Proof of identity isn't the same as SSO. Whenever you access "https" the server is proving its identity to you, since you access its public key (certificate) and trace it up to the root certificate that you already have installed. The server does not "sign on" to your desktop to prove its identity or use some kind of password or login authentication.

The blockchain can eliminate the need for getting blessed by a root certificate like Verisign (Verisign is very expensive, at $400/yr). That can open the door to consumers self-signing their data (no sane consumer would pay $400/yr to Verisign), and eliminates the need for "logging in". Any server can verify your identity through your own digital signature the same way your browser verifies a server's identity through its digital signature.

Any CEO of Microsoft, even if they hired an orangutan, would have withdrawn from the phone market, because Windows Mobile is junk and you can't even convince illiterate people to get one instead of an Android.

No, the British handed over HK to China in the late 1990s. China promised not to "interfere" with HK until 2047, but are already meddling in massive ways like requiring all elections in HK to only involve candidates China has pre-approved. HK is classified as a SAR (semi-autonomous region) along with places like Macau, part of China's "one-country, two-systems" policy. That means as a HK resident you pay HK taxes and not Chinese taxes. It also means as a HK resident, you follow HK laws and not Chinese laws (an agreement that expires in 2047, and weakened by China's view that anti-secession laws in China still apply to SARs like HK). All that said, HK is not a country, and China's military is stationed in HK. To avoid alarming people, the Chinese military is instructed to dress in a special uniform for HK and not the standard PRC military regalia.

No, it's not the same. Windows already has proper permissions for user directories since Windows NT. The issue is that ransomware runs under the same uid as yourself, so if you can access your own file, then the ransomware program can access those same files. This new feature makes it so that even if the uid has access, you can specify ADDITIONAL restrictions, like which exe is permitted to do so. So some ransomware.exe, even with your uid, will be unable to make changes.

There is no such ability in Linux or *nix, since ACLs are solely based on uid and not the name of the executable with your uid. The closest might be a sudoers file with specific commands for which you're allowed to escalate to root privilege. A *nix ransomware program running with your uid has the exact same privileges as bash or kde or gnome running with your uid and access to all your files.

All that said, there are still ways to circumvent privileges restricting which execs are allowed to access the folder/directory. For instance, if chrome.exe is given access, then any ransomware running as a chrome app will appear to be chrome.exe from Windows' perspective and be given access. This problem exists for any exec that allows running scripts or remote code, like bash or the Windows-equivalent powershell. You either have to deny all powershell execs from access, or grant all powershell execs access. The safest approach would be to not get infected with rogue code with your uid privilege. And if you get infected with rogue code that has Administrator (root) privileges, you're hosed because it can bypass or remove these restrictions altogether.

What about the microphone? There's nothing in physics that can stop a mic from eavesdropping on you.

That's true with partial fingerprints as well.

Apparently not just any 3D scan, but infrared, so it's a thermal image. Even with 2 photos (for the left and right cameras) and a double-sided mirror, you can't fake authentication because paper under infrared doesn't look like a person. Are there any infrared printers?

That's actually cool, I was wondering how it would handle night-time conditions. It also solves my concern about faking authentication easily with any 3D (stereoscopic) photo. I thought maybe you could print them out onto 2 different pieces of paper for the left and right eye, hold a double-sided mirror up between the two cameras, and fake authentication, but most camera-phones can't take infrared photos (yet) and we don't have any infrared printers!

Just as we push for greater automation of tasks, the task of coaching can also be automated (it's called unsupervised learning). Even with unsupervised learning, there is still a fair amount of input sanitizing and scrubbing and sanity-checking because we're at a very crude stage of machine learning. But don't bet your career on humanity getting "coaching" jobs for AI.

I don't really see any need for human labor in the next 100yrs in the same way I see next to no need for horse labor. CGPGrey makes the great analogy between humans and horses, and just because horses moved from battlefields and farm ploughs to cushy city carriage jobs, it doesn't mean all technological progress leads to a better life for horses.

I've had many conversations and people refer to AI as just a "tool". This is completely incorrect. A tool is a device that requires a wielder. A hammer is a tool, on its own it does nothing. A television is a tool, on its own it does nothing. Tools are utterly reliant on human presence. All technological innovation in the past has been on tools: you pick painstakingly pick cotton? Eli Whitney has the cotton gin, but it still requires a human to operate it! Jackhammers, bulldozers, airplanes, these all require human operators to wield the tool. We do not refer to wild dandelions as a tool. Wild dandelions know how to process light and have an entire self-sustaining life-cycle of aggregation, material processing, and recycling that is self-contained without human intervention. Dandelions are NOT tools. Monsanto non-sterile GM crops are not tools. Adjacent farmers have big issues with wild GM crops blowing into their farms and Monsanto suing them. Anything that is devoid of human intervention is NOT a tool. We are rapidly entering into the pure technology age where our technology can no longer be considered tools, but rather end-to-end processes like wild crops. An LCD plasma tv can be the fruit of a fully automated plant, self-running energy plants, self-running mining quarries for rare-earth minerals and other commodities, self-piloting cars and planes for delivery. This is exactly how a mushroom operates, organically growing tendrils to delivery resources to the central site for a mushroom to bloom. We should not consider a mushroom as a tool. What is it? Life? I wouldn't go so far, because moral or philosophical quagmires delay the more pressing issue: how to protect decaying egalitiarianism.

Do we want to live in a society where wild auto-plants are public domain, and we freely walk like Adam and Eve in the garden and pluck a Plasma TV from a tree, like Jean-Luc Picard brewing coffee from the replicator? Or do we want to live in a society where oligarchs own all the auto-plants, patented, copyrighted, trademarked, in perpetuity, with sweet-heart deals and land-giveaways for their auto-plants by states desperate for the tiny tax revenue they think they'll receive?

Neither of those two societies will have jobs, that's a given. If you're curious what a jobless society looks like, we have several today you can examine. Look at Saudi Arabia, they tax their citizens negative $75k/yr. Yes, negative. Their citizens receive $75k/yr for doing nothing. Of course, they're stingy and get huge amounts of slave labor from South Asia and will never make their slaves citizens. But you can study them to see what rich jobless people do. They mostly squander their lives, playing bumper cars with Lamborghinis. We have "trust fund kiddies" in the U.S. as well, jobless and rich. And we have the jobless poor, frustrated and struggling. Money should only have value due to scarcity. Trash has no value (you have to pay others to remove it) because it's abundant. Some trash has value, like glass, or rare-earth metals, and those recycled goods can be sold for profit, but only because those materials and/or the energy to make and transport them are scarce.

The economics of a post-scarcity economy changes things dramatically. Do we want an economy with poor people who cannot afford food and surplus food rotting away in the fields? Or do we want an economy that takes surplus food and give food stamps / ration cards to poor people? Why not make every citizen a stakeholder like Alaska, Norway, or Saudi Arabia does? What do we do with surplus everything, more Plasma TVs than people on earth, more Lamborghinis than people on earth, more everything? For most things in nature, such organisms when confronted with abundance will enter exponential reproductive growth until there again is scarcity. We are probably the only species on Earth where most billionaires (abundant resources) choose to have negative growth (fewer than the replenishment rate of 2.2 children), so we do not have nature's solution to the problem, and most democracies will likely make it criminal to try to destroy their post-scarcity utopia through explosive reproductive growth.

Will goofing off like rich trust fund kiddies ruin our civilization? Let's be honest, most of what we call civilization is just music, art, and entertainment, and it was only very recently that technology became a component of civilization. With regards to music, art, and entertainment, the goofing off kiddies ARE what make these great. Do you like listening to music from someone passionate about music, or someone hired to do a "job"? We are social creatures, we like to impress each other, mostly for sexual reasons. That won't stop, even if we're jobless. We even want to pay extra for crooked man-made furniture over exact machine-made furniture. We want to pay extra for naturally grown diamonds than lab grown diamonds. So civilization will be intact. What about technology? In the short-term, human minds will still contribute greatly to technological advancement, and again, even if jobless, we like to do so for no other reason than to impress. Heck, all social media sites rely on free labor by posters who seek nothing else than to connect and impress other people free of charge. Even the trolls try to impress themselves using their perverse measure of 'awesomeness'. We all strive to be awesome, we strive for the accolades of our parents in childhood, and our peers in adolescence, and peers as well as ourselves in adulthood. Will joblessness and zero money equalize everyone? Of course not. Just visit any high school, despite children not having jobs, not having money, they still organize into social pecking orders. People don't seek money, but to be "cool enough to sit with the cool kids at lunch." Post-scarcity will still succumb to one type of scarcity: time and access to fellow human beings for affection. That's what all children fight each other for, they labor so hard to be the first to shuffle a deck of cards like their dads so they can impress their friends. Are they paid? No. Is it a job? No. Do they still care about it like their life depends on it? Yes.

So will we just stagnate as trust-fund kiddies impressing each other with skateboard tricks and hitting on hot girls like we're perpetually in high school until we die? I hope not, and I hope "hotness" will stop being scarce as well as we find a solution to obesity and find methods for free and non-painful plastic surgery as well as gene editing. Keep in mind that until VERY recently, all technological breakthroughs were made by jobless aristocrats. You know, like Isaac Newton, whose full title is Lord Isaac Newton. Mathematics and Physics were considered curiosities for the rich because no common person could afford the time for it, they were too busy slogging away at farms and later factories. Did every rich person enter the sciences? No, but did all of science come from the rich? Yes. The human mind still has some time to contribute to technology, and our first few batches of jobless rich will greatly push technology forward. However, we will soon realize, minds greater than our own, either entirely artificial or some synthetic hybrid taking structures of the human mind and fused with new materials and larger scale, will be what ultimately carries technology forward. Just as we allowed machines to beat as at brawn, and no one alive today in any seriousness say "I am physically stronger than a machine!", they will beat us at brains, both in processing power as well as creativity. We will become useless both in physicality and mental prowess in the greater game for progress, but we will still wish to impress each other and shag hot girls. We will become jobless teenagers living with our machine parents, benefactors who provide us with everything, materials, vision, direction, and unconditional love. Or as other have posited, we will become pets.

Regarding multi-variate / multi-signal modeling, LIGO used the same approach to successfully detect gravitational waves. They used multiple low-SNR signals from different detectors (Washington State and Louisiana) since their noise is highly orthogonal and the signal is highly correlated with the correct phase-shift applied (solve for phase-shift using SSE minimization, then extract a high-SNR signal from the newly aligned signals). Some similar approach with multiple HDDs may work if the noise is less about ambient room noise and more about internal HDD initial-head location, other HDD geometric properties, and OS reporting error due to jiffies and NMIs (these are the sort of noise that should be very non-correlated / orthogonal across multiple HDD/CPU sources).

This is the BlackHat pdf / powerpoint from 2009, by Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco, titled "Side Channel Attacks Using Optical Sampling Of Mechanical Energy and Power Line Leakage": https://www.blackhat.com/prese...

It appears it less about predictive modeling regarding cadence of keystrokes and more about the data cable itself being poorly shielded and leaking onto the +5V and GND power cables.

I still think a multivariate model using multiple low-SNR signals can be quite useful even if no univariate model of a single low-SNR signal has enough fidelity to reconstruct conversations or keystrokes. Speaking of which, how orthogonal are the signals from different HDDs in a JBOD? Will signals from 12 HDDs in the room provide sufficient signal strength for a multivariate model? If you're able to sample at 60Hz, speed of sound moves 5 meters in 1/60th of a second, so HDDs separated by 2.5m should provide considerable phase-shift. Even at 1m separation, the signals should be fairly orthogonal, and having 12 HDDs at varying distances from the audio source should give you nearly 10x the sampling frequency.

I would like to apologize on behalf of people with dismissive attitudes. It is a real problem not just with anonymous posts, but even at the workplace, especially among "half-technical" people, who are are smart enough to understand jargon and comment but not enough to understand a reasoned argument. I've seen countless times where someone will quote from stackoverflow or some other source out-of-context, and several times where the source itself they quote from is utterly wrong to begin without even in-context. I might prove something with complex numbers, and they'll just quote someone saying you can't take a square root of negative numbers. Even after I convince them, they'll just laugh saying Intel cpus don't support complex numbers, and I have to show them the Intel cpu spec for hardware acceleration of complex numbers (and even without hardware support, it can be easily emulated in software). I've learned to stop trying, half-technical people are impediments to innovations.

Now, after that apology is done, I would like to bring up some academic research that may relate to your study of signal processing. There was some research done a while back (early 2000s, I think), that found that keyboard keystrokes leaked information on electricity draw. And even though they could not directly tell which key was hit, they were able to apply a model of qwerty keystroke cadence, since people tend to be faster or slower with keystrokes depending on the sequence of keys. Applying that model with a roughly 60Hz electrical tap, they were able to successfully reconstruct full text input at a 90% confidence. Because the model relied heavily on predictive modeling, it is not good for high-entropy signals like 8-character passwords, but it is excellent for low-entropy signals like a legal memo with several paragraphs explaining one point. You also mentioned a study directly applying to low SNR audio, for speech. However, I wonder if the vibrations for keystrokes are enough to disrupt HDD latency, and if so, a bivariate model using both HDD signal and electricity signal may yield a far superior reconstruction than electricity on its own, especially since the two 60Hz signals are likely out-of-phase. My 2 cents.

It's against the law in NYC for prospective employers to ask for, or require, candidate compensation history. The motivation is that women and minorities are often underpaid and when leaving their salary-biased job for a new one, often this bias carries forward with them if they have to report their past salary, which makes the problem of eliminating wage gaps due to gender or race difficult when the new employer can say "hey, I'm not racist, I just paid him what he was making before.. if his last employer was racist, not my problem!". This will mean interviews will be more in-depth and employers are expected to properly assess your skills and value to the company. Employers will still be allowed to do background checks, so if you got fired for watching porn on your office pc, or for incompetence, then new employers will know about it and can decide not to hire you.

Generally, most people who are "fired" aren't really fired. We use words like "fired" and "laid off" but those are not legal terms. The only legal documents a company can file to terminate your position is "involuntary termination with cause" (you were fired), "involuntary termination without cause" (you were laid off), and "voluntary termination" (you quit). In 99% of the cases where you manager "fires" you, the paperwork they file with the government is "involuntary termination without cause" (you were laid off). People think "laid off" is when 100s are let go and "fired" is when a manager singles you out for removal. That is just a misconception and in the U.S. nearly all involuntary terminations are "without cause". This is because "with cause" is very RISKY for the employer. You can sue them if you disagree with the cause of your termination, seek damages, and reinstatement. You have NO recourse if you terminated "without cause". It's similar to "at-fault" divorce and "no-fault" divorce. Even in cases where a spouse cheats on another, they generally file the paperwork of "no-fault" divorce, because "at-fault" requires you to PROVE they were at fault and is a huge hurdle to pass. If you sucked at your job and were fired, 99% odds are that it was a "without cause" involuntary termination, despite your manager yelling "you're FIRED!" in front of the entire kitchen staff. If you stole money from the company, committed fraud, or sexually harassed colleagues, odds are you were fired "with cause" and additionally criminal charges may be filed. No company with any half-competent lawyer on retainer will ever file a "with cause" termination for an employee being mediocre or bottom performing.

In about 100 years, the codebase of most simple appliances will start to resemble the size of the entire genetic material for a small insect. While no human can possibly think about the entire DNA sequence for even a simple creature, we start to think of which alleles can be switched "on" or "off" and cut and paste sections using CRISPR from related codebases. This is the ultimate in "script kiddie" hacking, but that's where we are with complex code like genetics, and that's where we will be with manmade code as well once it reaches hundreds of billions of lines of code.

You might think, "no human can analyze or write that much code!!!", and you would be correct. However, we will start using more and more automated tools. We will have programming interfaces where you can just talk to it and roughly describe what you want and it will spit out a portfolio of possible solutions like a commissioned artist might at their patron's behest. "I want my self-driving car to prioritize skipping potholes over saving running over kittens!". And while those solutions will look polished and smooth, it will be anything but in the underlying code and employ not just hideously complex code but hideously complex data like random forests or gradient-boosted regression trees with tens of thousands of trees and millions of leaf nodes for the simplest of classification questions, "is it a pothole or a kitten?".

It will be akin to those Frontpage and WYSIWYG web editors that spew out hundreds of thousands of lines of HTML code for the simplest of web pages. We will move to an FDA-like deployment process, where no one reviews the code but we just test it in simulation, and then in real life with mice and then monkeys and then humans. It will take 5-7 years to release code because no one will understand what it does or its long-term side-effects like modern pharmaceuticals. The QA-process will just involve large-scale clinical trials and zero code review.

I've seen Hans Rosling talk about how his common-sense ideas were dismissed as obvious in many of his initial presentations, so he switched to first asking the audience what they thought, and then presented his findings, and suddenly everyone thought he had remarkable and ground-breaking insights.