What is the world coming to when the average slashdot user doesn't understand the seriousness of privilege escalation?

This exploit makes any interactive user (or any process run by any interactive user) an administrator.

So, of course it's not much of a problem for home PC's where everybody is an administrator anyway;

But, That's a REALLY big problem for anybody who manages a windows computer in a corporate or educational environment.

What is the world coming to when the average slashdot user doesn't understand the seriousness of privilege escalation?

This exploit makes any interactive user (or any process run by any interactive user) an administrator.

That's a REALLY big problem for anybody who manages a windows computer in a corporate or educational environment.

First, swimming in a lake is not covered, because it's moving water. The only thing that is covered is still water. It's IP 68 rated, which is dropping it into a freshwater pool 1.5 meters deep, and leaving it there for anywhere up to 30 minutes.

Samsung may (and probably will) still cover you, but if you read the warranty, swimming with your phone is not covered.

Salt water wasn't tested. (but it's probably covered by warranty)
Chlorine wasn't tested. (but it's probably covered by warranty)

Dropping your phone in 1.5 meters of Hydrochloric acid wasn't tested either. I'm not sure if they'd cover that or not. ... but for the purposes of the Australian court case, what is or isn't covered by Warranty is irrelevant. What is relevant is what the phone was tested to withstand (ie. what it can reliably be subjected to without needing to be repaired), compared with what it was shown doing in the advertisements.

You don't have to prove any of that stuff, because if you send your phone back to be repaired it's very easy to tell if the damage was sustained due to capacitors exploding in the microwave, the LCD breaking apart due to freezing, or solder melting due to excessive heat.

Your warranty doesn't cover excluded events; and people who deal with electronics every day can generally tell what caused them to fail.

Unless you're a major airline charging credit card surcharges.

Then you can do it for decades, before the ACCC politely asks you to stop breaking the law.

It's not about warranty, it's about it not breaking.

IP68 says that the device can be immersed in 1.5 meters of still water for 30 minutes and not sustain any damage. That is what the Galaxy does, and that is what the Galaxy has been tested to do.

Salt water causes problems, as does moving the phone around in the water. There's a big difference between dropping a phone into 1.5 meters of distilled water, and running into the surf (into salt water with waves) with your phone. This was what Samsung depicted in their advertisements, this is what Samsung did not test, and regardless of if Samsung still repaired their phones under warranty after doing - this is what Samsung Galaxy Phones were not tested for.

Australia has some pretty oppressive consumer protection laws (oppressive on the seller, great for the consumer). In that "misleading and deceptive" doesn't actually have to mislead anyone, nor does anyone have to actually be deceived by it. It only has to be proven that it a reasonable person could have been mislead. This is an important legal distinction, because the prosecution doesn't actually need to prove damages - they only have to prove that people reasonably could have been mislead.

Samsung is likely going to defend the case by saying they still honored warranties, and they didn't punish customers for saltwater damage.
ACCC is likely to argue that's irrelevant, because it was only tested to 1.5 meters in still fresh water, and they have examples of where Samsung customers used their phones as depicted in their advertisement and the handset failed (and needed to be repaired at Samsung's cost).

Lastly, given that the ACCC has a reputation of being a toothless tiger in Australia, you can bet the reason this is going to court has absolutely NOTHING to do with consumers complaining - and everything to do with Samsung being dobbed in, then the ACCC being pressured by a large multinational organisation that sells phones that competes with the Samsung Galaxy (which rhymes with either papple or goodle) , and is currently advertising their handset in accordance to Australian Law.

If you add up every telecommunications device, every television or computer ever used to watch Game of Thrones, what number do you come up with?

Answer: It's totally irrelevant. Each individual party who chose to create, broadcast or watch game of thrones made their own economic decision that the benefits outweighed the costs.

Bitcoin (difficulty re-adjustment aside) _requires_ the energy of exactly one computer to undertake a Proof of Work scheme and process the transactions of every bitcoin transaction world-wide. It _needs_ a lot more than that to have enough computing power that no one bad-actor (ie. Bitmain) couldn't re-write their own blockchain through a 51% attack.

BUT - Every individual who chooses to mine bitcoin is making their own economic decision that the cost of equipment and energy used to mine is less than the benefit of joining the 'bitcoin lottery' and getting their part of the 12.5 BTC generated every time they (or their pool) successfully mines a block.

Bitcoin's energy consumption is simply a reflection of the attractiveness of the worldwide 'bitcoin lottery game'. Not a reflection of what it 'costs to run bitcoin' as a currency.

Windows 10 IOT Core is not "Windows" (as we all know it)

It's a cut down version of Windows Mobile.

Agreed.
Let me link you the Fermi Paradox: We're First, We're Rare, or We're Fucked.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05...

Specifically Possibility 4: There are scary predator civilizations out there, and most intelligent life knows better than to broadcast any outgoing signals and advertise their location. This is an unpleasant concept and would help explain the lack of any signals being received by the SETI satellites. It also means that we might be the super naive newbies who are being unbelievably stupid and risky by ever broadcasting outward signals; and Carl Sagan's takeaway: “the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and compa, ring notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.”

Okay, if you read the reports on the "insecurities" surrounding XMR, you'll find they all refer to the early days of the coin when it had a much smaller transaction pool to draw from, and in fact had optional privacy. Obviously I disagree with you, so I must be a shill.

Do me a favor, get whatever you can and throw it into Bcash and Bitcoin Private ... both are on SALE now. Though, if you're worried about who's controlling Bitcoin Core, you might want to do some cursory research into the relationship between Bcash and Bitman.

The market will sort you out eventually.

Except that Litecoin does everything BCash does, did it before BCash forked for profit, does it without trying to appropriate the "Bitcoin" name, and can survive without trying to trick people into buying it when they actually want Bitcoin.

And Zcash is all well and good, but privacy is OPTIONAL; and while it may or may not be cryptographically superior to XMR, the fact that private transactions stand out on the blockchain like dogs balls make them far easier to trace on ingress and egress.

Right.

Because Cisco let you inspect their source code, and your traffic would NEVER pass through one of those routers.

Headline: Agency who's job it is to spy on citizens thinks citizens shouldn't have technology which makes it difficult for them to be spied on.

The funny thing is the Raspberry Pi foundation resisted putting GigE on their Pis for years, because it only has a USB 2.0 bus and it wouldn't run anywhere near GBE speeds.

But all the competitors products had GigE (connected to a USB 2.0 bus), and their customers kept saying "we love the Pi, but why does it only have Fast (100M) Ethernet? Why can't you do GigE like every other single board computer?

I'm guessing they got sick of arguing the point and in the Pi 3 just went "Fine, you want GigE that runs at USB 2 speeds; have GigE that runs at USB 2 speeds".

Say what you like about the Pi (for example, you could look at the foundation's "charitable" status in the UK and determine for yourself if this is a legitimate foundation or a tax avoidance and marketing strategy; or the dishonest / loss-leading pricing strategies they force onto their international retailers), but you can't actually blame them for this one.

And some people are still trying to tell me that something that my grandfather might've done to their grandfather is something that I should apologize for.

That's a really good way of perpetuating inter-generational segregation.

Maybe we should be focusing more on what policies we could introduce today that give children the education and support they need to break the cycle of following blindly in the footsteps of their parents (toward drug addiction, prostitution and domicile in a region with zero employment prospects) and less on handing out cash which supports the cycle and apologies which shift the blame of it toward previous generations' failings.