Well one, it's bad enough for a single company to have their 'security' teams meaningfully assess the security beyond the obvious. Good security really has to be ingrained throughout the process.

The obvious security issues that something like a 'CyberUL' would catch are generally not the issues. The problem is that once a new issue is discovered, the existing install base is not be updated. Either because updates are available but IT teams are slack, or because everyone has jumped on the bandwagon of using preloaded stuff baked into products that get subsequently abandoned by their vendor or the vendor just goes defunct.

For another, any US endorsed entity calling the shots for security faces a bad credibility problem. NIST is pretty well distrusted globally now, I don't know what would happen with this initiative.

The same could be said of pretty much every advancement. Guys with clubs are cowards because the barehanded guys don't have a chance. Guys with swords are cowards because the guys with clubs don't stand a chance. Guys with arrows are cowards because the guys with swords across the field don't stand a chance. So on and so forth.

Of the factors driving reluctance to engage in harming other people, I don't think giving the other guy a sporting chance to kill you is a good factor. As others have pointed out, without your own life on the line you may have the opportunity to be more careful about how you proceed. If you are in imminent danger of getting killed, you may be more likely to make hasty judgment calls, collateral civilian damage be damned.

That may be a valid concern, however that's orthogonal to the point about whether a pilot needs to be inside a craft or not.

Points can be made about how susceptible it would be to jamming attacks and such. However as it stands the statement that drones have no conscience is about as useful as saying a bullet has no conscience.

I would say no to the actually firing bit. Sure have it be able to evade and retreat or adjust flight to try to get around jamming, but there's a dangerous step to let the AI take hold of the trigger.

I know the same can be said of humans, but at least we know how to contend with that reality.

Drones with weapons aren't autonomous.

HMAC is not just used in SSL. It's a commonly employed in a lot of protocols. It's an additional level of complexity beyond a 'broken' hash to compromise HMAC.

A hash is compromised if you can find a collision faster than brute force. Even if you have no control over the data it is broken.

It is more dangerously/practically broken if you can control generating two sets of data that hash to the same value. This is where MD5 is IIRC

It is even more critically broken if, given an image that you do not control, you can generate your own data to hash to the same value.

HMAC requires that the data combined in a useful way with some shared secret hashes to the given value. An attacker is missing part of the image that would require to be attacked, and that missing part is applied to the image in a way that makes it resilient to prefix and append attacks. SHA-1 and MD5 are weaker by virtue of brute force being easier in an HMAC context, but I don't think I've heard either of them as being 'broken' in context of HMAC. An example would be if someone figured out how to change arbitrary middle part of an image and have the hash work out correctly regardless of the secret data (if it collides, that might not be the desired effect, it would have to match what the image would have after being combined with the unknown key)

I don't know OSX and have no opinion on the matter, but Ctrl-F7 before tab can navigate between input fields seems weird. Why not have those commonly used keyboard shortcuts 'just work' without particular difficulty.

Nearly all the goofiness around the desktop experience in Linux is around the graphics stack. This is of course critical for desktops, but I had mentioned it above.

I go with Linux because I just don't like the Windows UI choice. I use Windows on my gaming system, but my Intel graphics laptop I just do linux. The graphics are adequate and my ability to actually debug weird stuff is better (my Windows system started hanging on attempts to shutdown, restart, or suspend and there's no peep of a clue as to what it's trying to do when it hangs).

In RFC land, PROPOSED standard is pretty much as far as most things get.

See:
https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/ind...

For example, nntp is 'just' a 'proposed standard'.

Saying HMAC with SHA1 is 'weak' is a bit too worrisome. Even with MD5 broken, none of the breakage applies to use in HMAC as far as I know.

So yes, if you are using a new implementation, go with the best hash. No reason to chose MD5/SHA1 in a new design. However if you are currently reliant upon some use of HMAC that happens to use SHA1 or even MD5, no need to exactly panic and break things to get away from that in an urgent way.

Though you still have the issue of the fluctuation due to whimsical behavior of the populace.

Basically you have one of two issues:
-A system where a designated few are given power to manipulate the whole currency, complete with how bad that can go when such power is wielded in a corrupt or incompetent way. On the upside, they can apply some manipulation to mask a transient issue that can and has sent economies spiraling into collapse if it manifested in the value of the currency directly.
-A system where the currency is more fixed, 'value' subject to the whims of the general participants in the economy. Note that those whims can be and have been quite successfully manipulated by sufficiently confident/charasmatic folks (e.g. relatively few very vocal folks largely drove Gold value up not so long ago), so the potential for manipulation by a few is still very real, even if not institutionalized.

It seems in practice the latter is more destructive, though the former *feels* more wrong. There are of course spectacular examples of the first going wrong, but most of those systems are working. There aren't really any at scale examples of the latter going right in this day and age.

No, they still use the phrase 'Windows as a Service' prominently. There's no hint that means anything with respect to how people *pay* for the thing. It seems to refer to two things depending on the audience:

-Rolling release for the consumer space. No longer do consumers have to/get to decide on a particular version. On the plus side, if you were running Vista and then 7 level of functionality came along, you get fixed for no additional cost. On the down side, if you are running something 7 like and 8 comes along, you get changed to the 8 vision (8 underpinnings were great, except for 'Modern' UI and apps).

-Deferred recognition of revenue for investors. Investors want the appearance of a 'subscription' like revenue stream. MS realizes this would be suicide for an *OS*, but still has to satisfy those demands. So hypothetically a user buys the OS for $100 from his perspective. MS defers the revenue so it *looks* like the user pre-paid for 4 years of a subscription at $25/yr. Note that there's not guarantee that the user will stop using it before that 4 years is up, but the expectation is that in aggregate that'll be the useful life of that purchase (tied to the hardware device, maybe not transferrable even for retail anymore?).

Windows has made a lot of advancements, but the picture is not clear cut.

Performance: Graphics driver stack and utilization Windows is ahead by a wide margin. Otherwise Linux usually wins (though some debate can be had about scheduling behaviors). For reference, look at the Top500 list and count the Windows deployments versus Linux.

Security: This really is more subjective than objective in many ways. Windows let's you *think* you are logged in as admin without actually giving admin in a pretty sophisticated way. Given the common use case of desktop users using just one account as 'admin', this is probably one of the most important facets. Additionally the ability to hold multiple security contexts without having distinct processes enables applications to take advantage of OS privilege enforcement in a more efficient manner. On the flipside, Linux has more advanced namespace manipulation and enriched mandatory access control. There is much better framework for hard enforcement of very fine grained things in Linux.

Stability: At this point things are fairly even. MS gets a nod for more resilient graphics stack, but I'd say the quality of third party drivers is frequently lower in Windows than Linux. I get more crashes on a modern Windows system than a Linux system, but I don't think MS is to blame anymore directly. If Linux were more popular and third parties did the same BS they do in Windows, Linux would probably suffer just as badly. In this way, the GPL I think has helped Linux as a kernel greatly.

Not to mention that 1Y ago it was $650 per unit, and was almost $1000 a year before that.

So on top of a massive inflation over two years, they are saying they are so stable they predict a 200-300% deflation thanks to how awesomely stable it is...

I don't understand how anyone can testify to the stability of bitcoin with a straight face.

That's incorrect. Gold fluctuates pretty wildly with mass hysteria, compete with massive deflation and inflation. Much like bitcoin. Prior to the 20th century, when communication wasn't quite so instant and pervasive, gold did a pretty good job because it was rare for *everyone* to panic more or be more confident all at once.