Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evoloving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Here is a tiny reason why “everything’s f****d.” “The 30 million line problem.” Many of the “smart” devices contain a complete operating system even though they don’t exactly require it. That operating system could be Linux, Windows CE, or a real-time operating system. It doesn’t matter. A modern operating system contains something on the order of 30 million lines of code. Some of this code is necessary for things like USB and HTTPS connections.
The massive quantity of code makes it easy for bugs (or backdoors) to hide. This is so much code that no single person can understand all of what is happening. One of the more troublesome places for bugs is vehicle infotainment systems. Those computers have a CANBUS connection to the car and can use that to control most of the vehicle systems. Hopefully it’s fixed now, but some researchers have disabled the brakes.
The massive memories and data connections of smart devices make them good spy gear. A thermostat does not need hundreds of megabytes of RAM and gigabytes of flash to do the job of a thermostat.
The software in these devices becomes outdated quickly. A lot of these devices will not receive updates for their lifetime. And even if they do, the update process can be an annoyance if it interferes with a person’s use of the device. Worst of all would be an update failure which ruins the functionality of the device. This has even been done intentionally by Sonos.
Slow startup times. The old tube TVs could start up in a few seconds. Can the newest “smart” TVs match that? If they do, it might be because the processor is always on and using more electricity than an old TV did when off. A Cisco router may take minutes to start up, slower than consumer routers.
Perhaps the one benefit of this is quicker product development. That’s a big benefit for the manufacturer. We as the consumers get half-baked products that need to be updated before they work as designed.
Does anyone have topic suggestions for a future “everything’s flipped?” Note that writing these can take hours, especially if researching topics that are suppressed and hidden. I usually write about topics that I know well and still spend hours researching.
I concur with this. There is no reason for having an entire embedded OS in each device except for creating "smart devices" and "internet of things" which ultimately has the same goal as connecting all humans to a central digital control system.
Its much easier these days to hack into someone's smart fridge and then get access to their internal network, than hacking into someone's computer. This is also by design. Every vulnerability in the OS is a back door for the intel 3 letter agencies.
I am going to pick a topic that might look hard (maybe this is actually an exception to the everything is f'ed, lets see): bicycles
To hack a bike, remove the wheels or the air in the tires.
The wheels must go around, or there is no purpose.