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Comment Re:Sooo .. (Score 2) 127

Couple of mitigations

- You can disable this feature if you want

- You can also enable SmartLock which will lock the phone as soon as it gets out of range of another bluetooth device (smart watch or key fob)

- Use android device manager to lock and/or remote wipe the phone as soon as possible after the theft. My wife has the ability to lock and remote wipe my phone from her phone using Android Device Manager, and I can do the same to hers.. you should set this up.

- You could simply hold the power button in while handing over the phone, forcing a reboot and lock

- You could get a dimple.io NFC button that lets you password lock your phone with a keypress

Comment Re:could be right (Score 4, Insightful) 353

When my kid reaches secondary school (aka High School), she will no longer be a "child", she will be a young adult. The idea that a 15+ year old can not be trusted with a smartphone, when they drinking, having sex, and in all likelihood doing drugs from time to time, is ridiculous.

People need to stop coddling their kids so much. Maybe that is the indirect cause of some of these issues, kids now unable to deal with the realities of the world as they get older because their helicopter parents never exposed them to it.

Comment Re:Tickets Are All About Revenue (Score 2) 760

... Except in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, where tickets are about a deterrent.

Because you know, they collect enough taxes to properly fund their civil services like police, so that, you know, they can do the jobs they are supposed to do and not focus on being tax collectors.

Comment Re:This Song? There's Nothing Tricky About It (Score 1) 386

It actually isn't that cut and dry at all.

If you watch the interviews with Thicke, he readily admitted, long ago even before this court case, that they were trying to create a Gaye-inspired sound. The song is very explicitly NOT infringement, because it is not a copy.. all it is is a sound INSPIRED by the original (ie they are somewhat similar but noticeably different).

This is why this would be such a landmark change if left unchallenged. If inspiration means infringement, then for all intents and purposes, you can no longer listen to any music anymore that you did not personally create. Imagine all musicians being afraid of saying who inspires them, for fear of being sued.

That is what the outcome of this could very well be. Imagine if this was propegated to the written word... every derrivitive story about a prince and a princess, or about a angst-filled teenager playing with demons or vampires, would be considered infringement, since they all inspire from each other.

If an artist can no longer be inspired by another, art will cease to exist.

Comment Overblown Hyperbole (Score 5, Insightful) 107

In a 2013 study that was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), two researchers demonstrated their ability to connect a laptop to two different vehiclesâ(TM) computer systems using a cable, send commands to different ECUs through the CAN, and thereby control the engine, brakes, steering and other critical vehicle components

So you're telling me that if you have direct physical access to a car's ECU, you can issue commands to it? No shit sherlock. That is THE WHOLE POINT of the CAN bus. The only alternative would be to close down the bus and only allow "authorized" accessories to be connected to it - hello sky-high diagnostic fees and goodbye to useful bluetooth OBD connectors.

Call me when this can be done wirelessly. Oh and yes I did read the "What the companies failed to note is that the DARPA study built on prior research that demonstrated that one could remotely and wirelessly access a vehicleâ(TM)s CAN bus through Bluetooth connections, OnStar systems, malware in a synced Android smartphone, or a malicious file on a CD in the stereo" blurb - which still failed to materialize an actual working example of exploiting a CAN wirelessly.

Comment The roots of suicide are buried in religion (Score 0, Troll) 498

The primal roots of suicide are buried in religion and thoughts of an after-life. The sooner people wake up to that fact and seek to correct it, the better.

The whole notion of "something better than this" or "anything is better than this" assumes there is a "thing". There isn't. There is nothing. And nothing is not an "escape", it is nothing. Period.

If people did not feel there was somewhere or something better to escape to, they would not be offing themselves.

Comment Re:The Browser is NOT the OS (Score 1) 166

The Windows interface is a GUI, not an operating system. Microsoft wants to limit your applications to those that use the Win32 API to sort of simulate the "Windows is the OS" look and feel, but that's not really what's going on.

The Android interface is a runtime, not an operating system. Google wants to limit your applications to those that use the ART runtime to sort of simulate the "Android is the OS" look and feel, but that's not really what's going on.

The GNU stack is userspace, not an operating system. GNU wants to limit your applications to those that use the glib API, but that's not really what's going on.

Comment Re:No surprise... (Score 1) 114

FIPS level 3 has nothing to do with software, that is the level which requires safeguards against physical tampering - tamper-evident seals etc. Again, nothing to do with the actual operation of the software. Level 4 takes Level 3 up a notch requiring even more hardening around "the module"... but AGAIN, nothing about how your software actually USES the module. Such a thing is totally outside the scope of FIPS.

FIPS is an outdated standard. It made sense when it was created and crypto was not well understood and poorly standardized. Today it adds little value because almost all software on earth uses standard crypto libraries.

Don't even get me started on PCI, which isn't even worth the paper it is written on.

Comment Here is the #1 problem with delivery drones (Score 1) 129

Company spends $10,000 on delivery drone. Company dispatches done on it's first delivery run. Rogue actor uses $100 worth of equipment to jam all transmissions to/from the drone, removes power source, and steals it. Company is now out $10,000.

Because they are unmanned, drones are simply far too easy to lose and far too easy to steal. They are impractical.

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