WHAAAAAAA?

You might wish to let these ex-Toyota workers know. Or these ones. Or the 4,000 ex-Motorola-turned-Google employees Google laid off because they were - wait for it - exiting a line of business they didn't think they wanted to be in anymore.

Good companies get out of bad businesses all the time. Usually they fire the people who worked in that business. It sucks but it's true, and to think that good companies never exit lines of business or lay people off is insane.

Cell phone SIMs are the "Encryption Castle", really? From a practical perspective, they are essentially plaintext, since everything gets fully decrypted at each hop.

Maybe I will start calling my previous car a "Dining Palace" in honor of the epic glorious time that I once ate a chili dog while driving, shifting and making a left turn (alas, this was before I had a cell phone) without getting any chili on my shirt.

I was thinking more of consumer equipment, where the warranty papers are oft-times only useful if you've run out of toilet paper.

Their favourite strategy seems to be "in case of defective design, replace the same part that broke continuously until the warranty runs out"

What if a drug to control aggression was developed and it was introduced into the atmosphere? It would impact everyone equally, with no opt-out.

I can't see a downside.

"the only one which is as popular is Sony"

Never bought an HP product, have you?
MO sounds quite similar.

"Your honor, the plaintiff's files are now complete safe. They're in no danger. Unless the new Jaguar that is parked just outside your office in the no park zone. The one for which the keys have been put .... right ... here"

There really seems to be no logical/moral ideas behind these decisions.

Want your employees to stay, give them working conditions and wages that encourage them to do so. (that said, it may be hard to compete against Apple pay-wise).

Apple et al already got crucified recently for agreeing not to "poach" employees (i.e. offer them a better pay/benefits to work elsewhere), and it was rules anti-competitive and illegal. Non-competes are similarly stupid and evil.

HOWEVER, if those employees are sharing corporate secrets or confidential data gleaned from their work with A123 with Apple... that would seem a reasonable grounds for a lawsuit.

Some of the mid-range and many upper-range Dell laptops do 1920x1080. It's more common on 17" screens so you do end up with a larger laptop as well. Some HP laptops also have 1080P displays, and 1600x900 used to be common on various models.

I remember seeing a dell laptop in the past that did 2200x1200 or something like that. I was very tempted to buy but unfortunately it was one of those affected by the flakey GPU's that tended to desolder themselves over time.

If a breach happens, just change your medical history.

Except that BB STILL has one of the best permissions models...

And my toaster DOES have the best permissions. Toast goes in, it toasts. No internet access :-)

There's no reason other smartdevices couldn't have used a similar permissions model to BB.

The sad part is that Blackberry, which preceeds both iOS and Android devices, did the permissions/request model best. Unfortunately they underestimated the power of "apps" and a touchscreen, and for whatever reason the other vendors went with a more lax permissions model (that said, Android is decent when rooted with some 3rd party stuff, but it's hardly an option for the average person).

This problem was addressed in v4.3 of the protocol. Also note that this particular problem only enabled theft from the store by a dishonest customer, but it does not enable the large scale skimming or cloning attacks that have been the subject of headline news.

A fake card can't lie about the PIN because it doesn't have the key needed to sign the packets the card sends to the merchant's terminal. The merchant terminal has a bunch of certificates in it and authenticates the messages coming from the card. In this specific attack, Ross' team discovered the message that said "Transaction Approved!" coming from the card in an offline sale was unsigned, so they had their tampered card send the same unsigned "Transaction Approved!" message at the right time in the protocol. The change to V4.3 (or was it 4.2?) fixed this problem, so it should not be an issue for the US market.

Ross likes to get EMV flaws in the news. While this benefits us all in that the protocol's security is tightened each time a flaw is uncovered, poor news reporting and the claims repeated by ignorant people (and fomented by organizations who don't want to see EMV succeed) are causing counterproductive hysteria. On one hand, EMV is a complex mess that was made worse by all the compromises stuffed in there by competing interests (banks, card associations, terminal manufacturers, card manufacturers, merchants, and payment processors), but on the other hand it's converged onto a remarkably secure solution to a problem that has plagued the industry for over 20 years.

The real crime here is that all the competing interests have resulted in foot-dragging by all the players who see changing over to EMV as too expensive, too hard, too risky; worse are the disruptive elements delivered by those who see EMV as a threat to their current business model. For example, EMV yields a system so secure the merchant's terminals are no longer the weak link, so why should merchants pay for expensive secure terminals? This makes companies like VeriFone nervous, because they'll soon be trying to peddle devices that only serve to secure the merchant's interest, not the cardholders or the banks. The PCI assessors are also finding ways to whip up hysteria and make bank now, because EMV will ultimately render their services unnecessary, too. Meanwhile, the completely non-secured mag stripes continue to deliver fraud around the globe, and the fraud won't stop until the mag stripes are dead and buried.

Yes, and considering that all somebody needs to do to check your pin is read the heat signature on a pad after you've used it that's a pretty low bar.

Payment cards, as in train passes etc perhaps, but my experience has been that overall Japan has a comparatively low credit-card penetration compared to North America, and in many areas is still very cash-centric. It's a bit of a shock to find that even many major chains (McDonalds, etc) don't necessarily take Visa in Japan.

But these days I tend to recommend Asus. Certainly they can cost a bit more than an HP/Acer, but they're fairly solid and have a decent warranty. My only real complain is their preference for 1366x768 resolution laptop screens...