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Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

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Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#231
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The less information available about the infosec and (more importantly) the sys admins the better. Nation states are like any organization. They are resource and time constrained. If you set the bar high you will eliminate the low hanging fruit adversaries. Force them to put the work in... Plus if you show them you are very careful and watching everything you will force them to be extra careful, as not to tip off any…

That's false sense of security you and many have. It takes very little time for nation states to identify who works for XYZ company. If what you suggested is the right practice, then why is Google Zero Project members a public thing? A lot of them are publicly known. If infosec people are vulnerable, isn't your building security guard vulnerable? We got tens of thousands of hackers attending DefCon, Blackhats, and ot…

> It takes very little time for nation states to identify who works for XYZ company.

If it requires a person to spend time researching non-open source intelligence avenues then I disagree.

The point is by not doing something a company can gain something. That's not a big ask for the marketing team not to mention names in any public interface.

It's easy to assume that 'nation state' surveillance means that a sophisticated person will hunt down a piece of information. But that's actually quite a resource intensive request.

Quickly finding someones name on publicly available resources and adding it to a list is on quite a different level than having a hacker/trained person hunt down a hidden piece of information that must be triangulated from other disparate pieces of information. And I say this having spent quite a bit of time doxxing people for fun myself - it's a time intensive activity regardless if it was ultimately easy to do. The less information available the much hard it is to do.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#232
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false sense of security you and many have. It takes very little time for nation states to identify who works for XYZ company. If what you suggested is the right practice, then why is Google Zero Project members a public thing? A lot of them are publicly known. If infosec people are vulnerable, isn't your building security guard vulnerable? We got tens of thousands of hackers attending DefCon, Blackhats, and ot…

> It takes very little time for nation states to identify who works for XYZ company. If it requires a person to spend time researching non-open source intelligence avenues then I disagree. The point is by not doing something a company can gain something. That's not a big ask for the marketing team not to mention names in any public interface. It's easy to assume that 'nation state' surveillance means that a sophistic…

But it is a pretty much a lost argument here because (1) developers aren't shielded, (2) developers are as vulnerable to social engineering as any infosec (but probably even more vulnerable if said infosec workers are very careful). The issue is the effort is neligible in a manhunt. For non-nation state actors like you and I, sure, it takes a huge effort. But if you don't everyone, then there is very little gain from hiding only people in infosec. In my experience, a lot of developers have production access. Compliance do not care if developers have access or not, auditors only care about if approval is in place and audit report can be produced without tampering. Also, in many enterprise, infosec often don't have access to actual production, they are just managing incident response process. Therefore, it is not usual to see massive social engineering, because it only takes one victim. Even if said victim has no access to most of the data, a breach in network is already a gold mine.

Also, you probably are familiar, sites like LinkedIn can be a great source for getting list of employees, and guessing company email is usually takes some effort once the attacker figures out the naming convention of email addresses.

Anyway, partial information is just as bad as full disclosure when the unhidden secrets are just as useful as the hidden one. So we either hide everything or we don't hide anything.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#233
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None, but they also approximately doubled the price. I suppose Nexus may also have a sort nostalgic glow around it, too, as developer's device - I have had an N1, N4, N5 and now an N6P.

> they also approximately doubled the price I paid $699 for a 64GB Nexus 6. The Pixel XL with 128 GB is $869. I don't know what they were charging for the 6P but based on the 6, they definitely didn't double it, though clearly the price did increase.

I paid $349 for my Nexus 5, $399 for my Nexus 5X; the cheapest price for the Pixel is $649. It's not double the price, but it's a 60-85%+ increase at the bottom end depending where you count from. I felt like $399 for the 5X was the wrong direction already.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#235

I think it looks really good. Not a huge fan of a proprietary expansion port, but I guess there is no other way of future-proofing for certain accessories, like sensors for inside-out VR/AR tracking. I hope they get enough traction so that it'll be a viable business and these won't be paperweights in 2-3 years time

The expansion port will be open source, like Ambiant OS, according to Andy.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the story with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 too, and it never happened. Believe me, I bought into the ecosystem and was a true believer. And it never happened.

But again, the difference is that it's full Windows 10 on ARM with x86 Win32 emulation. You can take your 32-bit Windows x86 software and run it with no changes needed if you want to. You don't have to buy into any new ecosystem because there is no new ecosystem. Here's a demo video they released at the start of the year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U

But I don't want to?

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#237
post #228

First-world problem: what business to start when you have too much money and no really good ideas. - Private space program? Everybody's done that. - Sports team? Not into sports enough. - Museum? Boring. - Supercar company? IC engines are so last-cen and electrics mean competing with Elon. - Super high end phone? Yeah!

I still think a robotics company for the masses is something waiting for a billionare to indulge in. Its 2017 and where is my "Rosie the maid" from jetsons? It should be here by now. I hate doing house chores.

100% agreed. The pieces are there, someone needs to put them together. It's VR in 2009.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again, the difference is that it's full Windows 10 on ARM with x86 Win32 emulation. You can take your 32-bit Windows x86 software and run it with no changes needed if you want to. You don't have to buy into any new ecosystem because there is no new ecosystem. Here's a demo video they released at the start of the year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U

But I don't want to?

Then it's not for you. But it is for me, it is for the company I work at, and it is for many companies like it. This capability will be huge.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#239

What is it with these companies putting the latest SnapDragon CPUs in their mobile devices? No one cares about CPU performance. I've got a SD820 now in my Axon 7, and I can tell you there is 0 difference with a SD625 in daily use. Except that the SD625 is cheaper and has an incredible battery life. The only company realising that people care about UX in stead of specs seems to be Xiaomi. Consistently choosing SD625 a…

As someone who's still using his Nexus 5 and seeing it get slower and slower as app bloat increases... I care, because I know the app bloat isn't going away.

Re: Essential Products – Andy Rubin’s new hardware company

#240
post #228

First-world problem: what business to start when you have too much money and no really good ideas. - Private space program? Everybody's done that. - Sports team? Not into sports enough. - Museum? Boring. - Supercar company? IC engines are so last-cen and electrics mean competing with Elon. - Super high end phone? Yeah!

I still think a robotics company for the masses is something waiting for a billionare to indulge in. Its 2017 and where is my "Rosie the maid" from jetsons? It should be here by now. I hate doing house chores.

Consumer Reports says the Samsung Powerbot robot vacuum is finally good enough to be useful. The Dyson robot vacuum is almost as good, they report. Previous robot vacuums were just too weak at vacuuming to do a good job.
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