Thank you for the write-up. I agree with nearly every single thing here, and my observations in my IT career conform to what you have said as well.
With regard to figuring out what would work better in the real world, there is an emerging need to abstract the hardware information on a number of the devices from the OS.
For example, in web fingerprinting, a lot of code targets hardware identifiers to build a bridge, for later identification. If the hardware identifiers are the same, or are associated with other device identifiers, its likely the same person.
There will always be some unique artifacts that can be collected, but black boxing hardware from the OS seems an admirable goal to reduce the attack surface for these types of attacks. Its already done to a much lesser degree in blade servers that use a storage subsystem that must come up before the system can boot. We really need something like this, also ACPI in modern hardware is nearly always the culprit with compatibility issues in Linux. The issue isn't often the hardware, its the lack of documentation of the hardware made available, but which may be made available to Microsoft (through their OEM Certification Program).
The one thing I find disappointing regarding your post is the final statement. Who decides what's better. The producers think the way things are now are much better, otherwise they wouldn't do it. As a user its clearly not better, so this reasoning is flawed because better, always pre-supposes a question of better for whom?. Its opaque without any real answer and is completely subjective; this is what spawns flame wars, and is fallacious in any rational context. I'd think sticking to a rational context would provide the most constructive benefit in a discussion; useless opinions without credibility often are meaningless and devoid of value.
Also, on a side note: that captcha to post is ridiculous and will block nearly all human posts. It took me a solid 10 minutes to figure it out because there is no context, and that's with quite a lot of knowledge about how computers actually function. I doubt any regular person would be able to get it except by accident. 2 from 14, 35, 26, 24, 28. It's assumed to be something simple a human could do, so processing math asking for a number 2 from fourteen (12,16), (33,37),(24,28),(22,26),(26,30), since this is the most common use. Though as you can see, there are at least 5 n_2-tuples, that when permuted could be any number of actual solutions, there's no operator, no determinism or pattern emerges for inference so you are basically asking people to guess at whatever the creator thought was the right solution (mindread), and I'm sure it locks people out after several failures. This is a very poor implementation that doesn't do what its designed to do, you should have a serious discussion with dreamwidth, very few people actually see that in the form of how a digit sum is put together, but that wasn't the answer apparently. Its very obtuse, and I can't be bothered to email them.
no subject
With regard to figuring out what would work better in the real world, there is an emerging need to abstract the hardware information on a number of the devices from the OS.
For example, in web fingerprinting, a lot of code targets hardware identifiers to build a bridge, for later identification. If the hardware identifiers are the same, or are associated with other device identifiers, its likely the same person.
There will always be some unique artifacts that can be collected, but black boxing hardware from the OS seems an admirable goal to reduce the attack surface for these types of attacks. Its already done to a much lesser degree in blade servers that use a storage subsystem that must come up before the system can boot. We really need something like this, also ACPI in modern hardware is nearly always the culprit with compatibility issues in Linux. The issue isn't often the hardware, its the lack of documentation of the hardware made available, but which may be made available to Microsoft (through their OEM Certification Program).
The one thing I find disappointing regarding your post is the final statement. Who decides what's better. The producers think the way things are now are much better, otherwise they wouldn't do it. As a user its clearly not better, so this reasoning is flawed because better, always pre-supposes a question of better for whom?. Its opaque without any real answer and is completely subjective; this is what spawns flame wars, and is fallacious in any rational context. I'd think sticking to a rational context would provide the most constructive benefit in a discussion; useless opinions without credibility often are meaningless and devoid of value.
Also, on a side note: that captcha to post is ridiculous and will block nearly all human posts. It took me a solid 10 minutes to figure it out because there is no context, and that's with quite a lot of knowledge about how computers actually function. I doubt any regular person would be able to get it except by accident.
2 from 14, 35, 26, 24, 28. It's assumed to be something simple a human could do, so processing math asking for a number 2 from fourteen (12,16), (33,37),(24,28),(22,26),(26,30), since this is the most common use. Though as you can see, there are at least 5 n_2-tuples, that when permuted could be any number of actual solutions, there's no operator, no determinism or pattern emerges for inference so you are basically asking people to guess at whatever the creator thought was the right solution (mindread), and I'm sure it locks people out after several failures. This is a very poor implementation that doesn't do what its designed to do, you should have a serious discussion with dreamwidth, very few people actually see that in the form of how a digit sum is put together, but that wasn't the answer apparently. Its very obtuse, and I can't be bothered to email them.