I had something similar happen to me. My fiance's condo, which she owned, was located in an HOA controlled building and they decided to replace all of the exterior locks with HID cards. They also instituted a policy that limited any homeowner to 2 cards. This policy was extremely inconvenient for how my fiance lived her life; it meant she could not provide a spare set of keys to a friend, for example.

I am not a lawyer, but a rudimentary Google search did not reveal whether a homeowner has a legal right to more than 2 keys to their property. I think this is really a new area and the laws have not been considered for it. It's easy to imagine any number of situations where electronic controls could limit a homeowner from accessing their property in ways physical locks do not.

In our case, we simply sold the unit when we married and left it as someone else's problem to deal with. I would guess that the HOA has changed their policy since - expanding it to include exemptions for delivery agents, real estate agents, cleaners, etc., likely to the point of uselessness.

Now when I open Google Maps, the bottom half of my map is an "Explore nearby" tab. Why would I want that? 99.9% of the time, I'm opening Maps near my home or work and am already familiar with my surroundings - far more familiar than the Maps app is. It is a nuisance and a timewaster, no different from the diatribe you describe.

In both cases, I believe we are starting to see Google really flexing their advertising muscles. For Maps, they are starting to try to redirect motorists towards paid advertisers. The same will be true for their assistant which will, in the future, always try to direct inquiries towards someone who has paid them money. The short conversation in the beginning is the equivalent of a short ad or station identification.

I'm frustrated by the situation because even as Google makes their products purposefully worse, they're still better than just about everything else out there. As things stand today, there's no real alternative if I just want technology to work the way that I want it to, without being sold something in the meantime.

As a mental exercise, I've pondered whether it would be possible to break up Google into multiple search engines. The reality is that searching the modern web is a massive undertaking and competing against Google is really difficult. Bing is the only company currently attempting it - all of the other search engines (such as Yahoo or Duck Duck Go) either repost Bing's results or are language specific search engines that aren't interested in searching the whole web.

As I understand it, modern search engines could be broken into 3 parts: collection, organization, and display. It's the last part that everyone wants to do as it most directly affects what people see and its the best opportunity to make ad dollars. Collecting data from the web requires a massive infrastructure to do it right and it seems inevitable that most companies will narrow their focus here, prioritizing only the biggest websites, in order to save some cash. Organizing the raw data into something searchable is extremely complicated and technical; Google has spent a fortune building the technology to do this well and it is difficult for a smaller search engine to compete with them.

So if the US Government wanted to encourage competition in the search engine field, a straightforward approach would be to force Google to sell search data to 3rd parties who could then index it and display it as they will. If most companies relied on Google to organize the data, they would likely display identical results, but there would be room for all of the players to carve their own niche. A conservative focused search engine might push search results from conservative news sources, for instance.

It's not an ideal solution because it still leaves Google in a monopoly position as the engine that runs the web but it would remove a lot of their direct power over search results. I just don't see a good alternative because searching the entirety of the web requires so many that a small operator will just never be able to do it well.

I don't know if, in this case, that's a fair criticism. VFEmail is providing a realtime service and going offline for any length of time has very serious repercussions.

Tape backups aren't going to have the users' most recent emails and it could take days to fully restore prior emails. From the users' perspective, this is extremely inconvenient and they're probably going to take their recovered emails and go elsewhere.

To run an online service in today's world, particularly an email host, means continual uptime. Downtime, even to recover lost data, is not a realistic option. Service providers thus need to focus their attention on redundancy at all levels. The question they failed to ask isn't, "How do we maintain quality offline backups". Instead, it should have been, "How do we prevent a single rogue employee or hacker from destroying our company?"

That's actually a pretty good example for why this home automation stuff doesn't work so well. Obviously these systems should be aware of state and be able to turn off/on devices to match that state, but imagine the following list of instructions:

Turn the exterior lights on at dusk to 50% so guests can see my house.

When the motion detector detects motion, turn the exterior lights on full for 5 minutes.

When I'm on vacation, do not turn on the exterior lights.

The problem is, how should the system interpret these instructions? Should the owner being on vacation prevent the exterior lights from ever turning on or should they just come on due to motion? Is the user expected to program this or does the system come with pretty good default logic?

My main complaint with most of the home automation stuff out there now is that its too reliant on the cloud. It should be clear, however, that even with the massive amounts of remove processing power being thrown at these products, they still act fairly stupid and glitchy.

A company can have a 100% backup solution and it may still be worth their while to pay the ransom. The decryption process can be applied to all machines simultaneously, bringing them back online in perhaps a few hours. Alternatively, a thorough restore from tapes fetched from Iron Mountain could take a week or two.

Restoring from backup is a great solution for individuals, but large networks are unlikely to have a backup solution that can scale as well as a ransomware worm can. For large organizations, their money is best spent on preventing infection in the first place and mitigating it when it does occur.

I've been in this exact situation twice, where someone dressed in black decided to cross a darkened road directly in front of me. In both situations, I had to brake hard to prevent hitting them.

The tip-off was that I noticed lights blinking out ahead, due to something occluding them. It was an extremely subtle effect, one I would have missed if I hadn't been paying full attention, and one which I do not think AI is capable of recognizing.

Simply put, I doubt that computer based vision will meet the capabilities of humans any time soon. They would do well to rely on additional sensors to supplement for the time being.

In order for John Irving to unlock her iPhone, he enters a 6 digit PIN. Maybe Lorian Bartle uses an alphanumeric password. John and Lorian did not choose strong passwords, knowing they have to enter it every time they boot up the phone, so either phone is easily crack-able by coping the encrypted contents of their phones onto a powerful computer and brute forcing every possible password.

Apple prevents this by generating a random element that, combined with John or Lorian's passcode, makes up the encryption key. This random element is stored inside Apple's super-special security chip. The exploit that they're selling may be based around extracting or computing this random element which would still necessitate a brute-force approach, but it moves the approach into the realm of the possible.

Neural network technology scales with processor advancements, so I understand why AI researches stay so excited about throwing neural networks at everything - it just keeps getting better and better on its own. The thing is, as great as modern processors are, they aren't even close to in the same league as a biological brain. It is unrealistic to expect a computer based neural network to approach the capabilities of even a biological brain in the near future.

AI researchers will only make progress if they put in the effort to understand what they are trying to achieve and to cognitively construct the necessary algorithms. In essence, a human needs to understand why an AI does what it does. It's an extremely difficult job that requires a tremendous amount of work and applied intelligence. The dream of the magic, learning computer will continue to remain a dream until computational technology become several magnitudes more advanced.

What puzzles me is, with all of the resources that the US federal government has at their disposal, why aren't they actually trying to crack encrypted phones?

As I understand it, the older iPhones could likely be cracked by desoldering a chio and interrogating it. The newer ones have their entire security apparatus encased in a single chip but I don't see why the chip couldn't be removed, disassembled, and its partial private key extracted. It's probably not something that could be done by hand and would probably involve contracting with a chip-fabricating outfit. The outlay costs would be enormous but once a "Federal Bureau of Device Recovery" was established and operational, they could make back money by cracking phones for state and local law enforcement.

It's just so strange because it seems likely that eventually other countries will have this capability, if they don't already. My guess is that if the FBI hasn't figured out how to crack encrypted iPhones themselves in the next 5 years, they'll be a company in Israel that will be happy to do it for them.

Credit freezing is the only real protection that a consumer has against identify theft, in my opinion. Not only is it much, much cheaper than the monthly cost for credit monitoring, it proactively makes it less likely that one's identity will be stolen rather than informing after the fact.

There is a marginal cost to doing this (around $10) unless one's identify has already been stolen, in which case its free. Since these major hacks and leaks are pretty much inevitable, it seems like in the fullness of time everyone will see their identity stolen at least once. When that happens, I guess everyone will just be able to freeze their credit for free.

It would sure be nice to just skip to the inevitable end and just let everyone freeze their credit for free, now. That would be a far more welcome outcome from Equifax, offering free credit freezes, than the credit monitoring that they'll offer in their inevitable settlement.

These technical interview approaches aren't very good, in my opinion, because they basically assume that the beginning and end of all software development training happened in a second year algorithms class. Algorithms are very cool, I understand why people want to talk about them, but they represent a minority programming challenge in today's world.

Speaking only for myself, in a given month of coding I may only have to consider which algorithms I should use once or twice. The rest of my time is spent on GUI design, communicating with coworkers, working on documentation, and switching between projects. Putting aside the value of algorithms in an interview, how can the interviewer ascertain all of my other software development skills if we spend 2 hours mapping trees on a white board? I would argue that they can't, and by asking technical questions about algorithms or brainteasers, they really aren't properly evaluating the skills of a professional software developer.

It is worth considering that for a large company, perhaps with several thousand workstations, it may be more cost efficient to pay the ransom and get their systems back online within a day rather than overworking their IT staff in the hopes of getting their machines back after a week. Even if the company has full data backups, they may not have the staffing required to wipe and reinstall every computer in a reasonable amount of time.

It really does feel like an "emperor has no clothes" situation. Companies are spending billions of dollars and articles are being published daily about a technology that hasn't remotely even shown to be feasible. Sure, they've figured out how get a car to do highway driving and that's making some long distance commuters very happy. But the stuff they're talking about, like replacing Uber drivers with a computer... there's no reason to think that's even possible with our current level of technology. Moving from highway driving to city driving at least an order of magnitude more difficult to do. Building a car that can detect lane markers does not mean you're going to be able to figure out how to detect jaywalkers or interpret road cones. An effective driver needs to be able to look several cars ahead in order to navigate complicated traffic situations and there's no indication that anyone has come close to technology required do this.

What's really disappointing is that the tech community, like those of us on Slashdot, really should know better. For a website that so often displays Luddite tendencies, it's strange that so few are willing to point out that autonomous cars just aren't going to happen.

Those Singapore cars rely on not just one, but two drivers.

That's what's fascinating about the self-driving car movement. So much money, and so many promises - entire companies even are banking on a technology that doesn't exist in a meaningful way. What we get instead are pledges and advertisements that are completely disconnected from reality.

They may come eventually, but no one in the industry seriously expects to see an autonomous car that can handle city driving within the next 10 years.