Usually purchase speed is in this order:

1: Debit card. (user swipes card, enters PIN, done.)
2: Credit card. (user swipes card, signs, done.)
3: Cash.
4: Checks.

From what I've seen at stores, people fumbling for their phones at stores is actually slower than the coupon-clipper with the checkbook.

If Google's mechanism goes via credit cards like Apple Pay, it would be useful, should I lose my wallet, as a backup mechanism. However, if it is ACH based like CurrenC... then I would avoid it at all costs, since all it takes is one bad transaction, and I'm cleaned out with no recourse.

It isn't cheap, but there are ways to use 3D printed parts to make "real" parts. For example, with a dissolvable filament, one can print out an intricate part, put it into sand, plaster, or one's preferred moldmaking substance (making sure you have a hole to pour in, and a vent hole), pour limonene in to get rid of the filament, then pour molten plastic or one's metal alloy of choice. Let cool, then separate (or break apart) the mold pieces. The result is a usable part made out of a material that is up to task.

It might be a part just may need improving. The turbo resonator on Mercedes Sprinter T1N models is one example. The original part was OK, but an aftermarket part would completely fix glitches with the item.

Another item might be RV door handles. There was a batch recalled that had breakage issues. If someone scanned the pieces and made identical items, except of a very tough Iconel, the same door handle would easily outlive the RV.

Right now, 3D printing is plateauing, because there is only so much one can do with plastic. However, if sintering, stereolithography, and other items which work with metal or ceramic become inexpensive, this can mean a lot of useful items.

My worry is that we start seeing DRM mandated for 3D printers. All it would take is having the print controller refuse to print any design unless it was signed with an approval certificate, with a number of parties on the Net that are set up to vet that some item isn't a copy of something.

Of course, DRM ends up an arms race, but ultimately, the victory goes to the deepest pockets. (For example, the PS4 and XBox One have yet to even have a dent made with them.)

I have given up on theaters except for the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin. Where other theaters have the constant people prattling and tapping on their devices, I have seen the ADH ushers be pretty proactive at tossing the texters and the yakkers out.

Long term, with people's tempers already raw, I wonder how long it will take until brawls start happening because people end up just sick and tired of the phone zombies, be it the cretin with one finger in his ear, screaming into his phone, or the people expecting others to clear a trail for them on the road. It only is a matter of time before this starts rubbing people past their breaking point.

As for lanes... good luck with that as pedestrians, that is great in theory, but once you get the people walking 3-5 abreast, that idea is going to go out the window unless there is a physical barrier preventing people from doing that.

In my experience, the average person buying a system with crapware on this doesn't care about it, provided it doesn't slow their machine down. It is just like the people who spill their lives onto social networks. They don't care who reads it, so likely wouldn't care to be tracked by "marketing browser experience enhancement" software.

The real takeaway from this is for people to pack their own parachute -- image off the drive's original software (just in case), wipe the drive [1], then install the OS from clean media, and from there, install applications. Of course, it doesn't hurt to make a zero-level image after the machine is installed, updated, drivers loaded, and activated, so a complete "bare metal" reinstall is just reloading that image.

[1]: Boot a Linux CD, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx if the drive is a HDD, blkdiscard -v /dev/hdx if the drive is a SSD.

My shopping experience is just fine without active MITM attacks.

The ironic thing is that Lenovo has had a good reputation. They inherited the Thinkpad name, and it used to be that it was the go to brand for laptops before Apple jumped in that market. Plus, business-line Thinkpads are pretty secure, be it a decent TPM implementation, fingerprint scanner, and other items.

I just hope they learn their lesson, and this doesn't pop up again, as their products are quite usable.

Ad injection is quite lucrative. This is what entire companies like Phorm which intercepts in-flight connections and inserts ads.

As for ad injection like this, I've seen a number of consumer level PCs route traffic through a local proxy, installing Web browser add-ons to keep the browser switched to the proxy and to inject their own SSL key. The fix was removal, and even then, there were processes that had to be stopped via autoruns, as well as blocked from phoning home via the Windows Firewall (so there wasn't a chance they could do damage even if restarted.)

The exception to this seems to be HP, which might have sample programs on it (Norton, for example), but no crapware that loads in Web browser add-ons. It actually was a shock seeing a new HP consumer laptop actually in a usable state out of the box, without having to go swinging at what starts up with the autoruns pickaxe.

The problem is that companies face zero negative consequences for adding intrusive software like this onto a machine. Joe Sixpack won't know or care that his search engine gets redirected through some no-name third party site so his google search page has flash ads. With the private key out, he won't realize that his banking stuff is compromised until his bank account gets drained.

The fix? As a consumer, either bring your own OS and completely wipe and reinstall the box, or buy a business-line version. Lenovo would not dare to try installing anything like this on the Thinkpad line, just like Dell's Latitude line, and HP's EliteBook line. Of course, there is always Apple, which seems expensive, but if one compares like for like, a MacBook Pro actually has a price advantage to a comparable business line HP or Dell with the same features and chipset.

I personally use a disk image utility to clone the drives before the machine ever boots for the first time, but almost all non-IT people end up losing the recovery disks, or just not making them in the first place. This is why having an OS image in ROM (or technically read-only SSD) would be useful.

The ideal would be both install media, as well as a recovery instance. This way, one could boot the machine, mount the volumes, and save off documents to external media in preparation for a complete format and reinstall. A recovery instance would also be useful for fixing boot issues, or even dealing with malware (although it is best to reinstall if malware is present.)

This is why you use VMs. If malware hits the disk, it is going to find a generic HDD, like a VMWare Virtual drive, and that vector of attack stops for good right there.

We are almost at a point where we should virtualize everything, and what sits at the bare metal is a hypervisor, where there is a definite layer of separation between the OS and devices. This way, a compromise on the OS level won't allow hardware to be tampered with. If there is a firmware update needed, then it should be made available for manual flashing that takes a deliberate set of actions by the user (or via remote, using some administrator certificate) to ensure that a firmware update is authorized.

In fact, virtualization on newer machines is more of a "why not?" item, than a "why?" item. For example, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have Hyper-V available with a switch setting and a reboot. With a little bit of work, one can have one instance of Windows just for Web browsing, and the browser would be a seamless application. The advantage of doing this is that if/when something nails the Web browser and gets a user context, rolling back to a snapshot/checkpoint is pretty easy.

A good example of this was when I was browsing in a VM a certain social network without an ad blocking extension in the browser... 10 minutes later, that VM was slammed by malware, likely from an ad server that was serving up exploits. The fix was two clicks and a confirmation dialog away. Of course, if malware isn't detected, that is another story, but for browsing the Web, it is wise to just roll the VM back every so often anyway (at least every month for Patch Tuesday's festivities.)

What would be nice is if PC makers could allow one's choice of hypervisor to be installed on a dedicated SSD that either is physically set read-only and read-write by a DIP switch (with preferences and system info stashed on a separate writable partition), or similar functionality. The advantage of this is that the hypervisor would be pretty much static except for occasional updates (and the update mechanism can be made decently secure), and hardware would be isolated from the VMs.

If a device does need a firmware upgrade, a mechanism at the hypervisor level would address this.

GM cars seem to be relatively rare in my neck of the woods. For college students, Kias, Hyundas, VWs and Mazdas have that market, with the Toyota models after that.

I really don't like GM's ability to disable any vehicle, anywhere. I'm reminded of an Austin dealer which installed devices to disable vehicles if the buyer didn't pay their loan payment... and a disgruntled ex-employee logged on as a valid employee, disabled all vehicles in the system and set them to honk until the batteries went dead. Wasn't a relatively big thing... but if someone did hack GM, the damage they could do with OnStar could be tremendous... for example, if there is a forest fire, hurricane or a disaster causing an evacuation, killing all GM vehicles in that area can turn the disaster into a catastrophe with extreme loss of life, just because the GM cars stalled would prevent movement of everything else.

For desktops, I end up doing similar, and building my own (for my personal use.) However, for laptops, it is good to go with a brand's business line (not consumer junk, but business tiers that actually will offer decent CS). Similar if one needs desktops for a company (since for accounting and auditing, it is good to have machines that have similar hardware or one easily trackable model ID.)

Of course, for personal laptops, there is always Apple. Even if one installs Windows on it (easy to do as it is a UEFI machine), the hardware is quite solid, and for individuals, Apple CS is quite good. Businesses and the enterprise, it is a different story.

tl;dr, there isn't really one fix for this, but in general, avoiding consumer-line stuff like the clap is the best thing one can do, either by building one's own machine, buying the business/enterprise tier, or going Apple.

Even on Macs, I prefer to zero out the HDD and install completely cleanly, as a matter of course [1]. In fact, on any hardware, be it POWER7, SPARC, x86, and others, zeroing out the storage and installing clean is a good idea. This not just ensures that one has a clean OS, but anything that was stashed previously is gone. No cruft, no oddball transient stuff that might have accidently wound up on the HDD during QA or testing (assuming the box was tested), just a working OS (hopefully.)

[1]: It isn't hard to download the install image of the latest OS X, write it to a USB flash drive, then use a Linux drive to boot, TRIM the entire SSD, boot from the OS X drive, and install from scratch.

If it isn't firmware level, a blkdiscard /dev/sda on a SSD should purge anything for good, and definitely not recoverable by any known means.

I'm the same way. The recovery partition is just a chunk from the HDD, so malware can easily seize control of that. Plus, I prefer server operating systems (paid for, of course.) Some laptop makers like Dell can ship a business-line model with a server OS, and since it comes from the OEM, there is a good chance the OS can just activate from the BIOS certificates. I have yet to see a machine shipping with a server OS have any crapware on it, other than maybe some administration tools.

I wish laptop makers could do what Tandy did in the early 80s... put an OS instance in ROM. Have a read-only SSD section set aside that would boot up Windows PE or even an image of whatever Windows edition came with the machine, with drivers merged in as well (easy to do with Vista and newer's WIM functionality.) This way, the box can be completely reinstalled and barring a flash of BIOS or other firmware, there can be high confidence a malware infection is eradicated.