Cloudiness
The cloud is fine for some uses but for mission critical uses I would be very wary. Outages will occur to all providers with varying degrees of frequency and severity.
4139 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
Yelp and other review sites have a problem with accuracy and verify the reviewers bona fides. It is fairly easy to post a bogus review on these sites. Reviews on Amazon suffer from this to some extent but Amazon can verify if the reviewer actually purchased the product.
Also, how many bad reviews did this guy get versus good reviews?
GM is issuing the recall before it will be mandated by the regulators. Also, this puts them in a more favorable civil liability position of they realized there was a problem and issued the recall in presumably a timely manner. So suing GM after the recall for this defect is not an option if the defect causes an accident or injury. GM can now argue, you were advised to fix the problem by us you did not thus it is solely on you. This narrows the potential window of legal liability and potential damages.
One of the reasons the Ford Pinto was notorious was the fact Ford apparently knew of the problem but did nothing for several years.
"It is a potentially foolhardy commercial organisation that doesn't err on the side of caution and mindless censorship." The problem FB faces is some sue happy shyster trying to make a quick buck claiming the picture is child pornography when anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells would realize this is not that at all. Too many important, historical photos dealing with war, tragedy, etc. are being banned by such stupidities.
@acid andy - I think the "short termism" comes from not respecting people as valued humans on their own merits but as objects to be milked or abused right now. If the powers to be respected people they would value a long term relationship even if it is only commercial.
Mythbusters, a few years back, actually showed how easy it was to fool fingerprint scanners. I suspect the basic technique is much different now. The only issue with biometric data is it relies on a form of security by obscurity. Once you have the victim's biometric data is relatively easy to fool the systems but getting the biometric data initially may be a little more difficult. Also, once compromised the biometric data is useless for security.
"It's all another brick in the wall. A wall we could very well wake up one morning and find totally surrounds us." - The problem is not (cyber)crime or how to deal with it but that the local Stasi are using the fear of crime to demand powers that dictators like Stalin, Mao, Hitler would love to have had. Given that powers will not be used to actually fight crime but to keep the various undesirables (according to your local elite) in place one should be very wary of these demands.
The real issue is whether there are implementation flaws or back doors (which act like implementation flaws). Adding a known backdoor is just painting a bullseye on the code telling hackers come look for the backdoor. Whether they find the backdoor they are certain to find some flaws they can abuse.
No cryptographic systems is truly unbreakable even if takes millennia with current hardware. The fact that older systems once touted as effectively unbreakable now can be seccomb to brute force attack means there is ongoing arms race between the systems and the hackers.
Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of cryptography knows all cryptographic systems have one glaring weakness - the brute force attack. Given enough time and resources all messages can be broken and read. Also, it is likely (more like a certainty) that any commonly used system has implementation errors that weaken it. Now the esteemed traitor/idiot wants in add a backdoor (implementation error) and expects no one will look for.
@Zakhar - The key with torrents is user control. Giving one the option of a direct download vs a torrent is reasonable. Personally I have found torrents slower than a direct download for what I have used it for. Plus I am not very thrilled with basic concept behind torrents so I almost always use the direct download. Slurp is not considering that users have different comfort levels with torrenting and some will much prefer a direct download especially for OS updates.
@kraggy - morons does as morons do, paraphrasing Forest Gump. Someone will figure out a way to piggyback malware through this. This will make protecting your 'bloat 10 kit very dubious. I do not trust any other user's kit to be clean enough for me to take a download from them. I am not a fan of torrents either.
I would rather not need to rely on the design not having some unknown/untested flaw. And the best way to avoid this kind of accident is not have a drone anywhere near an aircraft. I have been around engineering enough to know there is often a scenario that was thought of during testing that will occur in real life.
To break a code one needs enough data to give clues to the key. This has always been true. The only difference between now and the Enigma machines is the amount of data needed.
Encryption will never be perfect and will be broken with enough time and effort. It just has to be good enough so the plain text is useless one obtained.