Easy: Regulatory controls. In many environments, you get a 250+ page spreadsheet with hundreds to thousands of controls on them. There are some vendors like Crowdstrike which fill a niche that nobody else does, as they don't sell an "antivirus". So, it is either buying Crowdstrike, writing a POAM why you didn't use Crowdstrike, or taking the hit why you delibrately didn't buy Crowdstrike or something similar.

It would be nice if OS makers could put the functionality of Crowdstrike as a layer in the OS, perhaps with some standard APIs for monitoring tools and a remote management plane of the MDR layer (be it cloud or local servers), it would be very helpful. Not just an AV program that has a scanner like ClamAV, but something that runs and intercepts. Ideally, the OS would run stuff in a hypervisor, and the tool would run at the hypervisor level, so nothing the OS level can do can affect it.

There are a lot of tools that are the only game in town. Crowdstrike is one of them for the most part, although there are others popping up. I wouldn't be surprised when Crowdstrike's functionality becomes part of Windows Defender.

If Apple does this right, schools will love them, especially if they have a touch screen, and likely would make a significant dent on the Chromebook population out there.

Then, there is the fact that an entry level laptop is nice to have when traveling and not needing high end features. Back when Apple had their m3 (Intel m3, not Apple Silicon M3) MacBook with a single USB port, the 11" form factor was perfect for long trips, because it could easily be slung into a bag without worry. Having something that small would be nice. Yes, I can use an iPad for that, but I lose a ton of functionality with iPadOS that macOS gives.

If Apple does make this, I'd definitely buy one, just for something for travel.

I've encountered this through the years at IT. Some manager thinks bossware is a good thing. I look at the software, and almost always it is something that doesn't store any of its keylogs or screenshots encrypted... which means that if one is working in any environment that requires compliance, something like this can get an authority to operate yanked. Always cracks me up that software which should be at a security level at or above everything else is usually so poorly written, it can't get vetted by any compliance bodies.

Plus, it isn't really needed. This is what KPIs are for, and one can look at machine logs and figure out what someone is doing quite easily without needing to add more insecure, intrusive software.

Maybe take it up one more step... have it intermittently working? Good enough to part out and sell... but then have it fail shortly after it winds up in other hardware. This way, whomever resold the components is on the hook for selling faulty hardware. For the SSD, just have it quietly go into read-only mode, where the user can get their data, but the effective usefulness of the hardware is zero.

What would be interesting is the ability to consider adding more functions to combat this. For example, the option where if a phone is not used in "x" amount of time, it auto-erases itself, and won't allow unlocking until it gets a GPS signal with time and date. Maybe even add geoblocking, where if the phone is turned on and notices it is in Lower Elbonia, it erases itself. Of course, GPS can be spoofed, but this is a way to further add another roadblock.

The ultimate would be e-Fuses. Get to a level of certainty that a device is definitely stolen, start popping those to ensure that critical components cannot and will not be able to be used again. It also wouldn't hurt to have e-fuses on the SSD controller to guarentee that there will be no way to ever pull the encryption key out, combined with voltage doing a TRIM on the SSD, ensuring all data has been overwritten.

In this case, this is less of an issue. With tape, you generally don't search through media, other than to fast forward to a file set to yank it off. With tape, you need capacity, and archival grade capacity, where stuff will be readable years to decades later. Speed is important as well, and even though LTO is king, we need something that can keep up, even it means going back to helical scanning.

With cloud storage being less and less effective, we need something. Optical is promising, but because people are not buying movies on optical, nothing since Blu-Ray has been out. Tape, only LTO... maybe IBM, is the only game in town. So, having something that can store data for the long haul quickly and with high capacity, as well as cheaply, is critical.

AI is a power tool, no more, no less. If used narrowly, it can be useful. However, I've had cases where I spent more time debugging AI code than just writing something from scratch. It can greatly help if the use is fairly common, like building a CRUD app. However, even then, it still needs to be tested and looked at manually, especially from a security and defensive programming aspect.

It would be nice if AI can catch simple things like needing semicolons, and offer to fix those.

At that point, we might as well use LVM2's caching, as an option.

The ironic thing is that we need new filesystems. btrfs has had some changes, but it really needs the fscrypt mods mainlined, and if we can get Synology to push their "Lock & Roll" stuff to mainline, it will go a long way for immutability. Btrfs still has concerns on the write hole front, and it desperately needs an encryption layer built in for performance reasons, because FDE is a must these days... and no, LUKS doesn't cure everything.

What we REALLY need is a filesystem like VMFS. A checksumming, deduplicating, compressing, encrypting filesystem... which is cluster aware and can handle clustering quite elegently. Ceph and GlusterFS just don't come close.

ZFS is awesome. However, in the RHEL universe, it isn't supported. Yes, it will work, but when dealing with production, what works and is supported by the vendor are two different things. Even though Fedora has btrfs, Red Hat Linux doesn't have a single checksumming FS as a supported option. The only way to do that is to use a stack of block utilities, like dm-integrity, md-raid, and such to add that onto the lower layers, then throw XFS or ext4 on top.

Having bcachefs would have been a nice alternative, providing checksumming. Of course, it would be nice of Red Hat supported btrfs... but... Stratis.

How about... no? I don't want to wind up pickpocketed, then wind up in jail because I didn't have an ID. Passports are one thing, but as a citizen in my own country, if I'm out for a jog, I don't need to carry an ID. By law, all I have to do is give my name if asked by law enforcement. It isn't like with facial recognition and other items, that authentication can't be done via other means anyway.

Sorry, but "Ihren papieren, Bitte", doesn't sit well.

I wonder if this can be put in the mainline Linux kernel. So much stuff coming from Android and AOSP is highly useful outside of that ecosystem. For example, something like this would be very useful for web browsers to ensure that even if they were compromised, it would not escape the virtual machine. For servers, having containers in pKVM VMs is also an increase in security.

It worked for IBM...

SSDs are heat producing units. How is the heat dissipation going to be handled? It can be throttled, but what that does it give a nice spike of I/O at the start until thermal pressure compensation kicks in, and then the throughput hits the skids.

Ages ago, in antediluvian times, Kodak made an optical system for WORM storage which went up to around 1-1.5 TB. Doesn't sound like much now, but for the times, that was enormous.

Maybe it is time to revisit storage again? Companies are WAY desperate for some media other than LTO tape for mass storage, and optical storage can do this. About a year ago, some Chinese researchers were able to do 100 TB/platter using 100 optical layers. This isn't exactly new technology, but stuff that hasn't been worked on because there hasn't been a market demand. However, with Internet pipes not getting any faster, data needs getting greater, companies want fast WORM storage, not just because of backups, but to ensure ransomware protection.

If Kodak could come out with somethng like a DVD drive, even if it is not compatible with BD, etc... but designed for WORM backups with media being fairly cheap, people would buy those things left and right.