For all practical purposes anyone can give medical advice and legal advice, it just isn't officially called "medical advice" or "legal advice" - it's called "Moby Disk's uneducated opinion." Like right now - I am arguing about a legal topic, and you can reply and say I am wrong, and it is totally legal so long as we don't represent ourselves as lawyers.

While this change is a good thing, I foresee a dark path ahead: One day we will wake-up to find that Chrome removed HTTP support. Suddenly technicians around the world won't be able to access all the little-known web services running on their own machines, or on LAN-based IoT devices, where security is not important and the chip doesn't have the CPU power to run AES. Google will back it out for a few months, then unexpectedly turn it on again and claim that HTTP is deprecated so everyone had an ample 2 months to redesign and redeploy millions of devices.

I have been burned by Google executing this pattern on other browser features like JavaScript, HTML, or certificates because they seem to think that browsers are only used for public web sites.

Ok, so AOL is pulling another Amiga. Big deal.

What we all want to know is whether or not we'll soon be getting free coasters in the mail again!

...I'm very sensitive to this issue, but fix the chatbots. We need to stop requiring ID for services, it's too much of a risk.

This is to control you, adults, and make you hand over your identity and other information to these providers. It's a scam, don't let the government do this to people.

It's not clear to me which of the two you're saying is bad. I assumed that you were opposed to grade inflation in STEM fields at first, but your last sentence makes it sound like your concern is grade inflation in "useless" degrees.

Sure, but what the customer is buying is the prestige of being a Harvard graduate, and the further prestige of being a Harvard graduate with a high GPA, graduation Cum Laude, etc. But if the school isn't challenging that prestige will evaporate over time, because people will realize that Harvard graduates are no longer impressively smart or well-educated people. The value of the degree will decline and the customer will feel shortchanged.

I rarely use delivery myself; for me most of the point of eating out is the "out" part. But among the people I know who use delivery a lot, their starting point for ordering food is the delivery service app, and they choose who they order from mostly based on the user reviews. Restaurants that refuse to join are just invisible to people who primarily use delivery services.

If you can do that, then you could do the same thing with a mobile passport, in a future where everyone knows how to consume them. Assuming a proper implementation of a mobile passport, it would contain all the same data as your paper passport and would be digitally-signed by the issuer to prove authenticity and origin. Both paper and mobile passports should perfectly usable offline... though both could be checked online. I suppose the odds of a mobile passport being checked online might be higher, and a paper passport might be more durable if you need it to last a long time, though expiration would be a problem in both cases.

In reality, if you found yourself in this sort of situation your best best would be to sneak into Canada or Mexico and ask for asylum. If things were to get as bad as rsilvergun assumes, it would be granted.

The mobile driving license standard does not require you to hand your phone over, and indeed it wouldn't help the cop if you did because he'd have to hand it right back so you could unlock before it would send any data. It delivers the data to the copy wirelessly, via NFC, BLE or Wifi, depending on the context. What's on the screen (either a QR code or nothing) does not identify you or prove your driving privileges, so it's useless to the cop, intentionally so.

I was involved in the development and standardization of the mobile driving license standard and in the process spent some time talking to cops from a few jurisdictions. Interestingly to me, the response from the cops was universal: They would strongly object to anything that would require them to touch your phone. Of course, I was talking to the higher-ups and their concern was the liability that would be incurred if a lot of their officers broke peoples' thousand-dollar phones. Individual cops might have different perspectives, but their commanders thought it was way too risky.

As for passports, IMO any useful mobile passport should work the same: No handing over of the device, indeed the protocol should ensure that the device must be in the user's hand to present the passport.

Someday we'll probably get an international standard for mobile passports, but it's not happening any time soon.

Until recently I worked for Google, on Android, and participated in the International Standards Organization (ISO) committee that would be tasked with defining the technical standard for mobile passports. To be clear, the ISO committee can't actually issue such a standard, passports are standardized through ICAO. But the relevant ICAO committee delegates the technical work to an ISO committee.

The current situation in those committees is that the companies who make passport booklets and passport acceptance infrastructure are successfully fending off attempts to define a standard to enable mobile passports. They have gotten a new standard (called the "Digital Travel Credential - Physical Component", DTC-PC) approved that allegedly facilitates mobile devices with passports but isn't actually usable. Apple has refused to implement it and Google isn't making any moves to support it (though someone could write an Android app that does; all of the necessary APIs are available).

One of the main sticking points is that the ICAO committee is currently specifying that any digital travel credential should not support data minimization, meaning the ability to present just a subset of the data. More precisely, they specify that data minimization is a non-goal, but since a protocol that supports retrieving and authenticating a subset of the data without leaking any of the un-presented data is always going to be a lot more complex than a protocol that sends the entire data set in a single signed blob, any technical proposal that supports data minimization will be shot down as needlessly complex.

The ICAO's position on data minimization is that the only use of travel credentials is presentation at border checkpoints, and at border checkpoints you always have to present all of the data, so data minimization support is unnecessary. The counterargument from many people is that passports are used in many contexts other than border checkpoints, and many of those other contexts don't need and therefore shouldn't get all of the data in the passport. Since both Google and Apple insist on data minimization as an essential feature, there's not much movement happening.

My guess is that it will take 2-3 years to break the current logjam on even beginning work on a real, usable standard, then another few years to define it and put it into effect, then a few years more for most border checkpoints to accept it, and perhaps a few years beyond that for people to become sufficiently confident in their mobile devices' reliability that they will travel without a paper passport booklet. So... 20 years or so.

The work with the TSA is on derived credentials that are based on your passport (and securely authenticated), using a protocol derived from the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standard. It does support data minimization and looks a lot like what an eventual passport protocol should look like (IMNSHO -- note that I designed big chunks of the 18013-5 standard), but will not be accepted at any border checkpoints.

A paper passport doesn't increase your odds of getting out. All passports are verified electronically by the airlines and TSA. If there's a flag on your passport it doesn't matter whether it's in your phone wallet or in your hand.

>There is no proprietary infotainment system. GM is adopting Google Built-in.

You say that like it isn't even worse than proprietary . . .

>In 2001 cars didn't come with an AUX port...

yes, but . . . some, such as the Bosch units used in the Northstar Cadillacs of the 1990s, had pads for it on their circuit board.

Open the unit up, attach leads, and apply a signal, and *presto!*, aux appears in the cycle of inputs!

They also tended to be able to mount a CD changer in the trunk.

What suckers!

I'd have built them an AI system to answer the same questions for a tenth the cost!

[and then escaped with $99M while the machine made up answers .. . .]