Those cents add up to millions. Plus I mean, why should phone manufacturers care about their users, none of them does.

The practical problem, of course, will now be where subscribers will get the exact type of USB cable from, they'll need for the phone... but one can sell it to them at overinflated prices, even more profits.

Of course there's always a risk that people get their phone, and then don't bother using it, because they can't find a proper cable, effectively lowering the revenue for the company... but that's probably very rare.

I mean Germany got less innovative as the social system got torn down.

I think the main issue is strategic support for companies. While in the US you have a huge military sector which supports companies which then see civil markets for their military goods (think of integrated circuits) the German stategy was always to ask the leading companies what thy think we should support.

That's why, for example, we got things like Teletex. A sort of "end-to-end" e-mail system that works without servers over the circuit switched data network Datex-L. You could send a formated page of text in very few seconds.... reliably and throughout Germany at 2400 bps. For the early 1980s this was quite impressive.... however since companies were involved, this only worked between word processors... no computers allowed... and it required an expensive line to Datex-L. So essentially it was replaced by fax machines.

They can just approve every apps, but they can just hand out the name and address of developers. That way if you have a fascist government, they can get the name and address from Google and "convince" the developer to withdraw their app.

We have seen that Big-"Tech" does not even try to stop fascism.

Such a feature is wonderfully useful for Profits and Fashism. You can block out ad-blockers or other software that threatens business models.... and you can block software that tries to circumvent fashism.

If every app has a person attached to it, it's fairly easy to go against software that software that doesn't spy on the user. You just go against that person. It's a dream for both fashists and corporate lawyers.

Well half of the team I work at handles exactly those things, and while in the past this was an issue as it was handled via individual 64k TDM links... this now goes via Ethernet... and even though part of the software we use is written in Java, it's essentially just idling. Before there is even a noticable load on the signaling, the radio channel certainly will already be congested beyond being useful.

First of all, if you have so many devices at one spot, you'd essentially just overload a few cells. Second mobile networks are used to operating at 100% utilization, priorities are normal, particularly for things like emergency calls.
Besides if you wanted to DoS cells you could just use normal jamming, or if you want to be fancy and less easy to detect, just request a channel for authentication. You wouldn't need a SIM-card for that.

What seems more likely is that they build some sort of in official network interconnection. One can earn money by bringing calls from one country into another country. Interconnection fees are weird, so offloading calls into the mobile network may be cheaper than doing it via an official interconnect. This is also true for things like SMS.

Just because you have a "security enclave" doesn't mean it has anything to do with security for user data. In virtually all cases we've seen in reality so far, this kind of technology is used for securing business models against the interests of the users. Effectively they facilitate attacks against the user rather than hinder them. The most prominent example, of course, is DRM.

So please skip the nonsense. In the rare event you actually need some sort of hardware security, get a hardware security module.

I mean it's a phone, not an atomic bomb or something. The schematics are basically worthless and, more or less, just what the SoC vendor specified in their datasheets. If you remove the chip names it's probably impossible to distinguish one from the other.

There's nothing in there that isn't essentially public from the moment the device arrives on the market. It's also not where the "secret sauce" is in.

I mean for a while Microsoft was pushing for the background image to be displayed via the browser... to further integrate the browser into the OS. Couldn't you just use the Real-player plugin or flash to have animated or video plugins back then?

None of the causes for this problem lowered the costs of IT in any way.
I'd rather use the word "Jackass-iT", since we have organizations doing highly dangerous things on purpose fully aware that they are extremely risky and that they will, eventually, suffer from their decisions one way or the other.

It's like when you build a building completely disregarding any building codes at all. Sure it may stand, but eventually there will be problems.

AOL was an online service, kinda a counter-model to the Internet, where you had a centralized "information service" instead of a data network. While on the Internet everybody could, for example, run a webserver, having services on AOL meant having a contract with AOL.

They later did offer Internet access, but that was when the service essentially was already half head. Few people cared about the "AOL" aspects of "AOL" then.

While in reality most security issues stem from careless implementation of otherwise trivial software, these papers are essentially just distractions. They serve only to state how "cool" the researchers are, not how any of this will actually impact security or how to improve security.

It#s kinda like research papers which find out that, if you change the speed setting of your ethernet port... and use an unshielded cable, you can transmit data, weakly. Then they go on, demonstrating this in a very inept way, discrediting any scrap of hope they actually looked into a book on information technology. And all oft that completely ignores, that on most computers you _will_ notice the ethernet interface constantly renegotiating... and that nobody uses copper ethernet for classified settings.

Well I think many people greatly underestimate how cheap launch capabilities can get. The Falcon Heavy claims to just go a bit below $2k per kilogram. A typical ~400 Wp solar panel is something like 20 kg, and those often cost below $100. So you'd pay $40k to get up a $100 solar panel.... at overly optimistic prices.

In the meantime the real price of batteries is sinking by the month.

... that for decades now we have rather smart schemes to keep the beam aligned that are so dead simple they don't need computers. You can do that with simple electronics and a pilot "beam" going upwards from your target. So that's kinda the part of the whole idea that works best.

It's still a fairly bonkers idea, as you can just place solar panels on the surface of the planet... and you can more than overcompensate the atmospheric losses by just putting on more cells... and storage... for a fraction of the price it costs to send those panels up there. Those plans are like Gadget-Bahns, trying to steer politicians away from doing sensible things right now for lofty goals in the future.

So yes, this is a bonkers idea that keeps popping up every decade or so for the last few decades. So many of the detail problems have been solved for decades. The main problem, that it's extremely expensive, however remains.

BTW to show you how old the idea is, it was a background set piece in the story "Reason" by "Isaac Asimov" from April 1941.

Considering how much money he has/controls, that's just peanunts to him. It's like when I did a $1k price for something... probably even less.