Attacks only machines running specific Ubuntu kernels and using specific boot methods. Plus no actual payload. This doesn’t yet represent a real risk.

Where we’ll be in ten years’ time is unknowable, however. I think the Ars commentors who suggested going back to forcing jumper cap swaps or other hardware-mediated access requirements before overwriting the mobo’s boot firmware might be on the right track, even if it’s inconvenient for large corporate deployments. It’s normal for security and convenience to pull in opposite directions, and sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.

Depends on how low your standards are. I mean, there were [a small number of] people who convinced themselves that the 1960s chatbot ELIZA was a person with feelings, and the bots have only become more convincing since then. I can certainly see the modern ones fulfilling the emotional needs of someone who really, really wants to believe they’re speaking to a sapient being who cares about them, and as for the other, well, some people have pretty low sex drives or find phone sex fulfilling enough (at least for a time).

Because you’re using an external device to extend the capabilities of the port. It can’t do that without the dock, so now you have two things to carry around.

If you look at the comments on this, there are two distinct camps of people who will never agree: those who expect their laptop to be a self-contained unit that doesn’t require anything that wasn’t packaged with it to meet common use cases (which requires more ports), and those who are okay with docks and dongles and adaptors.

By the time the ecosystem has “caught up”, we’ll have USB-D ports to contend with. Possibly even USB-E.

And whoever buys it won’t also have some kind of ulterior motive? Chrome isn’t likely to be a money-maker on its own. If it were, Firefox would have less trouble staying afloat. Anyone who buys Chrome most likely will have plans for it that are no more in the end-user’s best interest than Google’s.

Depends on how much effort the average scammer puts into remembering the prospective victims that don’t bite. My guess is that they don’t waste too many brain cells on that.