I don't know the future, but this isn't just a kickstarter and some naïve geeks in a garage. Panic is no fly-by-night. They've been around for years shipping really high quality Mac and iOS software, and has a more recent bend toward gaming with titles like Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. Hardware is completely new for Panic though. I don't know who is building their hardware, but they did partner with Teenage Engineering on design. Teenage Engineering has their own line of portable audio and music creation devices, and has become the Pharrell of high-design boutique electronics, with partnerships on hardware undertaken with Baidu, IKEA and Nothing.
So, I don't know if you're wrong, but I feel comfortable saying it's not a foregone conclusion that they'll fail.

That's my experience. I've used several assistants, and they all fail to understand my requests. They'll skip words, lose context for follow-up requests, and do a lot of really stupid web searches. Want a reminder for the next time you're at Home Depot? You'll get that reminder next time you're home. Want to call your wife? "I'm sorry, I don't know who your wife is." Next query - "My wife is Anonymous Coward" and it'll ignore your address book entry (that has the relationship) and perform a web search.

I have to assume the chart placement for Nirvana's Nevermind had to take off, since every assistant I've tried thinks I want to interrupt my weather query, calling my mom, or whatever other task I'm trying to perform with a web search for a twenty year old album.

As bad as these things are on my phone, laptop and TV, I can't see giving them their own hardware that always listens. I estimate they save time in less than a quarter of attempts. Another quarter result in harmful errors, like meeting reminders using the wrong metric or date. The rest are plain old failures and useless web searches for things that sound a little like the topic of my query ("call Richard" "according to wikipedia, Richard Hammond is a presenter on the Amazon series The Grand Tour").

~$150 USD will buy a Windows 10 laptop that would, in most measures other than pure storage capacity, outperform a wide swath of machines shipped with XP. ~$60 USD will get you a cheap Windows 10 tablet.

Still, we can't get people off of Windows XP.

I've owned an EV. They're great. I just don't think there's any chance that people will swap out equipment on the sort of time scale described here.

Huh?

20 characters would probably be a strong password.

20 bits of entropy almost certainly would be a very poor password.

I'm not sure what twenty characters of entropy would be. I guess it would depend on your encoding.

Yeah, actually.

Yahoo’s Very Bad Idea to Release Email Addresses | WIRED

...that connecting sites, and allowing one site to post to another, increases your attack surface. It also shows that a failure to police these connections can increase risk as older services become "stale."

Twitter, Facebook, et al should introduce security tools to help remind users. "Hey, you haven't used "Cartoon your face" in two years. Would you like to disable access to your account? You can always change it back later."

The assumption here is that an attacker choosing the easiest way has no other route. It would be safer to say that the route used by the worm would have been unavailable if basic preventative steps had been taken.

It's like the old joke. "Ever wonder why whatever you're looking for is always in the last place you look?" "Well, sure, once you've found it, why keep looking?"

Microsoft seems to think the authors would have stopped looking without finding an exploit route. Instead, they found one, and stopped looking.

I am shocked that the number of nmap users who are also download.com users would be significant.

Eh, I kinda agree with him. I hate it when my phone is a computer too.

I do appreciate that Apple has spent some time making things snappy. I understand this isn't always the case (iOS 4 on iPhone 3G for example).

It sounds like he's complaining about being told that he has to update this, scan that, defrag something, and turn on his firewall for crissakes. My netbook is far more interested in telling me that whatever programs I run at boot have a new version out than just opening whatever program I need to use badly enough to have turned the thing on.

And that's the deal here - firing up a desktop operating system in the first place requires a certain amount of work and carries with it a certain cost that makes using a desktop operating system for short periods inefficient.

If you want to, for example, check the weather, for many, it's going to take five minutes of computer stuff to support a minute of the actual task.

Now, someone is going to come in and tell me that Ubintows 7X Meerkat boots faster than an iPad on a triskadecacore i8 with SSD, but I say that's not everyone's experience.

Further, the iPad doesn't expose the finer points of computer configuration, use, and management. The Slashdot crowd has a lot of people whose work exists in that stuff. I'm one, and time with an iPad or CR-48 makes me feel like I can't get work done, but that's often because my work is "computery." For people whose work is word processing, it doesn't matter so much.

So, Slashdot, if your work is working on the tool, it's easy to see a tool that doesn't need your kind of work as a tool that prevents you from doing work.

How would an equidistant supercharger (thus, one that is 200 miles from each of two points, themselves 400 miles apart) fail to help drivers with cars that have a 230 mile range?

Agreed on DansGuardian. You'd want all ports closed for all users in the organization, including 80 and 443, then you'd want to create an exception for the Dansguardian box.

Also, even if it's on older hardware, consider setting up a second box to serve as backup. Look into proxy autoconfiguration files. You can return two proxy addresses in an autoconfig file, and if your main proxy is down, your clients will silently fail over to the other box. The config files also allow your internal traffic to skip the proxy for things like your intranet site.

Also, consider putting /var/log on it's own partition, if you aren't already. You don't want to let forgetting about your logging directory free space to be able to kick your whole organization off the web.

On squid (DansGuardian is often used with squid) look at your http_safe_ports (I might have that variable a little munged, as I'm not in the config right now) to make sure it's right for your org, and that it matches what your firewall is allowing out.

No, that's QBASIC Gorilla tactics 101.