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Comment Re:never underestimate (Score 1) 55

But to commit intentional murder or violence in a conventional way (usually) requires you to be present in the jurisdiction where the crime occurred, so at least in this new arena, it's entirely conceivable that an "attacker" (literally) could cause bodily injury, even death, without setting foot into any jursidiction where they have the "risk" of being apprehended or even extradited. ... that is, if you can even determine who the attacker was, or even if you can distinguish that there was a malicious actor involved, in the first place, and not just some random bug in the software...

There is the concept of systems engineering with regard to "safety of life", which should be respected here.
That is, the security of your aorta tele-surgery is arguable more important than your wristwatch's cloud calendar.
This sort of thing should be subject to rigorous testing and code review, and in general have higher standards, e.g., MISRA C.

Comment Re:Prolific (Score 1) 700

(was just starting a response when I saw this)

Prolific has had this problem for a while with PL2303 chipset counterfeits.
They started a terrible shoot-the-completely-unaware-user campaign:
Starting a few years back with XP drivers, they started giving a nondescript "error 10" and refusing to start the driver when a counterfeit chip was loaded. On recent mac versions of the driver, they fail even more silently - just not transferring any bits. The funny thing is, the counterfeits usually work well when not on a crippled version of the prolific driver (or an open source).
Consumers here don't know the difference and just say - wow I have a crappy cable that doesnt work at all.

Would have been much better if they just displayed a message stating the facts when they detected a non-genuine cable - something to the effect of "hey we have detected a counterfeit chip in your cable - return to the dealer/vendor/manufacturer."

This would have been totally more effective at putting back-pressure against using counterfeits on the manufacturing/supply chain...
Alas - I guess it's cause I dont have an MBA that I can't see the wisdom in these tactics...

Comment Re:I must be in the minority. (Score 3) 467

yeah, in 20 years, i suspect being a millionaire would be like what it is today to earn a "six-figure income" - which is B.F.D.
I remember when I was a kid in the 80's, a "six figure income" was meaningful. Now in some places where software development is a common trade (cough: silicon valley), six figures is just-getting-by

Comment Re:Another case for open source firmware. (Score 2) 242

"Effectively, they are taking away functionality that I have already paid for."

You mean to say that you already paid DynDNS for service? If so, I dont see how this affects you, as you are a paying customer.
If you are talking about something you paid to a hardware/software company for a router which had dyndns feature - generating value for the said router vendor, but no revenue for dyndns - I'm not sure I understand the fairness in your argument.

Comment Re:Alternative (Score 1) 407

^ this one. ding ding ding.
Paraphrasing old Brucie on this:
Why would an attacker spend time trying to get through your steel-plated triple-deadbolted front door, when they can throw a rock through your kitchen window and crawl in?

All it takes are some unchallengeable secret court orders, and off to your nearest cloud/service provider to suck down all your datas.

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