A lot of people don't trust their car manufacturer to be in charge of firmware pushes. That makes perfect sense. Maybe the best approach, would be utilizing special software on existing smartphone platforms. This solves many issues at once. Car owners don't have to worry about their car "phoning home" or the dealer pushing "fixes" without their knowledge, while simultaneously giving the car owner, and the dealer the advantages of a remote software update. If you want it, you can install the dealer's smart app, and hook your phone up to your car for an update.

There are, of course, new issues. You need to properly sign and validate your updates, to make sure they are delivered to the cars uncorrupted, in the correct format, and that no one else can use the functionality to hack the car.

Yes...just like when your router goes down, you loose internet...

After I found that my ASUS RT-15U was running telnet with a default password, open to the world which I couldn't kill or change the password on, I swore of embedded device routers.

I have replaced it with a small Debian box with dual NICS, and bought a 24port switch from TPLINK. It was the best decision I have ever made. Perfect reliability, complete control, via IPTABLES. I've got auto blocking of malicious ips trying to hit my ssh or port scanning me via DenyHosts and PSAD.

A couple other custom scripts and DNSMASQ, dhclient, snort, and python, and I have all the other services and features I want, and ONLY the services and features I want.

...when their virtual boss tokens get hacked by their competitor or APT.

I always end up going back to a customized XFCE, but about every 6 months, I decide to try something else, and usually end up wiping my system and reinstalling before I'm done.

My wife has a mildly customized XFCE setup, and she loves it. It almost never gets changed or tweaked.

Out of the four harddrive failures I have had in the last ten years (I often replace smaller drives with bigger ones before they fail), 3 of them were Seagate drives and one was a hitachi. I will never by Seagate again. Meanwhile my other Hitachi drives and Western Digital drives still spin on.

Though this tool might prevent DOM traversal and node name referencing, it most certainly will strive to keep the website layout the same, from the user's point of view. Therefore, a simple bypass is to look for inputs via relative page positioning. That should completely bypass the anti-bot automation functionality. This type of check would be easiest to perform at a lower-level, but it certainly can be done via bot injected Javascript.

I got an older version of this: http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Unlimited-USB-2545-Eco-Friendly-Battery-Free/dp/B001EBJ9XS/ref=pd_sim_sbs_pc_1 (but without the idiotic double scroll wheel). Best thing I ever bought. No batteries to charge or replace.

Communities make laws that represent the majority in their community. They also commonly erect statues that represent something about their community. We don't throw out laws when one person's views are represented. How is it that a conservative community can't display a symbol with historical significance which represents the majority view? It isn't being "forced" on anyone (unlike a law). If you don't like the statue, don't look at it. There might be a case if tax payer dollars were used, but they weren't. If at some point the majority in the community no longer feels represented by the statue, then they can elect council members who will tear it down.

Wake me up when they have created the world's smallest graphene violin!

Each year it is a national joke some of the idiotic studies that get federal grants. If the federal government is paying for it, then it makes perfect sense that the grantee should justify why the research will benefit the country.

We should be intercepting the commie birds with lasers!

The passwords are very breakable as they used the same IV's and keys for every password. Thus any two same plain texts have the same cipher text. A little, simple statistical analysis will get you the keystream and allow you to get all the plain text passwords.

Bitmessage: P2P, encrypted, anonymous. The project is pretty new, but other than a couple scalability issues, I think this project has major potential. http://bitmessage.org/

I left Ubuntu back when they started making their own UI and doing it terribly.

I'd never go back, even if they had fixed all their flaws because of the inability to easily upgrade with each version.

These days I run Debian Testing with XFCE. Mostly painless, rolling upgrades.