Engineering Ethics
When I got my Engineering degree, classes in Engineering Ethics (including security) were mandatory and a passing grade in each ethics class was required for graduation.
1483 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
Windows XP was the last real desktop OS Microsoft ever made. The user commanded, the OS obeyed. XP did not "helpfully" turn options back on "for a better user experience".
Since XP with each succeeding OS Microsoft has taken more and more control away from the user until we have Windows 10 where it's a constant battle to wrestle control of your computer from Microsoft, and now Windows 11 where the user is a helpless pawn.
AC, I don't think you've been paying attention. Everything you just wrote - sending literally everything you do with your car to the manufacturer, bricking your car remotely, collecting journey data - every manufacturer can do this today. And if you are financing/leasing your car it's worse, the bank/agency that holds your loan/lease has its own module (independent of the manufacturer) installed on your car that also knows your location at any given moment, and if you miss a payment can brick your car without due process.
Don't buy/lease or rent a connected car if you care about privacy.
This video is a very good explanation of the design flaws in the sub:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac
In short, the Titan was not designed by submarine Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), you'll have to watch the video to see why SMEs were deliberately excluded because if I posted it nobody would believe me. It never had an unmanned pressure test at the Titanic's depth. Instead of the reliability and simplicity of a wired control system, the sub is controlled by a COMMERCIAL-GRADE BLUETOOTH game controller (Why? How far can the pilot walk in the sub?) and as far as anyone knows there's no backup if the controller fails. There are multiple single-point of failures. There is also no voice communications and worst of all, loss of communications is considered normal.
The most damning bit of information is that in 2018 OceanGate's Director of Marine Operations, David Lochridge, was fired for failing to sign off on the safety of the hull at the depth of the Titanic's wreck. The hull is wound carbon-fiber which under pressure does not crack (which can still hold pressure) but shatters (the end comes quickly).
But the attraction of RISC-V is that it is not only royalty-free, but also under the governance of its member organizations rather than a single proprietor that the architecture can be extended with custom extensions.
I've already been involved with several RISC-V core design projects, 1) royalty-free and 2) custom instruction extensions are the two main technical reasons for it's growth. Who owns the architecture is less important than the first two. It's also a true RISC architecture and only has one ISA (each Arm core has two internal ISAs, a second ISA is dedicated for Thumb instructions). The list of technical advantages over Arm is extensive, the closer I look at the RISC-V internal architecture the more impressed I am.
In my career I've never seen a CPU architecture gain acceptance so fast. This isn't a marathon, this is a sprint, the internal schedules for RISC-V to replace Arm are extremely aggressive. RISC-V is inevitable.
> Never, ever own up to fixing anything. You either get a bollocking or you have to do it again next time.
Reminds me of a rule that a business mentor once told me: Nobody gets promoted for "stopping screwing-up".
It's a truism. Again and again I've seen careers come to a screeching halt for not knowing this rule.
We are not sure that the Texas AG is actually "investigating" anything.
After the San Benito CISD told what appears to be a series of lies about RDA already detailed in this article, Superintendent Theresa Servellon issued a statement saying "The District is providing information to the Texas Attorney General to aid representatives from the Texas Attorney General's office in their future inspection of RDA Technologies."
Note she doesn't actually claim there is presently an investigation, but an "inspection", and not an active one, but maybe sometime in the future. I'm willing to bet all the school district did was send the Texas AG an email. If the Texas AG bothered to respond in any meaningful way the ISD would claim they are "in communication" or "having a discussion". I'm pretty sure its against the law to claim someone is being investigated when they are not, and I'm also pretty sure lying about anything a state's AG is up to is very stupid if you expect their future cooperation.
I'm the same way - I pay with cash. It's not only about privacy, it's about not having my credit card slurped. It's also about sticking to a budget.
But even when I pay with cash, many retailers will ask for a mobile phone number. Well, they don't really ask, while staring at the register they intone "What's your mobile number?" in a demanding tone of voice that assumes compliance. I've noticed that people automatically comply. But when I respond "No", there's usually a bit of comic relief when they hesitate, frown at me, and say it's for their rewards program or something like that. After a brief argument they give up.
When it comes to privacy and data security, most people are frogs and let themselves be slowly boiled.
How many times have we seen someone with a blue check-mark tweet "This is my only Twitter account. I do not have any other Twitter accounts. Anyone else claiming to be me is not me" with some adding "If you paid for something sold by a Twitter account claiming to be me, it was not me".
Yes, this is a thing, often the same person has to tweet, then re-tweet, then re-re-tweet this using capitals when they get tweet replies accusing the blue-check of scamming them.
When Lenovo was caught stuffing Superfish adware in the BIOS:
SuperFish cram scandal: Lenovo must now ask nicely before stuffing new PCs with crapware
Going back to 2014, the Chinese computer goliath was found to have been bundling new Windows PCs it sold in the US with an application called VisualDiscovery that was presented as a "search assistant" tool to help users find similar products to those shown in images. In reality, VisualDiscovery was just a modified version of SuperFish, a piece of adware that injected targeted marketing links into webpages whenever the user hovered over an image. In addition to being annoying and invasive, researchers found that SuperFish's use of self-signed certificates also introduced security holes to machines it was installed on.
Because it was loaded from the BIOS the adware could be reloaded into a fresh install of Windows. I don't know if this also infected Linux as well.
John McAfee @officialmcafee Tweet Date: Oct 15, 2020 -
I am content in here. I have friends.
The food is good. All is well.
Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1316801215083225096
He went on: "The response to PR #835 has brought about a realisation at Muse that the convenience of using Yandex and Google is at odds with the public perception of trustworthiness, so we will be self-hosting instead."
FIFY
It's too late and Muse has already publicly announced their intentions. I've got Audacity 3.0.2 installed, the last version before Muse assimilated the software into their anti-privacy collective, and I have no intention of ever upgrading.
And September 2013, while getting paid as an advisor at Platfora, he signed a $250,000 annual contract to have Platfora provide software to Netflix. He then urged employees to find a use for the software, despite their objections and the fact that Netflix was already using and paying for a competing product.
Anyone who has been in the corporate world long enough knows if you already have a working product, and if you are being pushed to use a competing and inferior product, then there's either money or connections involved.
The real issue here is why wasn't this flagged and caught much earlier? Why wasn't this exposed during an audit? You don't get away with this type of open and obvious fraud unless more executives are involved.
Many years ago I was an FAE and had brought in some significant semiconductor business where I was owed a sizable bonus. My U.K. boss just flat-out told me over the phone, very coldly "I know you're owed this bonus, but I'm just not going to pay you."
I didn't not have the experience or the resources to fight the situation in court. Within a month I had secured a new job with a competitor which caused a panic with my boss who vaguely attacked me with non-specific threats. See, I had gotten those design-wins based on my personal relationships with the customer engineers who knew me from a previous employer. They knew I kept my promises and never once tried to B.S. them about the product's capabilities.
Without me, my previous employer lost the business I had secured. It gave me some small satisfaction, but I would have much rather had the commission.
Snake, you made it sound like this was a Texas-specific problem in 2011. But the Wiki page you linked to starts out:
"The 2011 Groundhog Day Blizzard was a powerful and historic winter storm that affected large swaths of the United States and Canada from January 31 to February 2, 2011"
So while you tried very hard to make 2011 look like a Texas-specific problem, this was really a powerful weather system that affected over 100 million people in North America, including overwhelming locations up north used to dealing with extreme winter weather. It was not the same as today. You really should read what you link to.
Snake wrote According to the news reports, about a decade ago Texas had a partial freezeover
"News reports"?
"About a decade ago"?
What exactly is a "partial freezeover" and what effect did it have?
[sarcasm=on] Thanks for the detailed information snake, you've certainly, uh, made a point [sarcasm=off] while proving mine.
Lots of misinformation here. I actually had a client two years ago involved with the Texas power grid. Most of the news & info on the internets, to put it politely, is just repeating "inaccurate" or "horribly biased" information.
First, Texas has a state of the art power grid and gets a lot of its power from renewables like solar and wind, up to 11% (not 7% as publicly stated), most of it wind. Despite performing all the recommended cold weather maintenance on the windmills most of the blades are iced over. If there is sufficient weight on the blades the wind turbine safeties will not permit the blades to turn. It's reported that only 10% of wind turbines are operational.
Second, a lot of Texas power comes from natural gas and a lot of the equipment has freezed up. If just the natural gas or wind had problems everything would be fine, but with both wind and gas curtailed it creates a power shortage.
The Texas power grid is CAPABLE of being completely independent, but despite what you've read online Texas regularly buys and sells electricity to surrounding states and anyone who tells you differently is repeating false information. In times of heavy summer demand Texas has purchased up to 15% of its power from nearby states and regularly sells power to other states. However, the news even in Texas has been incorrectly reporting that the Texas power grid is not connected to the rest of the USA. The reason for this deliberate misinformation is complicated and has nothing to do with the power outage, but today the CEO of ERCOT, Bill Magness, came clean and enigmatically said that electricity from surrounding states is "restricted", claiming that they also have frozen power delivery issues. This unusual restriction of neighboring states to supply power is now the subject of investigations, and in response these states might find power they buy from Texas to be more expensive in the coming months.
One thing Texas is great at doing is not repeating mistakes. Two or three years ago we had winter weather that caused frozen trees & branches to take down power lines. In response ONCOR waited until spring to examine all the trees near power lines (by helicopter & drone) and trimmed everything. Took almost a year to do it right. So I don't see a repeat of the present situation in coming years.
So the remaining questions are, 1) Why is Texas gas production really down, and 2) Why are neighboring states not supplying power to Texas? Once again, like the past year, I see what's really happening & then I see the news and internet report a fictitious account of reality.
Intel shares dived today after it revealed a steep slump in enterprise and government sales of its server chips – and delays to its latest Xeons.
Isn't this what always happens when you replace experienced professionals with cheap college grads? This is not a surprise, this is history.
Yes it is a warning shot. It's a message to the lower courts to start interpreting Section 230 correctly or the Supreme Court will do it for you. Section 230 is meant to provide online content providers like Facebook & Twitter legal immunity from member's posted content & actions. Section 230 does not provide the same protection to content & actions taken by the content provider itself, including posts by officers of the company posting on their own website as well as moderation actions. The lower courts have been providing broad immunity by misinterpreting Section 230 to include all actions taken by the content providers. What Judge Thomas is doing is warning the lower courts to interpret Section 230 properly, as it is written, and not play textual words games to grant corporate immunity where it does not belong.
The reason for the warning & not ruling from the bench is nowadays it's not good for a judge's reputation to have the Supreme's overturn your decision - for example, it gives ammunition to defense attorneys. They're probably teased by their fellow judges too ("Hey, Walter! Wanna overturn those pancakes for me? Hahahaha!").
It also affects the stocks of the affected companies if the Supreme's are forced to set a hard precedent by interpreting Section 230 correctly, as opposed to having an appellate court rule against the same company.
A few years ago, I had a credit card I typically used for the usual household items and computer equipment. One day I used it at a household appliance store for a purchase much larger than I'd even used it for. The store got a notice back that the card wasn't declined, but I had to call a number to verify the purchase. The reason was the purchase was so many thousands of $$$ more than I'd normally used the card for it counted as "suspicious activity".
I'm surprised PayPal doesn't have a similar system for fraud prevention.
Young people with limited experience don't understand that modern business consists mostly of 1) Fixing projects that go wrong, and 2) Preventing things that potentially go wrong. They end up doing lots of (1) because they don't have the experience to see (2).
Their main weakness is not understanding unintended consequences of their actions. That leads to mistakes which the experienced competition can gleefully take advantage of.
My first and only experience with an HP printer is a familiar one. Back in the days of Windows XP I installed an HP printer "driver" that had a 65M installation file. Of course it slowed the entire computer.
And of course the HP uninstall programs were incomplete (remember?). It took me days to remove all the additional files, hooks into the system, and registry entries. The entire time I repeated in my head the invocation "I will never buy another HP printer again." I was pretty good at IT back then but no expert. The computer ran better but still had glitches. It eventually took an OS reinstall to finally restore it to it's pre-HP glory. I also learned the value of system & registry backup programs and installed one on every computer I was responsible for.
I kept my promise - I never bought another HP printer - or HP anything - again.