Similarly I was thinking this would probably be defeated by a "minifier", obfuscator, or anything along those lines. There are dozens to choose from for most languages and it would be trivial for anyone attempting to remain anonymous to use them on their releases.

If you want the code to remain usable, there are tools to enforce a standard style instead, in which case just set it up with rules based on a popular project if your language of choice doesn't have a specific style. At that point you're down to comments and variable names. Don't get fancy with either and I'd bet the identifiability would go down significantly.

I actually have one of those. My grandma found it in her sister's attic when cleaning the place out and figured I'd like it. I thought it was a laserdisc player when she described it to me, so I was really surprised to find that it was actually a vinyl-based video format.

Video quality isn't much worse than '80s VHS.

No one can say for sure of course outside of Redmond, but if I had to guess I'd say it would work similarly to the existing Windows Activation schemes. A hard drive swap means basically nothing.

I had never had a reactivation required until just recently when I switched from AMD to Intel. Swapping between AMD processors and boards (Athlon X2 3800+ to Athlon 6000+ to Phenom X6 1045) didn't trigger it, nor did uncountable disk and addon board changes, but going to a Core i7 finally did it.

From the official Windows Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/blogg...

It sounds likely that there will be some kind of a subscription offered in the future, but those who use this upgrade offer are set for the lifetime of the device.

I remember a time when Sony was a maker of quality consumer electronics. They were usually more expensive than the competition, but usually better made as well. Then at some point in the '90s they sort of followed Bose down the path of compromising engineering and quality for marketing more and more while keeping their prices the same. Since the death of the CRT and Discman I can't think of a Sony product I've been able to comfortably recommend over its competition for it's primary purpose.

The PS2 and PS3 both had a time where they were a great choice if you wanted a player for their respective movie formats before the ultra-cheap players hit the market, but I'd never recommend either as a game console unless you are tied to the platform by exclusive games or more of your friends you want to play with having one.

I don't know the answer for sure but this is Sony, is there really a question?

I think the main reason supersonic passenger flights are unlikely to make a return is what you're using right now. The internet has eliminated a lot of the business cases where such things could actually be justified rather than just being a novelty/luxury. It used to actually matter that you could wake up in New York, have a meeting in London, and be back home in time for dinner. Now most situations that would have previously required such things can be done over a videoconference and a few emails.

Yeah there are still a few situations where getting a person or airplane-carryable thing across the ocean in three hours is worth the extra cost, but for the most part Concorde was down to the novelty by the 2000s. Those who cared about luxury would more likely be on a jumbo with the semiprivate or private seat/suite arrangements and those who cared about speed were making things happen digitally.

Not always...

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/0...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a040...

Not saying this is common, Knight provides a good example in the other direction and I honestly don't care enough about the markets to know of anything that didn't make national news, just that it seems it depends on the situation.

Legally of course this depends on the jurisdiction, IANAL. Morally I believe this is very grey area and depends primarily on intent. Obviously it's sort of hard to judge intent in most cases, though in this case unleashing it specifically on a "Dark Web" type site does imply at least some knowledge that it'll happen these days.

Then again I have to imagine part of the point of this exhibit was to counter that assumption, that all these sites are good for are illegal things.

By displaying them in such a conspicuous location also changes things compared to if one had tried to use "the computer did it" as an excuse when caught with the same things in their home.

Basically it's probably legally wrong, but I'd have a hard time being convinced that they should actually be punished for it.

Again depends on the context and the intent. If you wrote a bot that went out looking for anything it thinks is porn to display automatically in an art installation and it happened to come across kiddie porn, it'd certainly be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. That said, due to the context of displaying the results of a search automatically as art I'd still be unconvinced that punishment is appropriate. The same excuse deployed by someone caught with a collection of images on their own machine should get laughed out of court and them right in to jail.

At least the first generation of Nest units have Zigbee radios, but they've never been enabled as far as I can find. I have no idea whether the second generation units kept the extra radio.

A PC Engines APU1C can "route" (NAT/gateway) around 6-700mbit/sec with pfSense on a 1GHz AMD A-series CPU with no hardware acceleration. That's nothing, hardware-wise. It has Realtek network cards which aren't great from a performance standpoint. I don't disagree that 10G+ service is going to take a fair bit of hardware compared to average home "router" hardware, but that's because those boxes are trash for the most part.

It's not always cost that limits bus widths. See PCI for example. They tried widening it (64 bit) and clocking it up (66, 133, and very rarely even beyond), but what won out is a much higher clocked serial interface (PCI Express).

Skew in a parallel interface is a bitch, plus the number of traces required on the board to support a wide bus. There's only so many connections you can practically run in to any given chip package without getting unmanageable.

ECC does not mitigate it, but it will detect the problem where non-ECC memory will happily keep on operating with the corrupted data.

For the standard car analogy, consider tire pressure monitoring systems. They won't stop you from getting a flat, but they'll let you know you have a slow leak where you might otherwise keep driving until it's bad enough that you notice otherwise. By that time the damage is done and you probably need a new tire.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure the first touch screen I ever used back in the early '90s used basically the same method. You didn't have to actually touch the screen, since it was a CRT and was usually curved where the sensor plane was flat.

SS7 dates to the '70s. Pretty much no communications protocols intended for general use were designed with even the thought of security at the time. The number of players in the game was small enough that any bad behavior could be rooted out fairly easily.

Look at email for the same basic problem, it was designed with the assumption that the parties involved could be trusted because on the networks it was designed for that was generally the case. Over time the trustworthiness of the network was degraded for reasons both good and bad, but the common protocols had already been established by then and it's a long road to change.

I won't argue that there probably has been some "influence" on decisions about adopting more secure replacements, but it's a bit tinfoil hattish to claim that the protocols themselves were intentionally made insecure when it's well documented that most protocols from that era just weren't designed to try to be secure in the first place.

Individual is the key word there. The BSA (and thus I agree by extension Microsoft) has a well documented track record of suing companies using pirated software. If you take them at their word that there were a large number of different devices activating those products from that IP address it seems reasonable that the same is exactly what's happening here. Individual pirates would be like the RIAA and MPAA going after actual people and families.

Or that IP is an exit point for Tor or a VPN or whatever and whoever's actually doing it is somewhere else, who can say.