time, directly form the airline company.
This whole WIndows 10 update story is really a masterpiece of company overreach. I wonder how much they can abuse their customers and still get away with it.
For people who explicitly don't want WIndows 10, this download is nothing but useless data garbage. Even if you are not on a metered connection it will certainly slow down your machine. I just had my parents in law asking me to check their machine, because lately it became so slow. After uninstalling KB3035583 it became a bit more responsive (apparently that one not only downloads a lot of data garbage, but also hugs a lot of memory). Luckily I foresaw Microsoft to continue on this path and slapped in a few more GB of memory, just in case. Turns out I was right and in my opinion Microsoft is in the wrong. What is going on here? Did they suddenly get brain cancer? Did I miss something?
Please stop this madness - shoot the hipsters in charge and give us back our old monopolistic boring Microsoft!
Settling underwater is less likely than you'd think, mainly due to decompression.. would you want to live somewhere where you have to spend a day in a hypobaric chamber just to go to the surface?
That would depend on how deep you go and on what pressure your dome can tolerate.
Perfect would be to have a dome made of glass segments, filled with near to surface pressure. Make the segments small enough to make them cheap, put everything together under water and evacuate it afterwards. If you can keep surface pressure inside you can just connect your habitation with a simple tunnel to the city and you have no problem with anchorage, as it will work effectively like a huge sucker cup and just stays in place and is held together by the weight of the water above.
Maintaining it might be difficult, due to the corrosive nature of sea water, but the technology is not so far out of reach. As for earthquakes - make it flexible enough that it can swing without collapsing. The Japanese do it all the time for their housings. Also it would probably be the safest place to be in case of a tsunami. That might be a good selling argument, btw.
We would be settling the Moon and asteroids first
And even before that we could set up some nice undersea cities on good old earth. The technology would be similar and if something goes wrong we can still evacuate everyone fairly easily.
Once that works out fine and we have the technology to survive a prolonged time in glass covered cities we can use the technology for the next step.
Actually it might even pay off nicely to set up some dome city in a densely populated area like San Fransisco for starters. Ground is cheap underseas.
In parallel start mining the Moon and the belt and develop space technology. As a next step, establish settlements there. The gravity wells should be last (nut not least) on the list.
If humankind would be able to look ahead and plan for more than 4 years, we could already be there.
I don't know about you, but I can look away from a single light point source rather easily. Helps when commuting around sunrise/sunset.
Believe me, coherent light from a green laser will blind you more than just a moment. Especially at night. Looking away does not help, you have to close your eyes as long as the light source is pointed at your head.
if you blind the driver with a laser pointer, he will probably hit the brakes, too. No need to create complex obstacles or anything, using laser echos.
These things can be a pest. Especially in vacation sites where they are sold to teenagers that have nothing better to do than pointing them around on others at night.
... would have caused more than £120m of losses to the film industry "if each of the persons viewing a film had watched it at the cinema or bought a DVD".
... or if the movie industry would have started offering legal streaming services when it became technically possible to do so, instead of trying to cling to their old and outdated distribution system and cement it with lawsuits...
... If unauthorised, such interference constitutes a criminal act.
And if someone is authorised to hack your vehicle it is perfectly OK, right? WTF?
The company is unaware of any injuries related to software exploitation, nor is it aware of any related complaints, warranty claims or accidents – independent of the media demonstration.
Just wait until the first customer that had an accident claims he had been hacked. And good chance to proof it hasn't! Reversal of the burden of proof is the keyword here. If the customer claims, the manufacturer has to prove the opposite. And how to prove it has not been hacked if there is a known vulnerability?
Toyota should invest that in learning how to install an exhaust pipe.
They had some design competition going on, but so far the solutions are not convicing.
but my personal experience with Huawei tells me to buy something else next time.
My 2 1/2 years old Honor 2 had just two updates after release. The first to 4.1 was so buggy that it was unusable - their fix was to offer a downgrade to 4.0. The second update to 4.2 came after one year. It was actually usable. It was also the last update this phone ever saw. At least in the international market.
Looking at the P6 and P7 update availability, the situation might have changed somewhat, but they are still not really giving an acceptable after market service outside of China. Given the latest security bugs in Android that's a killer for Huawei in my book.
Is that the little hat on the snowball in hell ?
Oh my, that is now nearly twenty years old. How things have <not> changed.
To be fair, every little counts, of course.
that didn't hurt so much, did it? Then let's try the second step. Go all they way and don't chicken out.
Yes, allow all media to be disabled by default.
As it is, I have my speaker muted all the time to avoid embarrassment. And I guess I am hardly alone.
Unfortunately this also turns off legit audio, like for example the ringing of my SIP phone.
to be able to call emergency services, is something at which a mobile phone is rather good
Well, that "be able to call" thing is the key here. You might not be able to make a call after a crash.
Generally it's a good idea to have a system that calls automatically for help after a car crash. But the system must be made in a way that it cannot be misused. Unfortunately most of these emergency call systems connect to the CAN to acquire things like vehicle speed and airbag status.
There is a lot of useful information available there, but unfortunately it is a completely unsecured bus. The control units accept pretty much every input sent to them via CAN, so it is really playing with fire to connect it to the internet. I have the same concerns for the new "Usage Based Insurance" systems. These things are just waiting to be hacked.
It sounds hysteric, but effectively you can mis-use these systems by checking the driving situation of a particular person and at the right moment send a torque demand to kill him or her.
Paranoid - perhaps, but I'm pretty sure there are people in the wild wild web who would be more than happy to anonymously kill others.
The good news? It at least doesn't actually control anything; all it does is locate the vehicle with “pinpoint accuracy” and give it the ability to summon emergency services.
Sure - and that little connector plugged in the OBD port is completely passive, right?
Fact is that pretty much all engine ECUs listen to a certain CAN frame from the ESP (stability control) control unit. And this frame can be send from the OBD connector. This is how some chip tuning solutions work. They listen to the accelerator pedal signal and add some additional torque, to make the vehicle more "responsive".
This interface is vehicle manufacturer specific, so once you are in the system you could give for example all people driving a certain brand a hefty push for a few seconds. Really nasty, especially if you are driving a vehicle with automatic transmission.
There might be other bad things you can do over the vehicle CAN, but that one I know for sure.
Generally I find it negligent to connect the vehicle CAN to the internet, even with a firewall between there is no 100% guarantee that it will not be hacked. Systems that can potentially kill you if misused should always be air-gapped IMO.
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