I'm aware of "the proper solution" from an administrative perspective, and maybe what you suggest does work at Google. However, there is a vast difference between a company the size of Google and, say, a startup where people just "take" rooms as needed, or you have to find a free room for something at short notice, and moving the conference from one room to another in a hurry becomes a pain. As I say, I've "experienced" the Chromebox for Meetings in the startup setting, and I'm sure it would be great _if_ you're a larger company, but it was "unpleasant" shall we say for me - in fact, you could tell it was not designed to handle exceptions very easily.

Google should recognize that there are many smaller companies than large ones and provide a convenient solution.

That's okay for you on your laptop. When you go to a conference room with a e.g. a PC set up for conference calls, and someone needs to log in to pull up the hangout, it's a different story (don't even get me started on Chromebox for Meetings...).

Here, having a little dongle sitting in the middle of the desk connected to the main system via USB would provide an easy option to provide at least the 2nd factor auth, without anyone typing in codes or plugging in additional devices. Lots of people walk into a conference room with their phone in hand as it is.

Let me know when they start selling cheap NFC dongles so we can just tap our phone on them to login. I'm sure our company would buy a bunch. 2-factor makes logging in to conference systems a pain in the ass - everyone is always looking to the guy who doesn't use 2-factor to login already. I don't see how fumbling around with USB sticks is much better.

It would be nice if router logs showed suspicious ARP packets and/or declined to forward them except for specially privileged connections (e.g. via a flag in the access list). The router knows the addresses of users connected over WiFi, and it's extremely unlikely those WiFi users will be routes for other devices. This seems like a good measure in general to make MITM harder.

Stuff like this is exactly why strong cryptographic solutions should be woven into the fabric of the internet ASAP (e.g. content signing in this case). Agencies globally have become extremely abusive - spying, manipulating, defrauding,denying - and work against the basic infrastructure elements that would prevent this at every turn. They really bring it on themselves with crap like this.

Maybe it is, when law enforcement isn't brazenly violating every single principle of personal privacy for all persons without redress. You got us here, Bush and Obama administrations. You. Not us. You.

I'm in no way a dashboard hater, but reports are great because:
* I can see them everywhere I can access my email. This is not always the case when a dashboard runs off an internal server.
* Getting an email in the morning is a reminder to check the data. If I have to remember to go to a dashboard I'll forget if I'm busy and could miss something important.
* Reports in my email are easily searchable without fiddling with date ranges in a console - assuming adequate history even exists since the latest time someone thought it would be a great idea to rebuild the dashboard.

Dashboards are great for sharing a realtime view but they aren't a replacement for reports. If you think they are, you probably seriously misunderstand your users.

It's more complicated than that.

Polygon-based engines support (and modern games heavily depend upon) things like:
* Dynamic lightling and shadows
* Deformable environments
* Transparency
* Reflections
* Fast collision detection
* AI route planning

Now go back and look at that demo video and tell us where you see those things.

Also, polygon based engines are still pretty efficient because of:
* Texture re-use
* Bump mapping to improve realism
* Shaders to implement things like motion blur, ambient lighting, etc.
* LOD maps
* Spatial partitioning

Laser mapping is cool because it snapshots a static environment at a moment in time. It would take a lot of effort to produce a polygon model ground-up with the characteristics you'd want for high performance in a modern game. But there appear to be numerous benefits over what has been demonstrated here so far. Perhaps a better approach (for games, at least) would be to work on a project that helps generate or enhance a polygon-based model from the mapping.

I've seen demos of what I believe to be this technology before, but what it seems to lack is any kind of interactivity with the environment/objects in the environment. From what I can tell in this latest video they've added an FPS handgun overlay and some poorly animated ferns.

The point is: Cool, you can render a nice point cloud. Can you actually do interesting things with it / what we want in most games or virtual environments, or can you simply render a nice point cloud?

As an Android fan, let me just say that these problems do not just stop with encryption. Unless you root your phone, you can't back it up properly because Google doesn't let you have access to your own files on your own f'ing device. Apparently nobody sees a problem in the fact that users are forced to make the decisions to either run stock or be able to access all their files. I'm sure it's to reduce piracy or something, but it's a nightmare. Unless your apps keep their data in an accessible folder or you let them keep all your settings in the cloud (if they even support that), just upgrading your handset to this years Nexus is going to mean data loss.

I get that it makes the security stronger, but Android badly needs some kind of super-user mode that makes the entire filesystem accessible to selected apps.

*unreasonable. Fatfinger moment..

Abridged version:

Regardless of how the government acquires the information, is the government performing unreasonable searches against the people? One might argue that inspecting every persons communications is both and reasonable and cannot possibly qualify for probable cause.

How hard is it to run an independent circuit that scrapes your OS and process executable memory and compute a verified hash? Do these systems run any kind of meaningful IDS at all?

Let's hope that the logic to brick is in some piece of code that can be subverted via a custom OS build and not something close to the radio receiver.

Also: I will laugh really hard as soon as the blackhats release a tool to bypass security and auto-brick, and then someone heads to the nearest mall on a Saturday with a high-power radio.

Thanks, AC!

For anyone else interested, I found this video on PatchMatch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...