A perfect chance to tighten the fences keeping the citizens in check.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but the idea that you have to keep Canadians "in check" is pretty funny. I've lived in Canada and have never met a people who were less "out of check".

I mean, what are there, about four homicides a year in Ottawa? And three of those are probably mercy killings. The other was a guy who wore a Marian Hossa jersey to an Ottawa Senators' game. Even criminals in Canada are polite.

Any one of various people who would want the new measures could have hired the guy.

You sound reasonable.

"It's all about ethics in Slashdot comments!"

Why spend the $10 most carriers charge for a SIM if you don't have to?

It's got to be an "Apple SIM" which probably means it's $599 for a small one that nobody wants and $899 for one that you can actually use.

I own a Surface Pro 2 and a Surface Pro 3, and use them for portable music production, live performance and field recording. They are by far the best system for such use. It's a tablet, with the touch screen (or stylus) except it can run a full version of ProTools with all the plug-ins and VSTi's you could possibly want. Full USB connectivity for audio interfaces, MIDI controllers and peripherals.

If they made a Macbook with a removable touchscreen, it would be close, but Apple seems more intent on having every pixel in the world. I remember when Apple really catered to musicians (except for their slow adoption of audio driver standards). Now, they cater to people watching cat videos. At the moment, there is no device close to the Surface Pro for this purpose. I don't believe this niche is enough to sustain the Surface Pro by itself, but I'm glad to have them right now. And I hope someone else out there is paying attention, which is why I post a comment just like this every time the Surface comes up on Slashdot.

Not that there's anything wrong with cat videos.

Of course he's looking for bad news. Have you read the comments for any Slashdot article that mentions the Surface or Surface Pro? A brigade of people come out who are basically upset that it even exists. It's like the Surface Pro scared their mothers when they were in the womb.

They only fix 2 problems - weak passwords and keyloggers.

That's not true. They also provide protection against:

• Shoulder surfing attacks, which require no compromise to the internals of the endpoint
• Storage of data encrypted with a protocol that later proves vulnerable in some interesting way, such as a key compromise

For example, consider heartbleed. If someone stores your encrypted communication, and later compromises a host's private key, that attacker could ostensibly decrypt those communications. If you use a password, that password is compromised, and it's "Game over, man." If you use a physical token, only the PIN is compromised (assuming the actual verification happens in a separate process).

Ideally, you would still want to issue new PIN codes, but the account hijacking risk would be largely mitigated by the physical token requirement, at least after the n-hour cookie expiration window passes, and you could even eliminate that window by expiring any cookies in your authentication database before bringing it back online after you fix the heartbleed vulnerability.

So you're saying they made a new network for blackjack and hookers? You know what, forget the network. And the hookers.

Does anyone know if FIOS internet uses the same system? I don't have a Verizon Wireless account.

Regardless of the fact that it may be legal for others to do so, it's unethical and clearly misrepresentation.

Not true. Lots of small homebrew hardware uses off-the-shelf chips like the ones FTDI builds without applying for their own VID/PID combo. This causes minor headaches because software can't tell them apart from one another, but as long as the final product doesn't have a USB logo on it, it is perfectly acceptable to sell it, even if your homebrew flash programmer looks like a USB to serial adapter to any software that asks.

If you want to use the USB logo, you have to apply for your own VID/PID combo and reprogram the chip to identify itself as being your product, and ship a custom driver that talks to it (which could be a modified version of the official FTDI driver, or the open source driver, or whatever).

"and kept politics contained in the opinion pages" - To play devil's advocate - this particular article IS in the Opinion section.

From looking at how their stuff works, no. The driver tries to change the PID on all devices, but genuine hardware doesn't actually write out the EEPROM until further action is taken, while clones immediately write out the EEPROM.

Although it isn't really a "brick" - it sets the PID to 0. Which is invalid, but happens often enough these days that you can still force the hardware to be used. Someone wrote a Linux patch that would register the correct driver for FTDI's VID and a PID of 0.

Another option FTDI could have done is: Change the PID to one reserved for clones, then spit out warnings when that PID is seen.

"are not sold as made by the company" - They use FTDI's USB VID/PID - this is representing yourself as an FTDI chip.

The tough thing is HOW to do it on first plug-in. The only method I can see that would work is to perform the same alteration the driver is doing, but instead of changing the PID to 0, change it to one reserved for fake chips. Then have the driver spit out lots of warnings if the "fake chip" PID is seen.

(As to how their driver is doing its thing - from what I've read of decompiled code, it attempts to change the PID to 0 on all chips. However, genuine hardware needs additional steps to actually start the EEPROM write, while clone hardware immediately writes out the EEPROM.)

"The issue is that the FTDI driver is deliberately reprogramming a chip that is not theirs"

Except they're only doing this to their USB VID/PID - which IS THEIRS.

If you use FTDI's VID/PID, you're trying to pass yourself off as an FTDI chip, and it is YOUR FAULT ALONE if an operation that does not cause issues on genuine FTDI hardware does bad things to your own.

(If you look at the decompiled code, the driver attempts to write the EEPROM on all hardware. However, genuine FTDI hardware won't actually START the write operation until the driver does "additional stuff" - but clones will immediately write the new EEPROM value.)

Research in this area is probably a good thing if done right. Mace, tear gas, and stun guns are not
very effective in a large crowd or hostage situation. I agree with the article that current methods
rely on exact dosage to prevent fatality but it's highly probable that we can find better chemicals that don't.
Marijuana is one of many known substances where the effective dose and the lethal dose are orders of
magnitude apart. Research into incapacitating substances with very low effective doses but very high
lethal doses would be where I would want to focus. Something like this would be very useful. You could
make everyone pass out and then isolate the bad guys before they wake up saving both civilian and
criminal lives.