Public Discussions > General Discussion
Future death of the personal computer?
Dave Yeo:
Not just older browser versions, there are often zero day vulnerabilities that target the latest or close to the latest.
Likely the biggest danger to our old Mozilla is old malware that has been laying around since ours was released whereas generally malware goes for the popular, which is the most recent.
Still a good practice to use adblockers, including a hosts file and/or NoScript as ads are a common infection vector.
Dave Yeo:
Another interesting attack vector is USB sticks. There's cases of them having an extra keyboard controller to inject commands, not really a worry for us besides making things unstable and the scariest is USB devices designed to kill your computer, a big capacitor or such injecting a large voltage through your USB port. Depending on the motherboards design, it might only blow a fuse or might fry the board.
Always be careful of USB sticks found in a parking lot :)
David Kiley:
--- Quote from: Doug Bissett on February 21, 2020, 07:02:22 pm ---That depends on how you define "progress". From a user point of view, small steps happen, mostly to keep users interested. From the point of view of those running the spy uhm advertising uhm cloud services, huge steps have been taken. People have been sucked in, so they can inspect whatever you store there (you do agree to that).
--- End quote ---
I guess my definition of progress is making a real positive difference in peoples lives, such as I mentioned spreadsheets were a pretty huge development in the dos era as giving people power to compute and crunch numbers in all different ways not previously easy or possible.
Or the car allowed people to travel further distance in shorter time - measurable and real progress.
Or the mobile revolution allows people to compute on the go, something no one could do before.
Other than cloud storage and integration of apps with internet services, I think the cloud is mostly hoodwinking people. Sure people have been taken by the concept because of marketing, but that doesn't actually make it progress unless the marketing is telling a real story.
For example I don't think office 365 is really offering anything that standard office or open source office suites like libraoffice, in fact it's worse since you have to keep paying for it. Microsoft might suck some people into the marketing, but it isn't really progress, at least from my point of view.
I admit some things are subjective, like features you might like that I don't care about -- but things like the car and the PC actually transformed peoples lives.
ivan:
Hi Dave,
Regarding the USB problems you mentioned we had a client that was worried about that so we made a test unit using a Raspberri Pi board, several high capacity zena diodes, a couple of replaceable fuses and a USB socket. Don't know if it worked for his company but it did work when we tested it.
Mathias:
Exactly.. cloud makes you pay to access your stuff.
Some cloud services are free to use, but then of course it might be taken away/offline all of sudden, once the hoster is no longer in business or willing to grant you access. - Does not even need to be your fault. - It`s enough to come from the wrong IP range.. like in my case some days ago.
Some brickheads at spamhaus thought that blocking my provider`s full IP range was a good idea, in order to block out the bad guys. Unfortuantely they blocked not only the bad guys apparently.. ;o
So.. what *I* do not like about the cloud is, that you might loose access to your data all of sudden. You do not have control. Only seems like it. Next day the data can be inaccessible for unforseeable reasons.. atleast for a limited time.
And of course in case of an application cloud.. they make you pay to access the stuff, you need... which is often more expensive than simply continuing to use the offline software version as long as it is supported.
Most offline software is still patched nicely for years and years. So why use the cloud version? Well.. 1) you always use the newest version and 2) no need to care about licenses, since your cloud management tool will also take care of this... you book x users for y hours/days..
And it might be cheaper to rent the software, cloud wise, for a short period of time versus buying the full offline product.
That goes, of course, only if you plan to use it for a short time..
But then again..
using cloud services always means taking the risk of ....
1) taking part in telemetry (or even data) collection or harvesting
2) being locked out when you are no longer wanted
3) being locked out in case of hard/software problems at the provider or the hoster
4) paying more than you might need to..
Of course running everything offline means, that YOU are also in charge of backing up everything yourself! Also the cloud hosted stuff mostly is highly available.. if one location fails, you can be sure the cloud switches access to another location, where everything is also duplicated to.
To have the same infrastructure in the same high availability can quickly get expensive..
So.. cloud is both.. good and bad thing at the same time..
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