It's not a case of lack of awareness, it's a case of mostly not giving a shit. We don't use most of the encryption features or hardening available between control systems on our site either because quite frankly we don't expect to and we don't need to. Actually I was quite critical at the last Schneider conference where they were talking about the encryption they are adding allowing you to connect multiple SCADA systems together directly via the internet. My comment to the presenter was "Why should I care at all about your encryption? Why should I trust you to do something out side your competency? We buy your gear because it's good at controlling equipment, we buy Juniper or other networking gear because they are good at networks. Your lack of encryption has never stopped me from connecting disperse systems. "

In all installations I have worked on we consider the network the device itself. If you touch the network then it's already game over, hardcoded passwords or not. Equipment is setup within private LANs, behind very strict firewalls. Physical access is prevented by means of lock and key, as well as privilege to even be in the same room as equipment. Where a connection is made over an outside network it is done only via an approved firewall / VPN method. We are aware of the security issues, we just work around them.

Now on the flip side this makes it incredibly hard to bring data onto or off from the network, but physical security is one of the best defenses. And no hardcoded passwords / encryption keys are not a good idea. But even if they didn't exist the industry has a lot to prove before I would trust any of them to create a secure system that I wouldn't lock down physically.

The GP asked why it was better, I told him, speed and efficiency. Use it or don't use it. I couldn't give a shit. You're acting like me answering someone else's question hurt your feelings. Jesus get over yourself man.

And recently there has been the phenomenon where companies try to hide things by using confusing nomenclature. E.g., "evaporated cane juice" in products with "no added sugar." Yeah -- "cane juice" -- it must be good for you, since they call it "juice"! Well, it's just another form of sugar... processed slightly differently, but still basically sucrose.

Basically, it's just a game... try to make things sound "natural" and "wholesome" when they're basically the same old crap. Same thing goes for "brown rice syrup" used as a sweetener in many things... basically sugar. But it's "brown rice"!! (Of course, brown rice also often has elevated levels of arsenic and other things... but hey, it's "natural" and "brown," so it must be good!)

Funny that you bring nitrates up, because that's one of my favorite examples of nonsense labeling. First, we get most of our nitrates from vegetables, so worrying about the small amounts in bacon and cured meats is probably not as big a deal as people make of it. (Yes, yes... cooking does other things to the nitrates and can make them bad, but proper curing also deactivates most of them too... we could argue this all day.)

But regardless of that, my favorite misleading labeling is all the "uncured" meats you see these days: "uncured bacon," "uncured salami," etc. Yeah, except these almost always contain huge amounts of "concentrated celery juice" (or sometimes another agent) which contains more nitrates than the standard salts used traditionally to cure meat. (And no -- to those natural foods wackos -- there's no evidence to support the idea that somehow those nitrates are better for you in the concentrated celery juice... basically because "natural" celery juice has unpredictable amounts of nitrates, they need to add more of them than they would for tradition curing salts.)

People just want stuff called "natural" with "juice" and "brown X" and "natural flavors" in it. It's almost all bogus nonsense, and often you end up paying a huge premium for something that could very well be worse for you.

Moral of the story: Labels frequently don't work to tell people what's actually better. Not saying we shouldn't try to use them, but companies will weasel their way around anything to appeal to customers.

(By the way, I'm all in favor of cooking for yourself with whole ingredients, using less "processed" foods, etc. But bogus "natural foods" nonsense is bogus nonsense.)

And yet the system remains completely functional when unable to reach Microsoft services. That's the key difference between tightly locked, and being offered by default.

As an average Slashdot user, the express settings sound fine to me. It's no different from iOS, or Android, and the reason that we send this stuff is to get stuff in return (voice search, integrated cloud drive, synchronized windows settings between machines).

Call me troll but I previously went out of the way to install such services to make my life easier and I don't distrust MS enough to complain that they included them out of the box.

I don't think you'll ever see a "Service Pack" for Windows again.

Maybe wait for Windows 11, It's due to come out within the year.

Can you point me to a case where letting Motherboard vendors do in the BIOS what they wanted has ever worked in the favour of anything other than Windows?

Honestly, search has been here since Vista and was refined in Windows 7. The only time in the past 7 years I've actually dug through a menu was when I forgot what a program was called but I could remember what the icon looked like.

Want to start Handbrake? Tap start > Type "han" > Hit enter.
Want to start Word? Tap start > type "wo" > hit enter.

I can do most of these faster than anyone can even take their hand off the keyboard and move it to the mouse.

Well yes, stop it. Hold it and turn it over to police. Do you often destroy evidence in a way that sees yourself up for property damage while at the same time removing your ability to prove the other part acted improperly?

My line of work deals with exactly this kind of thing. Engineers are in many cases obligated ethically or via business requirements to find the most inherently safe design that fits the design criteria, but one thing we (engineers) fail at most spectacularly is taking into account human factors, especially operator actions.

It has been seen in some spectacularly bad decisions over the years. The introduction of control systems removed costs of adding alarms so they put alarms on everything overwhelming the operator and in turn making them meaningless. The upgrading of control systems has allowed people to cram as much information on screens as they see fit, and rather than putting "information" on they put on 3D graphics, context less numbers, and hard to read bargraphs. (I should mention the airline industry is the model of perfection for operator interfaces that many other industries are following as they resolved these issues years ago).

We engineers know a lot about the things we design, we know how to break it. Unfortunately we also go out of our way to write bad interfaces and give the operator sufficient rope to hang himself. Nearly all jobs in safety systems and interlocking across various industries right now is in retrofitting processes, and in nearly all of these cases the hazards have always been well known and well understood.

I switch between English and Japanese keyboards every day. I don't find it a problem, I got used to it fairly quickly. The Japanese keyboard has a lot of differences to the UK one, like all the shift characters on the number row and most of the ones next to the enter key.

A friend of mine uses Caps Lock instead of shift, but he also types insanely fast. He sees it as inserting commands into the input stream, and claims it is faster for him.

To be fair though, putting power and sleep buttons on the keyboard was a monumentally stupid idea. It's far too easy to accidentally hit them.

Some keyboards do have small caps lock keys. Japanese layouts for example, but even in the west... I seem to recall some 80s computers had caps lock keys of "normal" size, i.e. the same as letter keys.

Software developed for governments perhaps? I seem to recall some countries mandated that software written for government departments had to be open source. They paid an external developer to write and maintain the software, but the source code was available.

Perhaps that will come to pass, but likely not for a couple generations.

Basically, for people to ignore all that stuff, you'll need the "people in power" to be okay with it. Most of the people in power are middle-aged or older. Social media stuff has only been the norm for about a decade, so I'd say we'll need to wait at least 20-30 years before most of the "people in power" will have grown up with it.

And then, guess what -- there's a filtering process for the "people in power" where the old "people in power" decide who the new ones will be. And so there will be an even greater lag, where the first generation of "social media natives" will still be shamed as they try to build careers, so in 20-30 years, the "people in power" will be "social media natives," but they'll mostly be selected by the previous generation and thus will hold a "higher standard" -- i.e., the kids who didn't do most of the "nasty stuff" when they where kids.

Maybe when you get about 40-50 years from now, you'll get a true transformation like you describe, assuming current trends continue (which, well... who would have predicted this current world 50 years ago?).

By the way, you can look for this sort of morality issue in various political campaigns, etc. What most of the "cool kids" were doing in the 60s (in terms of drugs, sexual practices, etc.) was definitely not acceptable even when that generation came to power in the 80s and 90s. Maybe in the past few years, we've finally started to see a majority of the public okay with some drugs, etc., but that's been a really slow transformation, as I described above.