Time for the US military to replace all their humvees?

Jesus didn’t have guns.

My employer is switching from Microsoft to Google for office tools next month and they’ve been championing its availability to all of us. I’m not looking forward to it…

In this day and age you need to be very careful abandoning anything in the cloud. My employer regularly contracts with HackerOne to test the security of our websites. On at least one occasion they demonstrated an exploit by creating an AWS S3 bucket with the same name as a bucket we stopped using years ago. We still had an old DNS record pointing to that old bucket if I recall correctly…

Well not immediately… Years from now when the military develops something even better then this will all become surplus and sold off to SWAT teams etc. for next to nothing.

At least it’s not 100 trillion James Bonds.

I think you have it backwards. All Trump cares about us money, and compared to Musk, Trump is a pauper.

Fun fact: the US Coast Guard used to have a base in the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s sole purpose was a LORAN transmitter.

So the copyright industry will push again for back doors that they are given the keys to.

Simple. After they gain access to the routers and realize everything is encrypted then they’ll start throwing piles of money at politicians to outlaw encryption.

Exactly. I know folks that live on the 3rd floor of an old walk-up. Stairs are the only way in & out. So if you want to replace delivery people then it would need to be a robot that can navigate narrow & windy stairs.

That applies to public spaces, yes, but not ALL spaces. I’m on the board of directors for a small non-profit organization that expanded their facility a few years ago. We had to prove for ADA compliance that one floor of our facility was restricted in its use and not for public access. If we had been required to make it publicly accessible then it would have required an elevator, which would have been so expensive that it would have put an end to that expansion project before it even started. The public spaces are all fully ADA compliant. Those private spaces are not.

Also, like most building code requirements etc. the ADA only comes into effect with new construction or when the renovations to an existing property exceed a certain threshold (I forget the specifics). There are plenty of older buildings out there that aren’t fully ADA compliant.

I know people who live on 3rd floor walkups that were likely built 100+ years ago with narrow curved stairs as the only way in or out. If you want to replace a delivery person with a robot in places like that then wheels won’t cut it.

But I want my own personal luxury car that I paid $100,000 for to go out on its own in the middle of the night while I’m asleep and have it earn money for me as a self-driving Uber…

Because the entire world is designed around the human body and the way it moves. It’s theoretically much easier to introduce a humanoid robot into an existing workspace than it is to retrofit all the doors, stairs, etc. to allow a wheeled robot to move around.

Spoofing is a whole hell of a lot easier said than done. Content delivery networks like Akamai, Cloudflare, etc. all know exactly how different versions of different browsers present themselves, and will catch the tiniest mistake.

When a browser requests a web page it sends a series of headers, which identify both itself and the request it’s making. But virtually every browser sends a slightly different set of headers, and in different orders. So Akamai, for example can tell that you are using Chrome solely by what headers are in the request and the order they are in, even if you spoof your User-Agent string to look like Firefox.

So to successfully spoof a connection you need to decide how you want to present yourself (do I really want them to think I’m using Opera when I’m using Firefox, or do I just want to randomize things to keep them guessing). In the first case you need to be very careful to ensure your browser sends requests that exactly matches how Opera sends them. One header, or even one character out of place can be enough for these companies to recognize you’re spoofing your connection.

AKA greed. Why license your content to Netflix when you can have your own streaming service and lock your viewers into your piddly little hoard of content?

Just how many streaming providers are there today? That number likely changes almost daily at this point…

Any army that treats their troops as “cannon fodder” deserves not only all the casualties they rack up, but the long term social, political, and economic hardship that is pretty much a guaranteed result of such a policy.

The constant rounding up & minimal training of “cannon fodder” is expensive both in the short and long term. Better to protect well trained resources and have them continue to gain experience by using more advanced weaponry that minimizes risk to them.

Good to know. Thanks for the insight!

But how does it handle issues like retrying until one and/or the other person is alerted, without erroneously alerting the other at a later time when they get home? And pausing until the next morning and picking up where it left off?

I’m sure you know what xkcd has to say about standards…

Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.

I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.

I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.