I don't understand why the automakers keep getting rid of physical buttons for safety critical systems. They save some money up front but the back end liability can be substantial.

Take for example Tesla. They had to perform recalls because their touchscreen systems eventually wore out the flash memory on the Tegra 3 processors and the screen stopped working. You would think fine-- if the car is under warranty, Tesla needs to fix, otherwise the owners are on the hook. But because the screen controlled safety features such as windshield defrost and back-up camera, Tesla needed to do a recall even on cars well past the warranty period.

Screens (with or without touchscreen) to control safety features seems like such a bad idea on so many levels. Windshield defrost should be one button press away at all times.

Yeah, I'm with you on this. I think it's not a stretch to convince a jury that inside information was used to trade something of value to make illicit gains.

I feel that adults could have reached a viable solution to this problem. But.... I wonder if Ajit Pai figures prominently in this somehow.

My 15" 2011 MacBook pro died and was replaced with a 2017 MBP model. I hate the Touch Bar-- screw you to whoever greenlit that idea. And the keyboard is a sorry replacement for the 2011's.

I did find out how to bring my 2011 model back to life! It involves a soldering iron to permanently disable the GPU. Two things don't work anymore-- external monitor support and brightness control. Otherwise, it works great. Here is the link:
https://realmacmods.com/macboo...

This might be a strained analogy but here goes. Instead of charging $50,000 and giving a $50,000 waiver for which they will be taxed, why not charge a tuition of $1 and give a $1 waiver. They can pay the extra 25 cent tax on the dollar and call it a day. What is the benefit to the school of charging $50K if they are going to waive it?

Can anyone say confounding by indication? In the same way that people who get a lot of EKGs are at much higher risk of having a heart attack, people who consume artificial sweetners are at increased risk of obesity.

No one would suggest that getting an EKG increases your risk of heart attacks but people who get a lot of them are certainly at a much, MUCH higher risk of heart attacks. That is because if you have risk factors and complain of chest pain and shortness of breath to a doctor, she will send you for an EKG. In the same way, people self select to consume artificial sweetners if they are fat.

As easy as micro-SDs are to lose, I would like to see this in a format that would work with a Raspberry PI 3. Pricing? I'm hoping its not "if you have to ask..."

I agree $400 per year is quite high considering the alternative, i.e. pay attention. At least this keeps the Audi engineers doing something other than cheating on emissions.

It's worse than that. Even having the complete source code offers incomplete protection unless you are sure of your entire build toolchain. See Ken Thompson's hack: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenT...

If you extend this to hardware, that's a whole nother layer to the crazyness.

I agree with you about this. With tidal changes in technology and how civilizations do things, there have some businesses made obsolete. For example buggy whip manufacturers with the advent of the car. With robotics and AI, what if humans (labor, thought, creativity, bargaining, etc) are the buggy whip?

You need to send this memo out to Amazon video and Netflix. My macbook gets awfully warm when playing video from these sources. iPad stays nice and cool however. They (Amazon, Netflix, Apple) should fix this but alas, probably never will.

Very few people buy things online? I think the more accurate view is that very few people realize how important strong encryption is to what they already do.

Perhaps companies/groups that write such software could implement a "warrant canary." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Once you are served with a secret warrant, you are legally bound not to disclose that you have been served. They can however stop updating the "We have not been served" status on their website letting users/people know that they have been served.

If you work on an security project and haven't been served, please do this now. And blink twice if you can't say anything....

If Apple is as serious as they say they are about security and privacy, they need to change the OS/firmware/hardware to make updating a phone impossible without either unlocking the phone or wiping it clean. This way, when this happens again, and it almost certainly will, they can honestly say, we can't rather than we would rather not.

I would imagine being able to encode this video with a ridiculously low bitrate and still achieve great pictures, albeit at low framerates. I would imagine most people would not be able to tell the difference however. 10 hour video, 1080p encoding for 10 MB?