I think that it works both ways: the campaign gets face time and spending money from assorted big names in tech because of the hope that it will make programmers cheaper; but it gets buy-in from educators and parents and politicians looking for feel-good photo ops because of the hope that somehow every kid can be a well paid knowledge worker.

Compare to H1-Bs. Those are similarly favored as a way to drive labor costs down; but are more or less politically toxic; so they have none of the popular chatter. The major tech employers are in favor of both; but only one has the buzz in the other direction as well.

These 'zOMG, everyone should STEM up and become an app entrepreneur!!!' stories aren't really about the desirability of everyone having a career in software development. They are more a reflection of the fact that plucky optimists looking for what kids should do to be successful when they grow up are...not exactly...swimming in options. Yes, they are also letting the fascination with shiny trendy things distort their perception of the options, hence the fascination with who will make the next Social Twitfriend app, rather than who will write unbelievably dull line of business stuff; but in broader strokes they aren't pushing this because it's a good idea, they are pushing it because it's an idea, and they don't have another one.

The pronouncement that 'software is eating the world' may have been a bit hyperbolic; but it sure isn't doing the life chances of people without advanced qualifications any favors. "Everyone writing apps" sounds slightly better than "Everyone selling each other securitized bullshit", so it gets more face time.

SMS-based approaches are certainly better than passwords alone; but I have a few areas of dislike for them:

They require an active cell link and a live phone, so are bad news if you are trying to log in in the bowels of some structure, with a phone that has a dead battery, or while travelling outside your non-ridiculously-priced service area. It also tends not to be a problem in practice; but SMS is 'best-effort', so if the system is being flaky then that's just too bad. Essentially, it isn't a 'second factor' at all; but a secondary channel that is assumed not to be compromised.

Then there is the matter of the site needing your phone number. For some applications, that doesn't matter: your bank already knows way more than that about you, say. For others, I'm not so enthusiastic about providing a relatively persistent, and spammable, identifier(also fairly robustly tied to me by payment data, unless I get a burner specifically for dealing with auth issues) to any lousy little website that wants it.

Finally, I'm not terribly confident about the medium-term security of SMS if it becomes a common '2 factor' authentication method. Mobile OSes tend to be a bit more locked down than desktops; but hardly infallible, and the security of SMS gateway providers(who sites using SMS auth presumably employ to interface with the phone network) is an unknown and possibly not comforting factor.

RSA fobs are ultimately an inferior option because they cannot be safely shared across multiple systems, and carrying a fistful of the things is ridiculous(plus, the pricing is usurious); but smartcard/NFC cryptographic authentication has none of these weaknesses. The hardware is cheap, it doesn't require a secondary channel to be available, certificates are relatively tiny so you can carry an enormous number of them without issue; and you can implement certificate auth with varying levels of connection with user 'identity'. On the relatively anonymous side, the user can just generate a keypair and send the public key when they create an account. Trivially handled on the client end, no interaction with outside entities. At the other extreme, hierarchical PKI systems make it possible to robustly verify the user's affiliation with a given organization if the situation requires it. The trouble, of course, is the lack of card readers/NFC pads on a lot of contemporary computers and mobile devices. A great pity.

"How would an experienced developer get these problems in the first place?"

A lot of projects do not follow widely-accepted best practices... even if they are experienced... and that is a problem!

A remarkable number of OSS projects fail to have a public source control system (#2). That includes many established projects that everyone depends on. Actually, a number of OSS projects - and projects that people THINK are OSS but are not (because they have no license) - fail many of these points. It's not that Red Hat's internal processes are immature; Tom was trying to bring in software from someone else (Google in this case) and was fed up by the poor practices from people who should know better.

Yes, #7 refers to a best practice (let people pick their install directory) that's been around for at least 20 years and probably much longer, but it's still widely NOT followed.

Anyway, that's Tom's point; there are a lot of widely-accepted best practices that are NOT followed, and that needs to change.

Unfortunately, as our fine folks in the TAO group have apparently proven on multiple occasions, even people with fancy access control tend to have very little power until the package shows up at their loading dock. What happens earlier in the process is less encouraging.

It isn't a standalone hack, since placing the implant is left as an exercise for the reader; but exfiltration is a necessary ingredient of hacks in situations where a network connection either doesn't exist or can't safely be used.

It isn't conceptually novel; but doing a practical TEMPEST attack with nothing but a dumbphone, with a fairly unobtrusive software modification, rather than a relatively classy SDR rig or some antenna-covered fed-van is a nice practical refinement.

Really, how many 'tech news' stories are actually conceptually novel, rather than "Thing you could lease from IBM for the GDP of a small country in the 60s and 70s, or buy from Sun or SGI for somewhere between the price of a new house and the price of a new car in the 80s and early 90s, is now available in a battery powered and pocket sized device that shows ads!" Conceptual novelty has a special place, of course; but one ought not to scorn engineering refinement.

Except it doesn't. The microwaves are not emitted anywhere. They are generated into a sealed chamber. There's nowhere they can go.

The formulae you listed would be useful to describe thrust from a photon drive (or light drive), but those need an open-ended emitter. Also, the results you get from them are about three orders of magnitude too low for the observed ratio of thrust to power. A 700W microwave photon drive wouldn't be detectable by the experimental apparatus.

A) That's one hypothesis among several, and many physicists claim it is, to use your term, "bollocks". I did mention there are multiple theories about how it works. They all have supporters, but they all have counterarguments too.

B) No, classical rocket engines push real particles one way and itself the other way. Unless you intend to claim that "virtual" and "real" particles are the same thing, it's not working "exactly the same way". Analogously, perhaps, but hardly "exactly the same".

Oh, and just for the heck of it:
C) To conclusively state that the EM Drive works according to your preferred theory is quite absurd unless you're an extremely well-educated theoretical physicist, and only slightly less even then. To even *claim* that I claimed anything about how the drive works, much less that my supposed idea is "bollocks", indicates a lack of reading comprehension, lack of understanding of the concept of scientific hypotheses, and lack of maturity.

Good day to you.

Not indefinitely, just over a long time. Ion engines consume fuel (which they ionize, and then throw the ions out the back of the drive, hence the name) so an ion engine still needs to haul its reaction mass along for the ride, and stops being able to thrust once it runs out of stuff to ionize and expel.

The fuel (energy storage) used to produce the electricity doesn't need to be internal to the craft, though. Photovoltaic panels, for example, take electromagnetic energy (photons), such as stars (big balls of fuel) produce, and turn it into electricity. A magnetron (such as the one inside an EM Drive) can turn that electricity back into electromagnetic energy. You now have a relatively tiny craft that can thrust forever so long as there's a star close enough to provide photons (in reasonable quantity). Maybe not viable for a starship, but it could completely revolutionize intra-system travel.

I wrote a comment on this up above, but just to help you understand...

1) No, the ion drive does not use electricity to produce thrust. Ion drives, as their name suggests, use ions to produce thrust. The ions are accelerated using fields generated via electric power, but that's no more a case of using electricity to (directly) produce thrust than an electric car is (the car pushes against the road, imparting momentum to the earth which balances the momentum imparted to the car).
2) Yes, it sounds like a free energy machine. If a given amount of electrical power produces a given thrust, constantly, without consuming any fuel, then you can generate unlimited energy by attaching this thing to a flywheel or rotor arm that drives a generator and it will produce more energy than it requires to drive the thruster. Some of the current theories about this thing claim that it won't do that, that its efficiency will go down the faster it's moving (relative to a given frame of reference).
3) No, electricity is not fuel. Electricity is not a thing. It is a process. Electricity is the motion of electrons. It is a form of energy. Fuel is a way to store energy, but it is not energy itself. You can generate electricity from many things, including fuel, and there are many forms of chemical devices with electrical potential energy - we usually call them batteries - but electricity is not, itself, fuel. Now, the energy still needs to come from somewhere (unless this drive does turn out to be usable to get more energy out than is put in, which would turn *all* of physics on its head) and that "somewhere" is usually fuel of some kind... but it can be things like uranium in a nuclear reactor that is usable for decades from a tiny amount of mass, or hydrogen in the sun producing photons as it fuses and those photons being captured and used to move electrons via the photoelectric effect (in layman's terms, solar panels).

Scientists Confirm 'Impossible' EM Drive Propulsion

Science News, Space / July 27, 2015 / by Giulio Prisco/

Later today, July 27, German scientists will present new experimental results on the controversial, "impossible" EM Drive, at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics' Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando. The presentation is titled "Direct Thrust Measurements of an EmDrive and Evaluation of Possible Side-Effects."

Presenter Martin Tajmar is a professor and chair for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology, interested in space propulsion systems and breakthrough propulsion physics.

A Revolutionary Development for Space Travel

The EM Drive (Electro Magnetic Drive) uses electromagnetic microwave cavities to directly convert electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant. First proposed by Satellite Propulsion Research, a research company based in the UK founded by aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer, the EM Drive concept was predictably scorned by much of the mainstream research community for allegedly violating the laws of physics, including the conservation of momentum.

However, NASA Eagleworks – an advanced propulsion research group led by Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) – investigated the EM Drive and presented encouraging test results in 2014 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference.

White proposes that the EM Drive’s thrust is due to virtual particles in the quantum vacuum that behave like propellant ions in magneto-hydrodynamical propulsion systems, extracting "fuel" from the very fabric of space-time and eliminating the need to carry propellant. While a number of scientists criticize White's theoretical model, others feel that he is at least pointing to the right direction. The NASASpaceFlight website and forums have emerged as unofficial news source and discussion space for all things related to the EM Drive and related breakthrough space propulsion proposals such as the Cannae Drive.

Shawyer has often been dismissed by the research establishment for not having peer-reviewed scientific publications, but White and Tajmar have impeccable credentials that put them beyond cheap dismissal and scorn. Physics is an experimental science, and the fact that the EM Drive works is confirmed in the lab. "This is the first time that someone with a well-equipped lab and a strong background in tracking experimental error has been involved, rather than engineers who may be unconsciously influenced by a desire to see it work," notes Wired referring to Tajmar's work.

Hacked has obtained a copy of Tajmar's Propulsion and Energy Forum paper, co-authored by G. Fiedler.

"Our measurements reveal thrusts as expected from previous claims after carefully studying thermal and electromagnetic interferences," note the researchers. "If true, this could certainly revolutionize space travel."

“The nature of the thrusts observed is still unclear.”

"Additional tests need to be carried out to study the magnetic interaction of the power feeding lines used for the liquid metal contacts," conclude the researchers. "Nevertheless, we do observe thrusts close to the magnitude of the actual predictions after eliminating many possible error sources that should warrant further investigation into the phenomena. Next steps include better magnetic shielding, further vacuum tests and improved EMDrive models with higher Q factors and electronics that allow tuning for optimal operation."

Contrary to sensationalist reports published by the sensationalist press, the EM Drive is not a "warp drive" for faster than light travel. It could, however, according to current experimental evidence, be a revolutionary development for faster and cheaper space transportation.

Wired notes that an EmDrive could get to Pluto in less than 18 months and mentions more ambitious ideas including a manned trip to the moons of Saturn with a three-year mission time. "Some damage to our theories of physics is an acceptable payoff if we get a working space drive," concludes the Wired article.

Finally, in the hacked.com article, rather than expelling "propellant", aren't you expelling "reaction mass"?

Where did you get that idea? The article never uses the term "reaction mass" (or even either word individually). The only references to "propellant" are to explain what the EM drive *doesn't* use, or to contrast the EM Drive with ion drives (which do have a propellant, the ions that the drive expels).

Also, for the record, "reaction mass" is just "propellant" that has been given momentum and kicked out of the vehicle. They are the same thing at different points in time, and the terms are often used interchangeably.

It appears to impart momentum to something without an opposite momentum imparted to anything else... you know, the basic concept of how every other propulsion system in the world works?

When you walk, your feet push against the ground, imparting a (tiny, relative to the mass of the Earth) amount of momentum to it at the same time that your feet impart momentum to your body.
When you sail a boat, the sails alter the momentum of the wind, and an opposite alteration is imparted to the momentum of the boat.
When a rocket engine fires, it releases exhaust with a lot of momentum going one way, and the rocket receives the momentum going the other way.
This model holds for any kind of propelling of anything. Even a flashlight projecting photons imparts a tiny, tiny bit of momentum to your hand, to your body, to the earth. Magnetic propulsion, chemical propulsion, ion propulsion... all of them operate on the principle of "we go this way, by making something else go that way".

The EM Drive appears to go one way without making anything else go the other way. It releases no exhaust, pushes against no solid or fluid, emits no photons, and interacts with no external magnetic fields. We don't know how it works (there are a number of theories, none of which are that widely accepted), and we still aren't 100% sure it does work (maybe it's still all experimental error... that becomes less likely with each independent verification, but extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence), but if it does work it does so in a way that is outside our current understanding of physics. That is a Really Big Deal.

One way or another, this is exciting!