Would your very large defense company employer actually let you sign into Google services?
I'd imagine that stuff like gmail/drive/etc are probably considered a liability.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to get the best of both worlds though. Allow users to authenticate with third-parties against Steam's OpenAPI equivalent to allow access to *their* data, while allowing anonymous data extracts to more global variables (e.g. how many discrete users are playing this game, age range, country, CPU/GPU etc) for unauthenticated services.

In the end, Steam is making money off of game (ok, and hat) sales, so they don't need to monetize your data in the same way that FB etc are, but that same data can still - if used correctly - be very useful to gamers and the industry at large if provided in a way that protects the privacy of the player.

You might also like Descent Underground, though it's not fully released yet it is slowly getting there:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yes, it was an intern in this case, but in reality it could have just as easily been a permanent FTE, a contractor, or whomever with an agenda.

I have the ZW2 as well. How's the battery life on yours? Mine seems very unpredictable as one day it'll be fine and the next it will chew through 3/4 of the battery by noon.

'Advertiser friendly' is anything that gets lots of attention, but isn't going to be the subject of a significant amount of negative publicity.

Nope. If they're visiting websites while logged in whole on-premises, then hopefully your other compensating controls (DNS filter, firewall, AV) can help deal with that. Not trusting the device initially is more to prevent things like:
a) Unauthorized devices in general attaching to your network (home device, infiltration devices, etc)
b) Machines that have left the premises (e.g. a laptop that may have been infected in the field outside the firewall etc)
c) Overall better identification and management of systems within an environment: knowing what and where.

No, but the usual points of concern aren't printers etc but users and their PC's. A printer doesn't go out and browse bad sites on the internet during work hours, users do.
Whitelist the printers. Blacklist any user PC until it's be validated. If you *CAN* validate the printers, even better!

Ditto here. Not to mention that the Ionic is a *joke* compared to what Pebble was releasing. Yeah, the early Pebble watches were plasticy, but the Time Steel 2 (which I was also on the kickstarter for) was a nice looking watch and would have had a color screen and approx a week of battery-life. There is *still* no watch that compares.
I've had a Huawei Fit (the B&W model) which was comparable in battery life but very lacking in features, and gone through various "Android Wear" watches which all have fairly shyte and not-to-mention inconsistent battery life.

Is it really too much to ask for a watch that looks nice, has decent features (message notifications from all apps, calendar, music control, faces, color), and lasts more than a day or two on battery?

It's interesting how Intel managed to downplay the AMT issues, which IMHO are more in-line with Spectre in most cases (a bit worse in effect, easier to patch apparently), but is now playing up Spectre to have it overshadow Meltdown...

Yeah. I think part of this shows an pretty big need to reassess the use and longevity of major industrial and medical devices in a connected world. I've seen local hospitals with XP devices etc as well but they're not connected to anything (even then there's a risk if people are using USB devices). Obviously there's a cost but it should be considered part of maintenance because a breach or a disabling worm could lead to catastrophic downtime.

Imagine if you've got some sort of very important medical device monitoring and keeping somebody alive and it suddenly goes down because of an attack against an unpatched exploit... scary shit.

It could, but obviously in the case of NHS and WannaCry they had a significant amount of machines running XP that were *not* air-gapped.

An air-gap also only works for network-layer stuff. Iran's centrifuges were air-gapped but still had available USB ports which allowed transmission by physical device. The devices in this case are only really safe if they never interact in any way with any other devices.

A stealth virus could work in much the same way. To be fair with that though, a modern OS still might bot be any proof against such a method if it's an unknown vulnerability/0-day. However, if you are running a consumer OS, then part of the process of acquiring equipment should be to ensure proper hardening, patching, and eventually everygreening (retirement) schedules. I'm not saying Linux etc would be better - plenty of people still on RHEL5 - but at least with an open driver and/or open software there's a better chance of moving it up to something more modern.

They "dispute" the figure of course.

Around the time of WannaCry

"A reported 90 percent of NHS trusts run at least one Windows XP device, an operating system Microsoft first introduced in 2001 and hasn't supported since 2014."

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/...

He does tend to call a fair number of thing shit. This is likely because that - given the potential number of contributers trying to push stuff into the kernel - a good portion of it *IS* shit.

they will buy AMD if they can't get nVidia cards for a reasonable price

They *would* if AMD cards were more reasonably available. They aren't. In fact, they're probably worse. I got an RX480 when they were relatively new over a year ago. Since then, the RX580's have come out. The 580's are perpetually out of stock, mostly due to miners. The 480's are similarly very hard to find and now cost more used than I paid new. I've seen Nvidia 1080's etc come on sale and go (very quickly) but very little from AMD-land except some comparatively shyte RX550's (which there's apparently some scandal about being rebranded 450's or whatever). The big issue for NVidia is not only is stock scarse, but the prices are still insanely high at retail, with 1080's going from $800-1200 (CAD).