depends on what exactly would be redacted. Customers are no more informed with or without just the keys. As I say, it depends on what exactly VW wanted redacted.

I'm a researcher, and you're somewhat confused. They made a claim about some or all of their results being on the internet already. Those claims aren't verifiable for the moment, nor is it clear what exactly they mean that the numbers are out there already. I can do a search for a lot of random strings of numbers and come up with results, that doesn't mean they have any useful context to them.

I'm not sure you understand how the car recall process works. There is a whole lot of asking what is the risk/cost of doing nothing versus the cost of a recall. Recalling 100k vehicles to put in new locks gets very expensive very quickly. Not to mention the lost time of car owners getting their vehicles fixed.

Canonical's stuff makes GNOME3 look usable. That takes some doing.

I'm sure any distro has rough edges. My experience on Ubuntu was just fine. But then they decided that neither preserving their user's work-flow equity nor advance notice of aggressive disruption were valid terms in the quality equation, so I bailed out of their ecosystem with extreme prejudice. Some of us older types actually derive value from persisting with entrenched methods.

Sometime nearly a decade ago I came across a Motorola web site for some hot embedded processor where you had to sign a form declaring an intent to purchase no less 10,000 parts (if selected) in order to receive the specification sheet.

Even if just a drop in the cell phone ocean, there's no reason the chip vendors can't cut a competitive price on volumes of 40,000 where larger commitments already exist on other contracts. The main reason they don't do this is to keep those large commitments happy that they are getting a favourable price. It has nothing to do with scale.

Samsung in particular would like to see some differentiation in the phone market where they are less under Google's thumb. I can see Samsung going "oh hell, sure, if you're only going to do a pilot run on a concept phone, we'll give you our best volume price on the components and watch with interest from the sidelines". At the same time, there are any number of premium Android phone design teams who have fallen on hard times who wouldn't turn down a third-party hardware design contract while they try to pick themselves up off the canvas.

Ubuntu is more than capable of getting the Linux component to work at least decently by the standards of people who view change as entertainment.

I don't see this project as being that risky if Ubuntu has already lined up the right concessions on the componentry and hardware design fronts. I just think it's a silly amount to pay for an Asus Transformer that dual boots. But hey, whatever floats your boat. What I do know about this kind of thing is that many people suck at NPV specs deflation. The kickstarter fora always fill up with people on delivery day who skipped the algebra class on slope and intercept.

No, it's an upper bound on the relevant complexity in the lock. So long as you can just smash a window the best lock in the world isn't getting you far.

If he can download a program from a website that will let him use an IR transmitter and a laptop I would expect to see the laptop method become quite popular.

Which, like all recalls is then priced into the future cost of the car, and passed on to consumers.

... left IBM because he couldn't get anything done ...

Lameness severity is typically evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5, with higher numbers indicating a more significant degree of impairment. A 1 rating suggests a horse with a minor gait deficit, a 5 is "broken-legged" lame, indicating that the horse will not put weight on the affected leg. Initial assessment may include a visual check for outward injuries such as cuts or swelling, observation of a horse as it travels at different gaits, particularly the walk and trot. Flexion tests may also be performed, and hooves will be checked for signs of injury.

Jan Wong

In 2006, Wong attracted attention by imitating the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and going undercover as a cleaning lady in wealthy Toronto homes. While employed by the Globe and Mail as a reporter Jan Wong impersonated a maid and then wrote about her experiences in a five-part series on low-income living.

There were many social issues discussed in this series of articles, the majority of which I didn't agree with as framed. One issue she pointed out was that these barely-literate low-income scullery-scrubs few of whom had driver's licences were expected to haul vacuum cleaners through the Toronto metro system between jobs that were not as proximal as a modern UPS delivery route.

Brown Down: UPS Drivers Vs. The UPS Algorithm

No, the scheduling algorithm employed by the scullery-scrub dispatch office involved chewing up small bits of paper and spitting them at a map, because they were getting away with NOT PAYING for the delivery of vacuum cleaners by their downtrodden and raw-fingered cleaning staff. Many of these barely-solvent workers were putting in eight hour on job sites, plus another four hours (unpaid) moving between job sites, toting equipment that wasn't even their own for less than the cost of delivering the equipment by any other business method.

Jan Wong could have gone to war over a clear violation of labour fairness, but she instead decided to do a lot of public hang-wringing over systemic issues unlikely to ever change.

It's Apple's job to politely inform their store managers that this violates accepted labour practice and to put an end to it as thoroughly as they do with unwelcome rumours about unfinished products.

I once spoke to an ex IBM employee in the early 1980s who said he left IBM because he could get anything done. His department was under such tight security that it took him an hour to get to his desk in the morning and another hour to leave it in the afternoon. I think part of that was fetching his work product from a secure area and returning it there again with an inspection. He was well paid for the whole ordeal, until it finally drove him nuts.

The rule in a democratic salary market is that time is money. Even if the money is too small to spit at from the perspective of the person writing the cheques.

An anecdote I liked from that series was the incident(s) where business owners tried to bully her out of using street parking in front of their stores (which they would prefer to see used by customers) on the presumption that she was timid and uneducated. It almost blew her cover confessing she knew how to drive in the hiring interview. I think she had to tell some huge sob story to make her desperation believable to take such a job as a person who could hold down a driver's licence.

Creating and distributing large quantities of bacteria with unknown long term effects is not a known quantity and hence .. is not a sustainable solution.

You left out a step in the middle. It's called a MOOC. That's where you learn things you didn't used to know. Everything one doesn't understand has unknown long term effects and hence is unsustainable.

My point was that fixing it may not be particularly reasonable.

Not really no, they can't. They never have been. It's a matter of degree. You can always break a window in a car, or failing that simply hire a tow truck over to the one you want to steal and tow it away. Being able to get into a car when you have locked your keys in is a major design problem, and so long as you let people do that easily you're going to have tools out there for easily getting into a car.

Note the crime rings part there. If a crime ring wants your car your options are limited. What you don't want is a highschooler and his laptop to be able to steal your 300k car.

If you have to replace say 3-5 keys for every vehicle, it takes 10 minutes of employee labour per key you're talking about a lot of money every time.

It seems like the BMW remote starters run in the 160-250 range, the one for my shitty ass GM is 100 dollars, whatever the actual costs, trying to do a recall on the keys for vehicles could get expensive fast.

It's not necessarily an obvious consumer cost sure, but it's still a cost, and how much padding do you want in the cost of your vehicle for key fob replacement every time something goes wrong with a key? Are we going to price 5 key replacements into the projected lifetime cost of a car?

Did you link the correct video? Because his video doesn't seem to show anything related to what we're talking about. What we're talking about is a remote wireless unlocking by some sort of key spoofing (perhaps a master key for the whole system, or perhaps they can extract the encryption key used, and it's the same for each model of car or... not sure). That video was with physical access inside the vehicle being able to program a key to access it, using well, a key reprogrammer.

Hammurabi, benevolent as he may have been, didn't have to "pass" anything. He simply decreed it.

Assumption 1: Hammurabi was personally responsible for all laws under his reign
Assumption 2: Taxes singling out specific types of businesses are shit.

Reasonable Conclusion: Hammurabi did, indeed, "pass" that tax specifically targeting breweries.

Know about but not necessarily how to actually do it. About all they know is from the guardian article that it took upwards of 50 000 GBP worth of equipment (and some security researchers) to actually figure out how to do it.

The point of notification is to give them an opportunity to fix it. The problem with cars is that 'fixing' it may not be possible, or may be astronomically expensive.

Volkswagon wanted them to publish a redacted version of the paper, that explained how they did the hack but not the actual key (codes) they discovered, and they refused. That seems kind of dickish on the researchers parts honestly. It depends on the details of what exactly was to be redacted, so I'll withhold too much judgment, but with things that aren't connected to the internet there's a big problem in trying to actually roll out fixes. Of course there's no point in publishing a paper if you can't say anything about your method used, and if anything interesting about that was redacted it's basically a non starter.

As we embed computers into more things this is going to be a bigger problem going forward. Are we going to need to replace 100 dollar car FOB starters every time there's a security hack? I suppose it might come to that, it's not like physical car locks are all that secure either. But if the hack requires 100 000 dollars in equipment and professional security expert time that puts the barrier to common criminals high.

The researchers main point seems to be that they aren't saying anything that isn't already public just from a different method. In that case sure, I suppose they could have just published and the situation wouldn't be much different. But I'm not sure how true their claim is.

Apple has 145 billion dollars in cash and other liquid assets it could use for a buyout as of April supposedly. Tech crunch

They had 120 billion dollars in long term investments as of October The guardian on 120 billion dollar investment strategy

The different in counting depends on what you're counting exactly as 'cash'. Your yahoo link gives apple as 176 billion dollars in assets, 15 billion of which are property 800 million as inventory, 1 billion in goodwill, and 4 billion in intangibles. There are about 40 billion dollars in outstanding cash liabilities.

The difference is in what exactly you want to count as 'cash'. Companies usually take their money and buy stuff with it, if they don't want to buy other companies or to give the money to shareholders they can buy other companies bonds (sometimes even for overnight), they can buy government debts etc. etc. etc. As per the guardian link, Apple has a lot of money waiting to repatriate it to US investors whenever congress can be bought into offering a 'one time' tax break for doing so.

What Apple could use for a buyout (of anyone really) would be their cash, cash equivalents, short term investments and long term investments. They might end up with some complex web of borrowing money against those assets too, but that's relatively normal.

The teaser margin caught my eye with a circuit strip (teaser margin = (WU- (pi/4))*XGA on most web sites these days, excluding content viewed through a dancing thumb while traversing Steiner diagrams in a busy urban core with the permanent postural stoop of Vermilingo Erectus).

Props for the big solder blob. No circuit is complete without one. The end.

Like a lot of regular services, there are usually defence contractors who offer similar services that meet whatever national government requirements are - for 10x the price naturally.

I would think that microsoft or google (though more likely microsoft than google) offer something similar to their commercial offerings but certified for defence. If not them, then likely you're looking at either Lockheed Martin, HP, IBM and expecting to pay very large sums of money.