Like I said, cost is king.
Heck, I've been trying to redesign something to use the ATTiny and bitbang USB. Thinking about it, that's where the 4k number came from. Boards with more memory and more features are getting cheaper and that's awesome. I can't wait for when integrated USB becomes as common as integrated SPI and TTL.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to get out of my cave and yell at some kids on my lawn.
Where did 4K of code come from?
I would expect to use a micro that can address enough memory for the job to be done right.
Who mentioned Arduinos? It wasn't me.
I was just talking in general. When someone says "simple microcontroller" I think of an ATMicro/Mega or something like the MSP430 most of which cap out somewhere between 2 and 16k. Anything more than that is a full ARM soc and normally is expensive and has finicky power and i/o requirements compared to the "simple microcontrollers" I normally work with. They're the lap of luxury since, like I said, you normally spend large amounts of time to make the code work with the 4k device instead of the 16k just to save a few cents per unit.
> So you can read and write to an SD card, you just can't run code off it.
That seems like a good thing for a voting machine.
Good for voting machines, bad for anyone who doesn't need any fancy features but needs more than 4k Bytes of code. Since that's your entire program space with those small microcontrollers. You find weird bugs and limitations in many of those since they have to use a stripped down libc. When you hit that code cap most of the time your only option is to redesign the entire board or start using hacks to cut down on code size. The Arduino might have popularized them, but microcontrollers are still a game where you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars up front just to save ten cents per unit.
Also, since it's much more of a pain to update code don't expect things to be patched unless they're critical. Even then it would be really expensive. Worse, since these things still use a stack you can still get them via Return Oriented Programming.
SD cards are actually even easier since you can talk to them over SPI. You can get a fifty cent microcontroller to read and write from those with no problem. The annoying thing is that those microcontrollers use a Harvard architecture. Instruction and data code use entirely different memory. So you can read and write to an SD card, you just can't run code off it.
FBI... Policing.... That's good, tell me another. J. Edgar Hoover pretty much set the tone for the FBI. Which organization do you think is actually prosecuting most whisleblowers and anyone the gov doesn't like?
It sounds to me like they're finally admitting that this is a basic service that everyone should be provided with.
I wonder how much longer it will take before they regulate it as such (as a utility).
The thing is that the FCC (US government agency that regulates telecoms) can do that. It's what the whole Title II reclassification thing is all about. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Which is why the lobbyists and congress are freaking out. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
This should have far reaching ramifications when it comes to copyright law. As long as the original video or photographs were made consensually or in public then the photographer owns the copyright. I don't see how that can be undone. It also should open the door for further defining what exactly entails "compromising the reputation". What if someone takes a (non-sexual) photograph of a person cheating in public? Or a video of someone acting like a jerk? Those would also compromise the reputation of the subject. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets overturned higher up.
That was my thought as well but remember the story about right to be forgotten. That case said it's ok to censor someone and have them remove totally factual articles and links. It was the online equivalent of if you don't like what someone said about you in a book then they have to stop printing it and pull it from store shelves, and bookstores have to remove all traces of it ever existing from their system.
It would have been a totally different lawsuit if it happened across the pond. Here in the US this would have been Copyright and First Amendment (both explicitly given to the gov) vs something much more nebulous (defamation or publicity rights maybe). Of course, here in the US they've determined that the first amendment doesn't cover "obscene" speech. Pity they don't really define obscene.
Another thing is that in most marriages the assets are merged. It's always tricky to divide everything in the divorce. The common (American at least) feeling is "she gets everything, and he gets to keep the clothes on his back."
The ideal use for mini projectors is when you need to give a presentation and don't want to deal with the hassle of setting up a projector and then connecting a laptop to it. The ideal projector has a USB port for a thumb drive on the back and automatically starts whatever powerpoint is on there. Add another USB port for the presenters remote and you're golden.
Business people don't like having to worry about cables and configuring multiple monitors. Heck, I don't either when I'm crunched for time and there's an audience staring at me and waiting for me to get it all working.
"Zero-Day exploit allowing the attacker to run arbitrary code"
I thought these words should be history based on the implemented NX bit, sandboxing, multiple lines of defense and Data Execution Prevention features of MS Windows after XP.
Why do all these features fail, when they are specifically designed for exposed code like IE? Or does this warning assume the worst case, where all these other features are turned off?
The NX bit, and DEP forced us to develop Return Oriented Programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Basically because function arguments and return pointers are on the stack you can make the code that's already there do the work for you. It's not as easy as just writing a little shell code and tends to be more specific as far as the version of the software the victim is running, but it's really quite neat and hard to stop.
Ironically, Asimov created the three laws because he was tired of stories where robots try to take over humanity or wipe us out. Wonder what he would have thought of the I Robot movie...
Are the sensors that detect things like occupants in other vehicles and train tracks and oncoming trains optional equipment, mandatory, or pure science fiction?
Because if they're optional, I'm not paying for that trim package.
Psssh, I'm totally buying that system, and then hacking it to report to every other vehicle that I'm a bus full of nuns and schoolchildren.
Oh, sure, that's a good plan: you just wait for the first super-villain to appear, and then see what happens.
You win the Internets for today. Congratulations.
I used to do software for industrial robots. Safety for the people around the robot was the number one concern, but it is amazing how easy it is for humans to give orders to a robot that will lead to it being damaged or destroyed. In practice, the robots would 'prioritize' protecting themselves rather than obeying suicidal orders.
It all comes down to how much you trust the user. Asimov thought most users were smart enough to not give orders that were that bad. Plus I think Asimov's robots were smart enough that they would try to carry out general orders without damaging themselves. For instance, "Come here as fast as possible," does not mean that the robot would burn out its motors while traveling to the person. So I guess even in universe you had to explicitly tell the robots to do something suicidal.
Side note, with the minor things like the Emory University incident (http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/05/17/051214/emory-university-sccm-server-accidentally-reformats-all-computers-campus-wide) it certainly seems that Windows tends to stop users from doing dumb things like formatting their system partition while running on it. Meanwhile, Linux and Unix have no such protections. "Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things." – Doug Gwyn
Of course, no modern OS will let you do anything truly damaging to it without admin rights.
Unfortunately, ULA has stated that it would cost one Billion dollars to set up their own engine production here in the US. Sure that's nine tenths congressional/military bribes and lining shareholders pockets but expect the US to be paying for the factory any day now.
I suspect the ban on using Russian engines to launch the US military satellites is more of a posturing. Russian rockets and rocket engines are used mostly to launch civilian satellites.
Except the number one thing in the news lately about those engines has been the massive US military block buy of rockets that use them. When the judge ordered a preliminary injunction to keep ULA from buying them a bunch of US businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians, and military types freaked out. Which was practically a sign to the Russians saying, "You can hurt us."
The GPS thing is partly posturing, but mostly about limiting military accuracy in the off chance we try something stupid. It's not likely, but still an important military concern, and it goes perfectly with everything else that's going on.
The space station thing is probably all posturing, especially since the US is expected to start testing manned launches again by next year. What I can see them doing is raising prices to an outrageous degree. Get every cent they can to build their new launch complex. After all, Russia currently rents the Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan.
They can't. These are certs that are added by the companies IT department, not certs that ship by default. In some places, like United States libraries, internet filters are mandated. So these places have a few choices, let the public potentially view naughty images via Google image search, downgrade all connections to http, or MITM everything. Guess which one of the three the politicians don't like.
The big thing those IT departments have to worry about is certificate pinning, which is where the browser stores the actual per website cert, and displays an error if it's changed. This is what Chrome does/is planning to keep people from MITMing Google in particular. I can see both Chrome and Mozilla being proactive, while IE focuses on the corporate clients and if anything becomes less secure.
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