When people believed you could use a computer without being able to program. That's how mandatory programming courses got shut down and the incompetence "trickled down".

Actually the Nokia 770 was a phenomenal success, despite not being advertised. It spawned 5 successors and the line was only cancelled when Nokia was Elopped. Even then the single remaining product was outselling all of their Windows products despite being only offered in selected markets.

It was the first, and unfortunately the last, mobile device that was actually useful. It was the closest thing to a portable computer you could get.

Actually scratch that, the protocol feature is not suitable for adding noise since it's like a ping. You send some data and it comes back verbatim... that's trivial to filter out as an attacker.

In his paper he admits that no data is necessary.

But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to do this on the application side? There you can easily just add "noise" in any way you want.

I mean keep alive is already done by TCP, a keep alive doesn't need data. Why did this even get into the standard?

It seems like the only purpose for this code was for Robin S. to erect a monument for himself. Again why did this get into the standard?

I mean paper doesn't have to be inefficient, in fact it rarely is since paper based workflows are often optimized. Everybody working with paper understands the process and can therefore come up with ways to optimize it.
I once worked at a hospital which had paper files. It makes sense since the documents in there can be in a lot of different types. The process of dealing with it was rather efficient on the paper side, you had some numbers and got the file with that number from a cabinet. The actual bottleneck was the computer based indexing system. We had something similar to E-Mail called "Outlook/Exchange". We ended up printing out those pseudo E-Mails, looking up each number individually in the indexing system, and writing the number of the file next to it. There was no way of sorting the entries to be able to reach them efficiently, nor was the system well designed. (it had SQL injection bugs!)
This is just one example of how badly designed computer based workflows can be.

Then there is the other point of governments being supposedly less efficient than companies. I have no idea where that idea comes from. I have 2 retirement funds, one run by a private company, the other one run by the government. While the government one manages to pay out millions of pensions every month and flawlessly adapts to any changes in my life, the private one can't even get a simple address change right, twice in a row!

Why should companies change? Companies mainly act to self-preserve. Any change is not just constructive, but also destructive. For a company to change it would need to have a vital reason, without that reason it cannot change.
Some people claim that there is the magic hand of the market which will somehow fix the problem though something called "competition". Those people go on citing exotic areas where their dogma actually worked and there was competition. However look around you. Go to an electronics store with a list of brands that come from the same manufacturer and then look at how many different prices exactly the same product gets sold. If there was competition, everyone would buy the cheapest of the otherwise identical products. There is no competition on many markets.

Such systems are not insecure because they are digital or involve computers or anything. (seriously I doubt the guy even understands what digital and analog means) Such systems are insecure because they are unnecessarily complex.

Let's take the Stuxnet example. That system designed to control and monitor the speed at which centrifuges spin. That's not really a complex task. That's something you should be able to solve in much less than a thousand lines of code. However the system they built had a lot of unnecessary features. For example if you inserted an USB stick (why did it have USB support) it displayed icons for some of the files. And those icons can be in DLLs where the stub code gets executed when you load them. So you insert an USB stick and the system will execute code from it... just like it's advertised in the manual. Other features include remote printing to file, so you can print to a file on a remote computer, or storing configuration files in an SQL database, obviously with a hard coded password.

Those systems are unfortunately done by people who don't understand what they are doing. They use complex systems, but have no idea how they work. And instead of making their systems simpler, they actually make them more and more complex. Just google for "SCADA in the Cloud" and read all the justifications for it.

Yes it did. It was transmitted via USB stick.

Only like the criminals the news likes to call hackers.

I've recently tried both Visual Studio and Eclipse for C. I have to say they are both where Pascal IDEs used to be in the 1990s, though Eclipse is a few years ahead.

However all that is just a part of the environment you develop in. It's more than the editor and compiler. It's also the operating system (in a wider sense) you are developing and deploying in.

It makes a difference whether you have a well structured system in front of you, where you can reach your goal by a series of orthogonal steps, or you have some knocked together system which barely works and is missing essential tools.

My current connection, as well as most "NGN" lines in Germany already doesn't have IPv4. All you get is some sort of NAT and of course IPv6. In practical terms it means nothing IPv4 related works anymore and many people set up their own VPNs to get useful IPv4 connectivity, if they still need IPv4.

Of course IPv6 works like a charm with roughly zero problems.

A scared society is easy to control. If you are feeling constantly watched, you are less likely to start democratic processes.

This change of behaviour is what governments want as it secures their place.

Additionally it's not hackers who spy on people. They wouldn't do this as it conflicts with their moral beliefs. It's companies helping governments, and companies like Kaspersky.

The statements of this company's CEO kinda sound like the wishlists of many governments.

End to online anonymity, so political protest can be surveiled much more easily. (as was done with mobile phone users recently in the Ukraine)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Digital voting which is much easier to fake in a large scale way than democratic ways like pen and paper and impossible to check by the layperson.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

And here he even advocates for "cyberwar", claiming that cyber weapons are somehow cleaner than traditional ones, completely ignoring the fact that such weapons mostly good against civilians as governments can easily have their own secure IT.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

Whenever someone tells you that x solves all problems, it typically doesn't.

Whitelisting is currently practised on many mobile platforms. The only thing it does is force people to turn it off so they can actually use their devices, since the white list was done by people with differing opinions.

The more sensible solution is to do it like Debian does it. Have repositories making it easy to download software which matches certain criteria. Make it moderately hard to install new repositories and make it hard to just "download a binary and run it". That way the layperson will just use decent software from the main repositories while the expert can still do anything they want to do.

Our society gets more and more influenced by computing. Many decisions in society and economy require at least a basic understanding of what computers are.
I believe that everybody should have at least a basic understanding of what computers are, and teaching how to program is a great way of doing so.

Obviously you should use sensible languages like old BASIC dialects (with line numbers) or maybe some assembler, maybe also LOGO. More modern languages like C or Java aren't as well suited at teaching computing. Again the point is not to turn them into software developers.

In fact you could even teach programming without a computer. There are "paper computers" out there which are like board games. There are even books like "Computer Science Unplugged" which show educational activities you can do to teach computer science to childrens.

Yes, those are some of the unsolved problems with it.

However we are talking about the US telephone network. It's not particularly well known for quality anyhow.