Science, Technology & Health: November 2011 Archives
New research reveals that millions of printers are vulnerable to rogue firmware updates.
One particularly vexing part of the fix: Printers that are already compromised by rogue software likely cannot be fixed. An attacker could easily shut down the pathway for future updates that would "cure" an infected printer."If and when HP rolls out a fix, if a printer is already compromised, the fix would be completely ineffective. Once you own the firmware, you own it forever. That's why this problem is so serious, and so different," Cui said. "This is nothing like fixing a virus on your PC."
Such inability to help consumers manually secure their printers could ultimately have disastrous consequences, Stolfo said.
"It may ultimately lead to telling everyone they just have to throw their printers out and start over," he said. "Fixing this is going to require a very coordinated effort by the industry," Stolfo said.
Bonus conspiracy theory: follow the money. What's the best way to sell millions of new printers in a bad economy?
(HT: RB.)
Sometimes an institution does something so stupid that it reveals that the institution itself has become fundamentally useless or even malevolent. In the most egregious cases, I believe we need something like capital punishment for entire organizations. Consider the recent ruling in the EU that bottled water manufacturers cannot claim that water reduces the risk of dehydration.
Brussels bureaucrats have been lambasted for conducting a three year study that has resulted in an E.U. ban on bottled water claims that drinking water prevents dehydration.A three year study by European bureaucrats in Brussels has resulted in a ban on producers of bottled water from claiming that water prevents dehydration. The ban met with widespread criticism in Britain where the advice of the National Health Service is that drinking water helps to prevent dehydration. However if bottled water carries such claims from next month, the producers could face a two year prison sentence, according to Town Hall.
The European Food Standards Authority is behind this idiotic decisions and should be immediately disbanded and all the employees should be fired. Any institution that can produce such nonsense has no hope for reform. Kill it and start over.
When the singularity comes, will we even notice the transhumans?
Premise #2: Transhumans will be hard to see.The individuals who elect to be more than human will evolve very, very rapidly. They'll be able to improve themselves continuously, after all. They'll be adding new powers, new abilities, new facets of themselves, all the time. Which means, I suspect, that they'll soon evolve right out of sight.
What do I mean by that? Well, as a character in one of my short stories says, consider the ant. It is a very successful being. It lived long before us. It will exist long after we're gone. But does it see us? Does it think about us as we think about it? As a living being? As an entity with its own goals and aims?
I submit that it doesn't. First, I'm not sure it has concepts like "entity" and "living," but, second, even if it did, I'm pretty sure it would see us as just big, warm, moving, something-or-others. And our constructions? Our cities and farms? No different from any mountain or field.
My point, then, is that once transhumans were as far removed from us as we are from insects, they might be pretty much invisible to us. Or, more precisely, we'd see them, but not know what we were looking at.
The whole thing is worth reading.
