I agree with you that the example is not the best, but obscurity has a lot of benefits. We did an experiment with a few students on obscuring a WordPress installation some years ago to catch ppl scanning for certain plugins. That gave us the ability to use the regular paths as honeypots. Gives you an ability to detect 0-day attacks as well.

Check the EDPB opinion that was released recently. It states quite clearly what can bu done.

Great if it worked.. does not find the papers of authors I looked for.

In all kindness, let me ensure you that experience is rarely gained until your forties. Early on we may feel on top and hold important positions, but it is not the same thing as understanding the other side. To gain wisdom, not there yet, probably take another 20 years.

McKinsey have messed up government policies all over the world when it comes to McDonaldization of Society. They are using simple measurements to model how complex societies should work, unfortunately this is only works for McKinsey and their partners.

Sounds a bit like a lot of "machine learning" actually (when it's done blindly).

But do you have any specific references for the kind of thing you're talking about? It sounds plausible, but if I had a dollar for every time something plausible-sounding was completely wrong...

Sounds like someone doing linear regression, claiming it's artificial intelligence, and charging $150k salary in a year for said data science...

I don't want to personalize the comment. But in Europe there are many examples where McKinsey implement a model to fix the money distribution problem. At the end, society gives up the culture and ideals. While the ppl get short handed the partners get a bonus. Still, I think this is mostly a problem of bad public leadership that is not approachable.

I wonder if they will do physical fingerprinting for unique digital signatures?

We can still not sandbox apps access to data by default. Numerous academic projects have show how this can be implemented, e.g. by fudging data when details are not needed. Also, in order to get these security fixes I have to buy a new device from one of their partners.. Google has failed society by advancing surveillance capitalism to the extreme.

I don't think you have really used Android lately.

1. Google has added API to access resources without getting full unconditional access

2. They are enforcing use of correct APIs on their store

3. Most of the system is now updated from the store. This is significantly faster than any of their competitors

4. Most vendors are now providing timely security updates. Some even have an Enterprise program with 4-5 years of updates.

I use it every day. Regarding P1, if an app ask for permission access to e.g. images or location, and you use the app, how would you limit what the app can send home or even review it? See discussion in the other comments if you're not an Andriod developer.

Since Android v1, it offers APIs (intents) for picking items belonging to other apps or doing an action on behalf of other apps.

Applications do not need access to gallery; they can ask the gallery to let the user pick the pictures he wants to work with; the app does not need the access to camera, it can ask the default camera app to let the user make the photo and get the result. The app does not need access to telephony; it can ask dialer to dial a number on it's behalf. Etc, etc.

The developers didn't use these APIs because users were asking for iOS style integrations, where any apps does everything for itself, instead of using system components. So they got it.

my android one branded Nokia has had a decent amount of updates and my partner's last few Motos. it's getting better for Android slowly

Going after a subset of low end devices seems a bit off-putting to me. A-One should be mandatory, but most manufacturers are hooked on adding bloatware to track you.

In principal e-voting to increase transparency is a nice ideology, but how would you engage the people over time? I'm afraid this would rather cause an increase in fake news and the likes. The obvious case is the Brexit vote, that gave the people two options: a remain (no change) and leave (open ended in terms of how).

With e-voting can keep mostly the same system we have now, but augment that with two small changes. 1) you can change your representative at any time, which changes the weight of his vote, 2) you can overrule your representatives vote on issues you care about.

In this way there won't be a situation like Brexit because after initial open ended vote people can participate in subsequent votes too, and can eventually decide that they don't want Brexit or want it even without any trade agreements.

Fake news, (or rather people not smart enough to distinguish fake news), will remain a problem, but democracy uses assumption that most people are smart enough, if this assumption is not true then oligarchs buying politicians is actually useful to the society, but i don't think this is very likely.

If Firefox would add a smooth zoom for pinch for Windows touchscreens, then I would never look back to Chrome. Its a feature that has been promised for many years, but has never been implemented properly.

How do you know emdrive did not pan out? It's shown that the used configuration was wrong by the German institute.