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Ross Anderson in the Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory asks some questions about whether durable goods such as cars can be Internet-connected and yet provide sufficient privacy and safety. It's not a deep discussion but it does raise a few other pertainent questions.
Perhaps the biggest challenge will be durability. At present we have a hard time patching a phone that's three years old. Yet the average age of a UK car at scrappage is about 14 years, and rising all the time; cars used to last 100,000 miles in the 1980s but now keep going for nearer 200,000. As the embedded carbon cost of a car is about equal to that of the fuel it will burn over its lifetime, we just can't afford to scrap cars after five years, as do we laptops.
Meters and medical devices are two more examples of hardware that can cause great harm when control of the integrated software is taken over by malfeasants.
Source : Making security sustainable.
and Making Security Sustainable: Can there be an Internet of durable goods? (warning for PDF)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday March 08 2018, @08:04AM (7 children)
I still have several DOS and WIN95 systems running absolutely perfectly... still doing what they were programmed to do.
Amazingly, I even still have some of those old CDC 40MB MFM disks still running... the Seagates all died though. Stiction got every last one of 'em.
Not too concerned over the disks though... if they go, I have plenty of IDE and Flash memory alternatives. But as long as the disk runs, I just back up the programs and keep going. I still have a box of about a dozen of the things still in the garage somewhere. They just don't seem to die.
Yes, I occasionally have to change out the clock battery, or put fresh capacitors in the power supply. Looking at the "AC volts" across the filter capacitors with my trusted 50 year old Triplett 630 VOM will spill the beans if the capacitors need changing.
The only problem I see coming up is it is almost impossible to find a parallel port printer anymore. And I think soon the VGA displays I use will be scarce as the copyright people work with hardware manufacturers to "close the analog hole".
When I build something, I expect it to work until it is dismantled. Not time out in three years or so. Finicky stuff that doesn't last is the kind of thing one would sell a business, that is businessmen that can't see beyond the next quarter. Some businesses seem like they absolutely love to spend all their capital on ephemeral junk, while gloating over how much money they saved by hiring the cheapest manpower they can attract. Then they wonder why they can't keep up with technology. Guess what, you don't HAVE to change out all the wiring in your house every three years. It will do what it was designed to do for a hundred years. You want to set up automated assembly plant? Do it right, and it will do what it was designed to do for a hundred years.
To this day, I have yet to see a "worn out" computer with the exception of what I will type later. I have only seen those rendered obsolete through lack of support. However the time between the Pentium II up to the more modern processors I avoid, because of power supply and heat sink issues.... there was runs of crappy capacitors, and the boards had issues with other heat related and pulse related problems. However, the processors released the last five years or so are back on track for being reliable. It was about a twelve year window around 1996 to 2008 that it seemed nothing coming out was worth having. It was all full of heat sinks and massive current pulses that lead to deterioration of bypass capacitors.
I considered the 386SX to be the last "super-reliable" device for mundane machine control... which I am now designing Arduino/Propeller hybrids for their eventual replacement. I simply cannot trust the commercial DRM'd stuff in an industrial environment. What do I do if someone upgrades the OS when its busy putting labels on bottles? Come in the morning only to discover a room full of broken bottles and a congratulatory "you have successfully upgraded" message on the monitor?
Presentation is everything. I guess its OK if they also show a cartoon depiction of a smiling man wearing a suit, hand outstretched for a shake. The roomful of broken bottles won't look so bad then.
XP on the Atoms? I felt that Atom was a fantastic step toward again making something that was not a heat-making, current-sucking, power-hog. Something usable for making a long-term device with.
I have a celeron in my laptop. Same thing. Snappy when I first bought it. Got slower and slower. Finally a virus delivered by JavaScript did me in a few years ago. It was on these very forums you guys steered me onto NoScript. So, I reinitialized my laptop to factory state, noted how the machine was back to its snappy state, reloaded my software, disabled updates, and am still using it. Ten year old machine, WalMart special - no less, but works great. Admittedly, a lot of the modern softwares work like crap in this old machine, the big one to me was the browser. And again, you guys saved me with the SeaMonkey recommendation. I had FireFox, which had grown beyond this machine's resources, and was hanging up on YouTube all the time when an ad insertion caused it to overload. Its working with SeaMonkey. Hell, as long as I have a browser, Eagle, LTSpice, the Arduino programming environment, MathCad7, and a few other utility proggies, it does all I need. Its not like I am doing any heavy gaming on this thing or anything else computationally intensive. EAGLE seems to load this thing down more than anything else. I am running Eagle 4. I have access to Eagle 6. Is it worth it to upgrade? Or will doing so make things worse in terms of additional resource requirements? ( Asked for the same reason that I ran the earlier Firefox just fine, but the later one takes up so much memory and CPU that I simply max out then either stutter or crash! )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:31AM (2 children)
That's a problem with some of the standards for security being written today, which are driven almost entirely by a few large silicon valley companies who assume the whole world is online 24/7 and anything can be updated within 24 hours. There's no backwards compatibility or future planning, just "lets throw in every cool feature we need for our purposes, we can always roll out new patches whenever we feel like it, and deprecate anything we feel like". There's no way to reconcile this with devices that have to operate in the field for five, ten, twenty years. "We've got what we want, and everything else doesn't exist".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday March 08 2018, @12:33PM
And then one day they sell out to someone else who turns off the server.
Then you are left holding a bunch of technology that no-one ( due to Intellectual Property rights ) knows what to do with if its broke.
Might as well toss it and start all over.
I find that paradigm very nauseating. I feel if I can't fix it, I really question what business I have with it. It would be like a business hiring an employee, but having no control over him.
The exception is cheap generic consumables.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 08 2018, @01:40PM
I just "felt a bomb dropped" when one of our developers told me that the WebRTC source code was 5 to 6 GB... for a comms layer!
The world is truly screwed if we're depending on 5 million pages of code just to shuttle data from A to B in a "open" format.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 08 2018, @03:30PM (3 children)
That is an attitude that I learned almost forever ago. My first boss in construction, immediately after high school, put it into perspective for me. Words to the effect, "Every house I've ever built is still standing, and still looks good. If one of my houses falls down because you didn't do your job right, I'll have Jose kill you. If one of my houses starts looking crappy and deteriorated because you screwed up, I'll have Jose take your nutsack off. Don't fuck up my houses!" I took his warnings a little more than half seriously.
(Jose was a crazy bastard - big burly guy with no sense - and not even Hispanic, don't ask me why they called him Jose.)
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday March 09 2018, @05:23AM (1 child)
He was just carrying on an old tradition that goes back to at least Hammurabi [lexology.com] if not earlier.
Nothing about nutsacks though. That might have been a local variant.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 09 2018, @02:38PM
Good one - I had never read that.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday March 09 2018, @10:29AM
My first boss at Chevron - first job out of University - really instigated the value of craftsmanship and good workmanship into me and the other newhires.
I clearly remember my boss showing me the refinery when I first arrived. He told me this refinery was here before I was even born. It was. He told me it would be here long after I die. Well, I just went to get my Social Security retirement turned on today... and the Chevron Pascagoula refinery is still there, proud as ever.
Just like he said it would be.
When one takes all the trouble to make something in the first place, make it right. Otherwise all I make is expensive junk.
I only wish I had the knowledge then that I have now, as my inexperience at the time resulted in a lot of misjudgment on my part. I remember some of the refinery mechanics carefully picking up all the parts of some failed thing I had designed, and placing them on my desk so I would see what I had done wrong when I came to work the next morning.
I sure wish some of the other companies I worked for later in my career took that stance.
But then, those companies do not exist anymore either.
Chevron is still hanging in there.
What sickens me is the ones who made the el-cheapo decisions got paid, got bonuses, then got out, leaving the stockholders with an empty purse, the customers with junk, and the employees without a job.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]