My brain said NFC and wireless the second it was mentioned.

Sure, if you use the right software you can keep the power usage to a minimum in the box so heat isn't an issue, but we can already wirelessly charge devices, instruct them to wake from sleep, and send data to them. It's not even unusual on modern phones to have all those features.

The bigger question is whether its actually worth the effort. Next month there'll be another update anyway. If you updated in the background just while the user goes through the first-time-setup, you could do exactly the same without requiring infrastructure to every store at all. And without potential security problems of being able to power, wake up, and communicate with a device that's "turned off" or has never once been turned on.

The only real use of this might actually be far more simple. Have all phones in the shop deactivated, and only when they go through the genuine purchasing process do they get remotely activated by the shop's system. Basically eliminates theft without requiring having to trace literally every device produced and its current status. Just ship them to stores in a deactivated state where they won't work, and they only "turn on" once they've been through an Apple store till.

But it seems to me that the costs purely for "updates" are totally not worth it. Just have the device check for updates in the first-time setup and refuse to offer services like Bluetooth, etc. until it's done that (so there's no window of vulnerability in the meantime).

Here's the thing:

- Government will always regulate currency to combat things like this, and money-laundering (because it can facilitate things like this), and avoidance of tax.
- To do that, they need to identify users or require them to identify themselves. That's the rules that pretty much all EU and US banks operate under.
- Cryptocurrencies that don't allow that automatically fall foul of money-laundering and these identification rules. So banks in the EU and US are stopping transactions to cryptocurrency exchanges and preventing their transfer. I've have transactions to very well-known and legal Bitcoin exchanges blocked by banks, for even tiny amounts, with that reasoning.
- Even buying a house, I have to prove the origin of the money and money-laundering checks are a mandatory part of that, including into the origins of any money that parents, etc. give you for deposits. They literally have that money traced.
- The above is only going to get more strict while black markets and money laundering continue. Especially when billions are involved.
- So anonymous cryptocurrencies will always be a black market. And black markets attract black market transactions. Like this.
- Therefore although Bitcoin might get around this, Bitcoin transactions are like an screaming alarm that goes off when people start looking at your finances. And that's going to make them take notice - maybe for years monitoring what you do - and when it comes to actually putting you under the thumb, they'll have all they need because using a cryptocurrency to generate or transfer any significant sum that you're not recording, claiming or going through legitimate avenues to process is just going to raise red flags everywhere and they'll nail you for it.
- And Bitcoin, on its own, is useless because it needs to be converted to something to become useful and THAT'S the part that governments are regulating and watching. How it gets there is almost irrespective (and has been traced ending in convictions before now, even through mixers - a.k.a. devices literally intended to launder money according to the law)
- Bitcoin use is therefore just going to actually make it MORE obvious to the agencies who actually do this stuff. And those places won't care for a bit of weed or some guy gambling online illegally. They will only actually show their hand when it's, say, billions to a sanctioned Russian outfit, and then it'll be kept under wraps because they also want to catch the next guy too.

If anything, not using Bitcoin probably made them evading detection a bit easier. I've never even heard of Tether. And if they managed to transfer billions via it they stood more chance of going under the radar, by far. Except... they didn't. They got noticed, as per this article.

There's a line where the local police aren't going to do fuck all about someone using Bitcoin. The state police aren't going to care much. The federal agencies might and have certain convictions in their history with billions of Bitcoin attached to them which they were tracing and following and even able to convert later to put back into the country's treasuries. And then there's a whole other level of military intelligence, tracing illicit military and guerrilla funding, international sanctions evasions, and such like.

And at that level, far more is going on than you'll ever see on Slashdot stories. Far more is invested in tracing things. Literally billions of dollars just watching certain individuals. And far more is happening that wouldn't be "legal" for police to do - like knowing exactly who it is in Russia that's receiving this money and monitoring every move and hacking every device they have for decades without detection to establish every method, trick, source and destination of the money.

These kinds of transactions were going to get taken down no matter what they used, it's merely a function of time. The trick is to not be involved with any of the services or people performing such so you don't get caught up in something far larger. Any US citizen or corporation involved in these transactions, or any in allied countries where people like GCHQ etc. have powers, is a damn idiot to facilitate it. The method of that facilitation being "more difficult" to trace or shutdown doesn't help their case one bit, in fact it literally makes it worse, especially if they know or have cited that as a reason to use those facilities.

This isn't your local cops being baffled by computer stuff that you used to buy a graphics card on the black market. This is the US and allied intelligence agencies stopping Russia receiving significant funding enough to buy arms to potentially use against NATO allies. Bitcoin ain't gonna save you, and anyone in the path of that who can't claim genuine ignorance that that's what was happening is in for a real bad time, even if that takes YEARS to actually happen or come to a public court.

I've heard of it, and they're reinventing Slackware.

I ain't paying for Linux.

You can really, really, really stop trying.

Especially when all I'm paying for is someone to recompile a new package on an old machine that was working absolutely fine before they decided to "cut off" package updates.

This is one of the reasons why my preferred package manager is ".\configure; make; make install".

I installed Ubuntu on three machines last week - and none of them are commercial machines, none of them need a subscription or account, and all of them had the packages, MOTD, etc. associated with these services ripped out.

By all means offer a corporate support service. But if you want to do that, don't spam your free product with adverts for your paid-for product. RedHat/CentOS/Fedora all over again.

I would literally rather roll-my-own if this is the way other distros go too... because then maybe I can turn off most of this systemd shite too. Spent 20 minutes the other day working out why I couldn't just kill GPSd and move it to another port after having changed the configuration - and it's because systemd ingratiates itself even into simple services like that to auto-start them as you touch the port you intend to use or insert a device, and that uses entirely different configuration files. Did we learn NOTHING from Autoplay?

All Ubuntu pushing this stuff down my throat constantly does is put me off using Ubuntu entirely - including professionally.

It is ironic that I started many years ago with Slackware as a desktop, then moved to Slackware for servers (predictability and control), then changed to Ubuntu for desktop (simplicity), then changed to Ubuntu for servers (simplicity and control), and now would really move back to Slackware for servers (predictability and control) and other things entirely for desktop.

My entire reason for using Linux is thus:

- I want things to just do what I say, and work when I do that.

That's it. That's the one, sole reason for my preference in that regard. If I kill a process, I want it to die. If I change a config, I want it to take effect immediately without having to reboot. If I want to rename a device, I just want it to happen (I once spent a day trying to rename a joystick device to always present as the first js0 device under systemd, and at the time it simply wasn't possible, it always just did whatever it felt). If I want systemd or an alternative, I expect to just be able to choose. If I want to install my own local DNS server, that's what happens.

Don't even get me started on those software that demand I install them via snap/docker/etc. as their only way of doing so.

Play ball, Ubuntu, or lose your customer base. Not "signing up" to get an extra two years and spamming you incessantly if you don't.

Because you think that the landline system was somehow massively distributed and uninterruptible, but that cellular, satellite, fibre, radio, etc. aren't?

If anything it would be even harder in the modern age to take out communications - previous generations had the landline and public radio (transmitting from large, obvious, powerful towers) and that was it.

Now you can use cellular, satellite systems (Starlink), form wifi mesh networks, use Pringles-cantenna long range wifi networks, use underground fibre, microwave interconnects, copper landlines, radio-modems, etc. not counting what the community itself can come up with locally to connect that one local site who does have a connection to everyone else in the town.

Landlines are inherently reliant on power, for a start, across dozens or hundreds of paths in the connection. They have also been almost entirely VoIP on the back-end for decades now. So much so that my landline provider is telling me that they are removing the voice capability from the line and it'll just be DSL, then they'll move my phone number to a SIP connection (and I don't use it, so I don't care). It's called "Digital Voice" in the UK and it's going to happen to everyone in the next 5-10 years.

And though many of the above methods are interruptible in a war (e.g. satellites), you have to take out SO MUCH MORE hardware than just a few major exchanges.

The BT Tower in London used to be part of a network of microwave towers for exactly this reason. It was obsolete by the 60's because of satellite and fibre networking. It's been basically abandoned for decades. There is a similar tower near where I live, that formed part of a national point-to-point microwave network in case of an attack. They are all defunct for that purpose and have been for decades. They're just radio masts and cellular towers now.

Because the Internet did one thing - it put everyone, no matter how they connect, onto the same single network. Fibre, wireless, copper, radio-modem, satellite... you're all talking IP and literally talking using IP (VoIP, etc.).

And it no longer matters how you join that network, so long as you have ANY connection whatsoever to another node willing to share.

In the case of a war, landlines are going to be the last target mainly because it's just not worth the effort. Until people start bringing down satellites, you're fine. And even then - at that point connecting to the Internet will be the last of your worries, but it will still be far easier than it ever was.

Just because "other companies" do it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Just because "it can be done that way" doesn't mean it's the best way to do it.

Just because "Excel can do the job" doesn't mean you should be using Excel, that your first thought should be Excel or that another tool wouldn't be more suitable.

Just because "The team's been doing it that way for ages" doesn't mean that someone - for instance a guy coming from another successful Formula 1 team who don't do it that way - can't improve things and actually stop nonsense like that where unsuitable tools are used "because that's how it's always been"

As the articles on this point out - while you can dump information into Excel, none of it is live and up-to-date and it doesn't contain anywhere near the information you might need to run a successful multi-million-dollar Formula 1 team efficiently.

These guys are engineering down to microseconds and nanometers, they have millions of dollars sunk into complete efficiency of every part, every design, every usage, every fitting, every staff action, through a full supply chain, including unique, one-off, cutting-edge designs, products, software, analysis, etc.

And some prat is still carrying around an Excel spreadsheet which is highly suggestive that nobody has ever BOTHERED to find a better way (because there will be one!). Literally one line of quote tells you why this is: "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update". The guy came in, found it unsuitable for the purpose and questioned it. It also had real-world, knock-on effects on their actual Formula 1 workshop and performance: "Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team's factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up." It's right there in the summary.

And all you get is a bunch of office workers and their IT departments on here going "Oh, well, Excel's fine, it's not even a million line spreadsheet being abused as a primitive multi-user database, pfft!".

I wouldn't tolerate a 20,000 line Excel "database" of products, parts, inventory, assets, etc. and I don't work anywhere near Formula 1 - I work in an office. I'd be ripping that junk out and replacing it with a proper system, and have done a thousand times for a thousand different things in my career.

At the level this guy is working at, with the experience from OTHER F1 TEAMS he was in charge of, and that he's in charge of this one and particularly its operational side... he's perfectly entitled to be taken seriously and it's perfectly laughable that such a team was still using Excel and think it a suitable tool with demonstrable, actual, real world impact on them doing so.

You could read the articles about it and discover that it leads to delays and all kinds of problems with parts supply, and that he's now in charge of exactly the team that does such.

Seriously, do you need to even ask?

Where's the profit in keeping people alive a few years more when they can get asbestosis and spend a fortune on healthcare?

I've said before:

Anyone who got to that point knows that the original wallets will be watched like a hawk - by users and governments alike.

But at any point they could have just joined in a bunch of smaller miners and made an absolute killing with a properly anonymous wallet that isn't being monitored, live a life of luxury, and never have to touch the original coins at all.

Also, if the original creator was, say, funded by a government agency somewhere - even just for research - they wouldn't be allowed to touch that original money, but they would be able to discretely mine their own elsewhere once they realised it was going to take off.

Chances are that the original creator(s) is dead, a secret millionaire, and has no need of or access to that original wallet.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ...

Use software in breach of its licensing agreements.

For instance, it's perfectly fine to use some software a self-contained DLL / library that you publish the full source code to in compliance with its licence. Then your proprietary code can call that DLL as much as it likes so long as it uses the registered interfaces.

LOTS of companies / products do precisely this - you have one in your house right now, I guarantee it. They publish the GPL and the list of software used in the back of manuals for EVERYTHING nowadays.

But that's not different to using, say, the PhysX libraries, Unity engine, DirectX or anything else... whatever you use you need to track licensing, draw boundaries and make sure you're compliant.

One of the major omissions of source-code control systems like SVN, git, etc. is that they DON'T TRACK LICENSING. And they should.

How about this...

We make better quality screens, cheaper.

I'd far rather that than literally ANY other gimmick like folding screens, see-through screens, etc.

If you can't make it cheaper or better (including more resilient, brighter, etc.)... then don't worry about the screen. Find something else to do instead.

Gimmicks don't sell me on ANYTHING at all. I'd far rather have a basic, non-gimmicky thing that was slightly better and/or cheaper.

He incited people specifically to obtain unauthorised access to classified military systems and publish it to himself, where he then disseminated it to the world, without redaction, analysis or reasonable protections.

He probably got people killed by doing so.

Sure, there were things in the leaks that were worth whistleblowing, but an awful lot that should never have been made public (which journalists are good at dealing with and separating so they... don't end up being locked up!).

Whistleblowing isn't the same as "just publish everything you can get your hands on, no matter the secrecy or relevance of the documents". If it was, secrecy would be pointless because everyone would claim journalistic / whistleblowing protections, even enemy states.

Journalism, no matter what impression the tabloid press might give it, comes with responsibilities and most professional journalists are extremely responsible. Assange was not.

We are certainly missing something. Something that doesn't just follow on from rigorous logical operations.

We are not a Turing machine. And Turing told us that any machine we have is equivalent to a Turing machine in its capabilities.

We are capable of doing things that no Turing machine can. Intelligence resides in that missing piece of the puzzle - where we can do things that even the most powerful computers cannot. And it just so happens that we know there are things Turing-complete computers cannot do, and we're able to do some of them. That's not a coincidence.

We don't need to get mystical and spiritual (and the whole "consciousness influencing physical reality" is far too unscientific for me). There are things we can do, that computers cannot do - even in theory. Hence current AI cannot do them no matter how complex or fast we make them.

There was a hope that some quantum mechanism might be at work - we have observed quantum-level interactions in neural cells, and quantum physics acts in such strange ways that maybe a quantum machine might be "more than Turing-complete", like we are. However, I believe that our current generation of quantum computers, for instance, are still considered "only Turing-complete" and nothing further.

It's all very hard to define and lock down, but we're missing something critical that no amount of scaling-up is going to solve.

It's not magic, or inspiration, or courage, or consciousness, or a spark. There is a physical, technical thing we are missing that neurons and the brain etc. are able to do that a mere Turing-complete model cannot do, ever.

And even that might not be the complete picture. But it's definitely something different, definitely something we are closer to defining, definitely something that computers are missing, and definitely something that could be a major factor in our failure to do more than statistical automation.

Why should anyone waste their time when the software you're using is inherently out of date, obsolete, unsupported and quite clearly dangerous to use.

There's no more point filing CVEs against ancient PHP than there is filing CVEs against Window 3.1 or 95. We know it's broken, beyond repair, will never be fixed, and should never be in production use. Why bother to catalogue HOW broken it is against pretty much every attack you want to try?

7.4 has been "security fixes only" for over 2 years and end of life for nearly 18 months. Publishing CVEs for it only encourages people to keep using it, but make sure they patch those CVEs, which are likely to be nothing more than the icing on the cake in terms of actual obvious holes in the software.

Developer time, testing time, etc. is limited and wasting it on literally obsolete software that is officially stated as "A release that is no longer supported. Users of this release should upgrade as soon as possible, as they may be exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities." doesn't help anyone.

"Personally, I find taking calls through Bluetooth to be more distracting than using the handset"

And studies have conclusively shown multiple times that having a conversation with someone who's not in the car (and thus doesn't pause to let you consider responses, etc.) is far more distracting than radios, passenger conversations or a variety of other activities.

It's literally nothing to do with call quality or speaking. It's to do with the person you're speaking to being remote to you and it severely affects your concentration and/or ability to pass basic tests while it's happening.

The real question, then, is why CB radios were ever tolerated in moving vehicles.

And, indeed, there are levels of window tint that are not permitted, including anything on the front windscreen. Those rules are throughout the UK and EU as far as I know, and police even have "tint meters" they can use to determine at the roadside if you're over the limit.

Those rules, however, long predate speed cameras or mobile phones.