I've seen a fair bit of amateur wiring, and I can assure you that most people are not capable of safely wiring up a house. In any case, without certification the electricity company won't let you connect to the grid, so you are reliant on what you can produce.

So, nice work, but not very practical.

You can create a secure base OS that runs on low cost ARM, for example, and then have a limited, sandboxed application layer. Think browser plugins - they can do a lot, have network access etc. but are executed on a virtual machine (Javascript) and with heavy sandboxing, with masses of security protections in place.

The problem with emebedded system is that you often can't remotely update the OS, or if you can manufacturer's won't bother. You can limit the damage from exploits to things like information leaks (heartbleed style bugs) or DOS, but those are bad enough.

But the assumption seems to hold up. Look at the history of Christianity. Crusades in the middle east, murdering Muslims, raking in massive wealth in the process. Was that the middle ages or the last few decades?

So actually, the goals of America seem to be pretty similar to what you (wrongly) suppose the goals of Iran are. Your mistake is assuming they think the same way you do.

Sounds a lot like the rhetoric from US politicians about bringing democracy and freedom to the whole world. Read it again. "A struggle against non-Christian values, plunder, repression and cruelty. The war waged by non-US conquerors, promoting puritanism and sub-human behaviour. They care not if whole countries are wiped out and many families left homeless. But those who study democracy and freedom will understand why the US wants to bring them to the whole world."

Bush even called Iran part of an "axis of evil", and then invaded two of the other countries on his list.

That kind of thing is pretty common with embedded systems. You have code that has been tested and otherwise works, except for this one bug. Much of it is probably ancient, with new bits tacked on as time goes by. You are terrified of breaking something by making changes, so you do a hack like this that makes minimal changes. A proper fix could cause even more problems.

The real legacy of Struxnet is to have opened the way of a cyber cold war. It's now acceptable to attack other country's infrastructure with cyber weapons. It's like sending your spies to blow up their bridges. Everyone knows who did it, but can't bring them to justice, so will just retaliate in kind.

As a real engineer let me explain how it works. Both of you are a bit off.

Even if you hire security engineers, they will be overridden by the need to add marketable features and reduce support costs. If it's too hard to set up, if it can't do what the competitor's product can do, security is irrelevant and will be at best an afterthought.

In practice, they won't hire security engineers with that $500k, some manager will spend $5k on PR making them out to be the victims if they are hacked, and the rest will be his bonus for that quarter. It works too - look at Apple. Crap security leads to many people's private photos being posted to 8chan, they claim to be the victims of "sophisticated and targeted hacking" (reality is they didn't rate limit login attempts or use captchas) and the exodus of users from iCloud doesn't happen.

To be fair, that's not something most people could do. Presumably you have the relevant certifications for installing electrical wiring and plumbing, hooking up to the networks etc. Not everywhere has a cheap supply of stone, or even allows stone buildings to be built.

I'm not suggesting what you did wasn't great, it is, but it's just not a very useful comparison for most people.

Damn it, I moved all the cushions, took the covers off, lifted the whole thing up, and then out of frustration took an axe to my sofa. All I found was 28p in change, a marble and some cat vomit. I really suck at mining my sofa.

The fact that you can't resell digital content (at least, not easily) is why Steam has to have regular, massive sales. Players were used to buying games at full price and then trading them in for a good fraction of that back. They were used to picking up used copies for a fraction of retail price, especially for older games.

Steam even mimics the experience of visiting your local game shop periodically and discovering interesting stuff in the bargain bin or used. They have flash sales, very limited time only, aimed at impulse buys and people waiting for some price threshold.

Digital content has to be cheap because it's worth much, much less than physical content due to lack of resales. Publishers are trying to prevent resale of physical copies now by having one-time use codes and DLC tied to the console, but consumers are pushing back by demanding lower prices. It isn't clear which side will win out yet.

My local library lends out ebooks now. Some DRM schemes allow lending to friends. There is always piracy too. If you charge too much, people will find other ways to read books. Particularly if your book is aimed at teenagers who don't have much money, you need to account for that.

There are around 600 churches and nearly 400,000 Christians in Iran. If they were really interesting in attacking "infidels" they would start with them.

Iran considers the US a rogue state that illegally invades its neighbours and murders innocent civilians. Any way you frame it, they are not entirely wrong about that. Once you strip away the propaganda it's easy to see how they have quite legitimate security concerns.

I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.

The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.

I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".

I don't think so. The problem is as always: lawyers. This is quite likely a very legitimate program started with someone's good idea. But when they went to publish it the legal team would have skimmed through and reworded everything so they can't ever be held liable for anything.

I work for a very large corporation and we do the same. We legitimately run such programs but advertise them with weazel words just in case something doesn't go quite right, so someone doesn't then hold us to account on a stuff-up.