Slashdot Mirror
Domain: grc.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to grc.com.
Comments · 905
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Re:BoycottXP
You'll probably want to link to GRC's page. Steve Gibson has a lot of stuff on his page about some of the troubles that will be introduced with WinXP. Particularly that its support for full raw packets will enable 'hackers' to write code that will spoof the IP, whereas 9x doesn't have support for full raw packets.
He argues that, since 9x didn't support them, and people have gotten along just dandily, then why should XP support them? Apparently MS is doing it just to appease the people that complained that it wasn't there.
I remember the last time when I cursed my 9x box since it didn't support full raw packets. Don't you?!
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span. -
Re:Why M$ ?
I can't imagine that they didn't think as hard about security as Apache or Linux for example.
i'm not bashing microsoft here, but the windows3.1/95/98/nt/etc os's originated from dos which is a single user operating system. there were no concerns made with respect to security when dos was originally placed on the market. because of the application base dos had the various windowsxxx's that have come along had to be backwards compatable with dos programs. as a result you have this pseudomultiuser platform that implements security as an afterthought. see for example this article about windows xp.
on the other hand linux is based on unix, which microsoft trashes for being 30 year old technology, but this technology has had 30 years to iron out alot of the security issues. unix was also designed with multiple users in mind which affects everything from file access to memory allocation.
so in essance linux, via unix, has had alot more thought put into security than microsoft. as a result of linux being open alot of the security issues can be addressed by its users. because microsoft is closed the poor iis administrators have to sitback while their boxen are DOS'ed and wait for a patch to arrive. its sad really.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that -
Kiddies grow up: more kiddies appearI'm most moved by this poster's comments on the effects of network attacks on depression support groups. Normally lots of people would be annoyed and inconvenienced - some people counting on the system to transmit or recieve important information - but this is a special case; I have just enough experience with depression to know how being deprived of a solace can hurt.
Once those kids grow up, they will learn - most of them. It's part of growing up, really - learning to keep minor set-backs in proportion, rather than making life hell for everyone else; learning to consider others. Learning what the effects of their actions actually are. There are unpleasant and irresponsible adults out there, of course - but a lower proportion of them than of kids. Not knowing the consequences of your own actions is almost part of the definition of childhood, isn't it?
The problem is - when today's kids have grown up and absorbed adult attitudes, there will be a fresh supply of youngsters causing trouble. The individuals involved will change; the tendency to casual maliciousness will not. Even the nicest of people occasionally feels angry or hurt and wants to lash out - whether or not they actually do it.
Well, wherever casual maliciousness is an option, some hurt, angry, or immature adult or some ignorant child is going to cause trouble - sometime, somewhere. The easier it is to be nasty
So what do we do? I'm not one for regulations, or blame; I can't see that it would help here. I think the best thing we can do is make it harder to inflict damage, easier to defend against it; naturally there's a limit to how far one should go before it isn't worth worrying any more, but it's clear that we aren't there yet. The article at grc.com on DDOS attacks gives some thoughts on this
I'm not so keen on bashing Microsoft, but it sounds like there's a lot they can do that would improve things. That being recognised, it seems to me almost criminal that they don't!
We're little folk. Keep an eye out, folks, for the places you can help; in internet security and elsewhere.
Rachel
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Speaking of paranoid...
last night I was reading about the attacks at GRC.com since I had given up all hope at CounterStrike.... I did a netstat -an and found I had something listening on port 137-139. I don't have NETBEUI running on any of my home network boxen, so I freaked.... and then noticed my Linksys box was misconfigured.
Nothing like thinking one of your boxes is owned to put the fear of god in you... FDISK usually purifies and redeems - I was just digging out my ISO's when I remembered that 192.168.x.x was internal. Ah, never mind honey - you can have your laptop back. Everything is fine.
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Re: This is getting out of hand.
Take a look at http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm, under the "An Attack 'Prone to Filtering'" heading a short way down the page.
Further sensationalism and misguided ranting can be found at http://grc.com/dos/winxp.htm
Still more amusement can be found on Gibson's security newsgroup where his most feverent groupies and sycophants display an astounding lack of clues. These are available via the web at http://grc.com/x/talk.exe?cmd=xover&group=grc.sec
u rity or through a standard NNTP interface at news.grc.com, newsgroup grc.security.
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Have crack, will moderate.
The occasional poster formerly known as jihad23 -
Re: This is getting out of hand.
Take a look at http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm, under the "An Attack 'Prone to Filtering'" heading a short way down the page.
Further sensationalism and misguided ranting can be found at http://grc.com/dos/winxp.htm
Still more amusement can be found on Gibson's security newsgroup where his most feverent groupies and sycophants display an astounding lack of clues. These are available via the web at http://grc.com/x/talk.exe?cmd=xover&group=grc.sec
u rity or through a standard NNTP interface at news.grc.com, newsgroup grc.security.
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Have crack, will moderate.
The occasional poster formerly known as jihad23 -
Re: This is getting out of hand.
Take a look at http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm, under the "An Attack 'Prone to Filtering'" heading a short way down the page.
Further sensationalism and misguided ranting can be found at http://grc.com/dos/winxp.htm
Still more amusement can be found on Gibson's security newsgroup where his most feverent groupies and sycophants display an astounding lack of clues. These are available via the web at http://grc.com/x/talk.exe?cmd=xover&group=grc.sec
u rity or through a standard NNTP interface at news.grc.com, newsgroup grc.security.
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Have crack, will moderate.
The occasional poster formerly known as jihad23 -
Re:This is a clear violation of DSL User Agreement
If you'd like to see just how much an ISP cares about policing its network, go to grc.com and read his account of tracking down Denial of Service attacks on his system. He had clear evidence of hacked machines running as zombies, hijacked dial-in accounts, etc. and got exactly zero interest from the ISPs on whose customers were being exploited. The entire story is a fascinating read on how he tracked down the perpetrators of these sort of attacks and got it stopped (no thanks to the ISPs or law enforecment).
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Re:More Writeups NeededOK, can you give a URL for this DDOS reference?
Jason.
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Investigative reporting
For Feature Journalism, GRC's report on DoS attacks and zombie bots. Any news article that contains the phrase "Attack-Neutered Mutant Zombies" definitely deserves some sort of award
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Re:Well.. we knew that.Do you understand the difference between porting a utility than porting that *stack*?
Yes, and I said so, or at least I tried.
I was simply verifying that MS uses OSS code in Windows, even Windows NT.And since one of the reasons GRC was able to block the initial DDoS attacks was because of the limited TCP/IP implementation of Windows, it seems obvious that the stack is their own.
M.
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110 is 911.This is serious. 110 is the equivalent of 911 in Japan.
On that note, there was a "911 Virus" that spread via open Windows shares and randomly called 911 last year. This didn't spread far because it was so malicious (it erased users' hard drives) but it is an example of this sort of thing happening. The Houston, TX police department got a large number of false calls.
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Better than "good" resolution...I was confused hy the article's explanation of the resolution:
The spaces between electrodes are small enough to give a resolution of 300 monochrome dots per inch (dpi).
First of all, 300/3 = 100, not 80. But that isn't even right - there are still 90,000 dots per square inch, so 30,000 color pixels in the same space, theoretically about 173 per linear inch, arranged perhaps somewhat like this:...
A drawback of the filter approach to colour generation is that the filters need a single pixel for each primary colour. This effectively reduces the resolution by about a third, to 80 dpi.
rGBrGBrGBrGBrGB
As you can see, any L-shaped grouping of adjacent primary pixels can represent a color pixel at resolution 200h x 150v. If this thing is designed correctly, sub-pixel antialiasing can be done to retain nearly the full 300 dpi resolution WRT brightness. There's a great explanation of this on Gibson Research (Poor guy just got over a DDoS attack, and now I'm slashdotting him) as well as a demo of how it works.
gbRgbRgbRgbRgbR
BrGBrGBrGBrGBrG
RgbRgbRgbRgbRgb
If we can patch together segments of "digital paper", it could be a crucial step in making affordable the wall display panels from Arnold's apartment in Total Recall....
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Re:Why portscanning must be illegal.
ISPs use something called dynamic IP addreses. These addresses can change (usually do) every time your computer connects to your ISP. Since we all know that computers often get disconnected from dialup connections, how do I find my computer when I'm at work if I need to use it?
Your computer could send you an email when it connects up and tell you what its IP address is. That wasn't too hard, was it? There is no need for you to scan everybody else's computer to find out which one is yours.
You can do whatever you like with your computers, but you have no right to try to break into other people's computers. All the people who think that portscanning is a right and that the Constitution should have a new amendment guaranteeing the right to bear portscanners, post your IP addresses here and we'll see how many scans you get. Don't worry! The script kiddies are only seeing if they CAN break into your computer! They won't actually break into it. -
Why portscanning must be illegal.
Let's say you're shopping around for a web hosting provider. A lot of them will say "secure and reliable", but you know that doesn't really mean anything. So, you decide to run a few trivial security checks on their servers, including running a port scan.
Let's say I'm connecting my computer to the internet for private purposes. Why should I have to put up with repeated port scans? Those people aren't trying to connect to ports 111, 161, etc to do me a favour by testing my security. They're trying to break in! This would be obvious by examining what they had done, which would be to scan certain exploitable ports on a range of IP addresses. If you asked them, they would probably tell you why they did it: to find computers to break into. Let's not forget what happened to grc.com.
Portscanning should be considered a crime. -
Subpixel text rendering on color LCDs
You could use more or less the same process, only with monochrome elements instead of R, G and B -- and have a display with three times the horizontal resolution of a color display.
Microsoft Cleartype uses subpixel text rendering to take advantage of the fact that each LCD pixel is actually three. Apple used a similar technique for text rendering on TV monitors. And you can enable subpixel text in recent XFree86.
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Arrogance is the posture of the inadequateFate can turn on a dime these days. Witness the nearly overnight downfall of IBM hegemonic control of the PC industry in the 80's.
Microsoft is not invulnerable. The arrogance and complacency of MS, Earthlink, AOL/TW and other mega-corporations will be the source of their ultimate downfall. There are forces and bodies of knowledge and power on the Internet of which MS and their kin have never dreamed. Anyone who doubts this should read Steve Gibson's account of his recent DDoS atttack at http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm, sit back with a warm cup of coffee and ponder the implications.
The power of a good idea is untimately irresistable, and the Internet is just such a good idea. Many walls and many established powers will fall before the sweeping changes which will surely come, no matter how strongly the Microsofts and AOLs of the world try to excercise their control. We are, in all likelihood, at the beginning of time of conflict, perhpas even war. Many of us may be called on to take action or to take stands, some of which may be difficult, frightening, dangerous or lonely.
Be hopeful, keep your eyes, ears and mind open, and remember that the Internet, like all open source endeavors, was founded on trust, sharing, and cooperation, and it's these that will see us through even the most difficult of times.
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Re:It's not the speed
ZoneAlarm from Zonelabs is a great FREE (as in beer) firewall. Steve Gibson has some good things to say about it after thorough testing.
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Ping floods
Chirillo starts with Port 7, echo, explaining
ICMP echo requests (as used by "ping") do not use port 7 - as the name implies, they are ICMP not UDP!
More importantly, while ping -f is not exactly a high-skill DoS attack, it works - and it does not "take advantage of a computer's responsiveness": it just floods your connection with junk. Even if you just ignore this traffic completely, it's too late: it floods your connection, blocking out legitimate traffic. This is exactly what happened to Steve Gibson at grc.com, as he describes here.
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Re:OLEDs and ClearType
Maybe, maybe not, but the prior art certainly makes it irrelevant.
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Have a cookie Mr Gibson.
Anyone who knows networking will tell you that this is exactly what SYNcookies were made for. The attack didn't use up all the network traffic, but rather used up all the filehandle-slots on the server OS.
Just take a look at that graph and the anver is obvious.
When using SYNcookies the server doesn't allocate a file-handle for each new connection but puts a 'challenge' in the Syn/Ack package and waits for the last Ack of the 3-way handshake. This effectively forces the attacker to reveal his IP address if he wants to use up the filehandles, and then you just block hin in your router.
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echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D7272 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc -
Look who's talking...
From his DOS attack history page:Rather than engaging in another night of cat & mouse "guess the IP" as we had the night before, I decided to remain off the Internet, collect attack logging data, and take the opportunity to defragment our server's hard drives while weathering the storm.
"defragment our server's hard drives" ? Seems that he's not using Linux for his servers...And then he complains about being DoSed? Sheesh...
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Re:20 GB Portable Drive
Instant Portability! Satisfaction Guarenteed!
So if I'm not satisfied, what do I get in return? Personally, I think I'd like some rebate coupons for some reliable products.
< tofuhead >
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Re:Click of death?
It refers to Jaz and Zip drives and media which failed with the endless sound of a 'Click, Click, Click....' as the drive head tried to read data from the disk (but failed) over and over again. Iomega denied it till the bitter end until they lost the class action lawsuit against them last month on this issue. Even then I don't think they admitted fault (their product was defective). But the ultimate insult - and this is why so many people hate them - is that for restitution they were able to get the courts to allow a remedy whereby in order to get a refund from Iomega for their defective product - get this - you have to buy more Iomega products! That's right, the refund in the class action is in the form of a rebate only valid on future Iomega purchases. It's kind of the last straw for a lot of people around here. They really don't sell price competitive products (never have except for a few short months at the outset of each the Jaz and Zip). They seem very good at marketing. But people just don't like a company that doesn't take its customers seriously. So most people are avoiding these products like the plague. As you can see Iomega is trying to artificially raise demand for their "peerless" product by not having it be available when they announce its availability. There are too many alternatives out there for much less (or with much more storage).
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Re:The only sad thing is...
True.However this subject reminds me of a review of a piece of software once upon a time. (I'm sorry, I don't have a link or even recall specifically what it was.) Basically it was done by a guy who knew his machine code and compilers and the like. He stripped apart the actual executable binary (which he determined was built using MS VC++), and totally lambasted the developers. You see, so many 'default' things had been left in the 'starting' project that he was able to determine that the size of the thing was 5 times what it needed to be!!!
Have you ever seen this guy's programs? He writes them in machine language. It never ceases to amaze me, but people who write in raw ML end up with TINY executables!!!
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Re:But do I trust it?I can see an alternative though. Set up a website (or better yet, a voluntary series of mirrored sites) where users can go, and ASK to have their computer portscanned, and fixed if necessary. Make the "good" worms "sterile" (IE: unable to reproduce) so if the machine is infected, it can be automatically innoculated and patched against further infection.
There exists such a web site already: check out Steve Gibson's site, and check out the "Shields UP!" section. This will portscan your machine for you and report the ports it finds open. (It was designed for Windows machines.)
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How subpixel rendering works...
is explained, in depth, at Gibson Research If you don't get through to this site, its not becaused they are slashdotted, but because someone is inflicting a DDoS on them (which has the same impact, though). For this reason, I can't give you the complete address, but its just a from mouseclicks away (as soon as the attack stops). Yes, it may be amazing, but (to some extend) sub-pixel rendering improves quality on a CRT, too! If you don't believe me (and even if you do), check out that small programm that is offered on the web-page above. But notice why it works: it does so because antialiasing and sub-pixel rendering is similiar. And contrary to some believes Microsoft didn't invent subpixel rendering! Instead, this technique was used on Apple computers 26 years ago (this has been a topic on
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Re:Good ol' iomega.
I don't know what physical malfunction caused the click of death, but my guess is that it was some instrument scraping against the media within the disk.
this page has a good description of what you're talking about.
I got an internal scsi drive back in '98, and I'd only had it for a bit over a year when I got the problem. I didn't bother getting a replacement, because I wasn't using it much, and I threw the drive out. I'm now wishing I hadn't, because at the university I'm at, the student computing machines all have zip drives. Being on dialup, copying big files onto zipdisk would be a lot easier than emailing them around =) -
GRC's better than decent COD summary page
I have a decent respect for TIP "Trouble in Paradise", an unfortunatly Sindows only utility.
It has brought back several otherwise unreadable zip discs that were out on my scsi chain drive.
I was willing to try this util, as I have been a great fan of his SpinRite util for years.
Just one man's Datapoint, Your Life may Vary...
Adam
Trouble in Paradise page {has link to free anti-COD utility}
Trouble in Paradise utility {yes, it's a
GRC's Home
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GRC's better than decent COD summary page
I have a decent respect for TIP "Trouble in Paradise", an unfortunatly Sindows only utility.
It has brought back several otherwise unreadable zip discs that were out on my scsi chain drive.
I was willing to try this util, as I have been a great fan of his SpinRite util for years.
Just one man's Datapoint, Your Life may Vary...
Adam
Trouble in Paradise page {has link to free anti-COD utility}
Trouble in Paradise utility {yes, it's a
GRC's Home
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GRC's better than decent COD summary page
I have a decent respect for TIP "Trouble in Paradise", an unfortunatly Sindows only utility.
It has brought back several otherwise unreadable zip discs that were out on my scsi chain drive.
I was willing to try this util, as I have been a great fan of his SpinRite util for years.
Just one man's Datapoint, Your Life may Vary...
Adam
Trouble in Paradise page {has link to free anti-COD utility}
Trouble in Paradise utility {yes, it's a
GRC's Home
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Click Of Death Info PageGibson Research has an excellent series of articles regarding the anatomy of the Click of Death. The Click of Death Webpage is here. People even sent in dead drive for dissection, and a lot of good info is there, with autopsy photos,etc. Very much worth looking through.
For those who do not know Steve Gibson, he originally got his chops as the original writer of Spinrite, one of the first drive recovery tools of the PC. He has a number of neat little free tools on his website. they are all written in assembly language.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
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Click Of Death Info PageGibson Research has an excellent series of articles regarding the anatomy of the Click of Death. The Click of Death Webpage is here. People even sent in dead drive for dissection, and a lot of good info is there, with autopsy photos,etc. Very much worth looking through.
For those who do not know Steve Gibson, he originally got his chops as the original writer of Spinrite, one of the first drive recovery tools of the PC. He has a number of neat little free tools on his website. they are all written in assembly language.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
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since nobody's mentioned it...
Gibson Research's Click-o-Death detector pretty useful. too bad i got screwed out of my rebate because of the date i bought my zip drives... f*cking new ones i own don't have that problem. wasn't this mostly noticed through the parallel port ones? i haven't heard of many drives going bad through ide, only disks.
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Information & Utility to Test for "Click of Death"
Gibson Research Corporation has been following the "Click of Death" for a while and has been a player on the good-guy's side. He also has an application that will test if your ZIP drive suffers from the ailment.
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The Evil Suits Strike AgainOK, letting the quality of your product slip is not good. But if Iomega had just shipped a few bad drives, that would not be such a big deal. Even the best hardware breaks, and no sane consumer assumes otherwise.
Iomega's real mistake was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong. I suppose they were afraid of driving the stock price down or something. But if they had done a simple "we blew it" announcement and offered their users a simple diagnostic download (like Steve Gibson's TIP), they would have come out ahead of the game.
They do deserve points for ignoring expired warantees for CoD drives. But they didn't get these points, because they didn't publicize the policy for fear of publicizing the problem. Nor did they try to educate people on the technical issues (like why a non-defective drive can click when trying to read a defective disk). So they got bad press, rumors of a "contagious" bug, and a lawsuit.
Which is too bad. From the start, the Zip was obviously an attempt to replace the ubiguitous and useless HD floppy. I always hoped that attempt would succeed.
__
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Re:Poof! stuff breaks!
Yes, and once you do this, any number of sites stop working for you and all of your users, depending on how the site is coded.
I wish there a nice, free way to block ads that is transparent to end users and doesn't break everything. I used to use junkbuster, but it broke so many sites that people who use my computer (roommates) that I just stopped using it. Steve Gibson at GRC had a registry patch that added a bunck of web buggers to the "hostile" zone of internet explorer which worked pretty well, but then I don't use IE either.
Wishful thinking... -
Re:The Local Hack"Great, now I'm not only vulnerable to repeated port scans from any moron with a TCP/IP connection, but from my local community LAN also."
You do run a firewall, right? If not, try Tiny. It's just one step up from ZoneAlarm, and so much smaller. You should probably ignore the CNet luzer votes though. You might also find this interesting.
That's assuming you are satisfied with software.
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Follow the Bouncing BallThe following is based on a recent conversation with a friend (yes I actually have one of those)
There are advantadges to knowing the older stye linear programming, compared to the more modern object oriented. Just to be perfectly clear in advance: I think people should know both.
Part of the magic of object oriented stuff is that you do not have to get into the lower levels to tweak with things. But, lack of expertise in this regard leads to bloat, lack of efficiency, and another programming layer where flaws can crop up.
an extreme example of the opposite practice are the products at Gibson Research Corp.. [Disclaimer: I am not an employee, and have never been associated with him or his company, aside from just being damn happy with his products] Steve Gibson programs all of his stuff in assembly language. They are damn tight, damn fast, and damn small. If windows were programmed this way, it probably wouldn't be quite so horrid.
Point being, each programming approach brings with it certain strengths, and certain weaknesses. Being able to undercut the weaknesses with bits of magic from a lower level elements makes life easier.
For example, the vast majority of books on things like javascript all cover the basics, but almost everyone each leaves out one or two critical elements needed to get the big picture. Never mind various differences (when you want to do something fancy) and you want to have an integrated page serving all browsers. Never mind that every time your turn around you have another point version of the language to catch up on, and sort out regarding the various levels of compatibility (even though people are trying to push standards).
This last bit becomes the bouncing ball of marketing. Use this language, use that, with this additional layer of muck on it. But is this even an inprovement? And do we want to be teching this in college, etc. without teaching the underlying fundamentals really well?
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Re:Activation
The whole point isn't that MS does these things (which is pretty unlikely), but that they will have the power to do so. Every connection your computer makes is a way for it to send a few bytes of secret data. The panic over this is like with the whole Juno distributed network thing. Juno says that they will use the virtual supercomputer to make "lifesaving new drugs". But they reserve the right to switch it to "RIAA looking for mp3z" without telling you. Similarly, Windows XP doesn't now have spyware included, but it could easily in the future, added via an automatic service pack or something. To use the time-honored house analogy: You wouldn't mind giving a copy of your house keys to a close friend, I imagine. But give them to someone with the means and motive to secretly distribute your house keys for a price, and you have another thing going entirly. This is NOT just paranoid mumblings, have you heard of Aureate/Radiate?
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More Info on NetBIOS Vulnerability
If you don't already know about it, go to the Gibson Research Center. He has a program, Shields Up!, that tells you if your NetBIOS (and other) ports are vulnerable. He also includes detailed steps on how to configure Windows to make the NetBIOS ports inaccessible from the internet. Even if you don't have shares, the NetBIOS ports will give out information about the configuration of your computer.
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Re:May save your eyes but...I don't know what OS you use, but if you use Windows, you should try out Microsoft Reader and see if you see a significant improvement in readability of your fonts within the application with its ClearType technology, which really improves fonts on LCD screens. I have also heard that ClearType will be included in Windows XP when that is released.
If you use Windows and don't want to download Microsoft Reader, I suggest trying out Steve Gibson's ClearType Sub-Pixel Font Rendering Demo, available here, which is a small application to demonstrate ClearType technology.
Also, Slashdot (last year) ran an article on ClearType technology here.
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Re:A Golden AgeI remember that app - OptOut. Never had it crash on me, though. It should be noted, however, that even though it may have been written in assembly, most of it wasn't in assembly - since it's (dynamically) linked to your standard Windows libraries (KERNEL32.DLL, GDI32.DLL, ADVAPI32.DLL, COMCTL32.DLL, and SHELL32.DLL to be exact). The core of the program may have been assembly, but most of what it actually did was through Win32 library calls, most of which are written in C (I believe).
The simple fact is, as you allude to, writing something in 100% assembly is, for the most part, foolish - you cut down on stability and development time for a small gain in speed.
(It's a lot easier to muck things up in assembly... like the time my "print random colored characters" assembly homework program became a "change the screen to random modes" because I set some value wrong - forget which one. It was pretty funny to watch though... looked weird, screen blinking with all this weird garabage all over it. Thankfully the "quit on keypress" portion worked...)
Personally, I don't believe OptOut would be any faster than a similar program written in C. In fact, I'd bet that the C program would be more stable, and more useful, since it would be much more easy to extend in new ways. (Especially for finding new spyware, which is what OptOut was designed for.)
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This isn't JUST anti-aliasing --
This isn't JUST anti-aliasing -- it's subpixel font rendering, which Microsoft calls "ClearType." It's used in their Reader product. For a more technical view of subpixel rendering, check out Steve Gibson's page on the matter.
Anti-aliased text in X isn't new, but subpixel rendering definitely is.
Some people have posted about the color fringes around the edges of the letters. This looks kinda weird on a CRT but the effect on an LCD is very clear. This is only really nice looking on an LCD screen, and that's what subpixel rendering is designed for.
zsazsa -
Re:NYT Link (First Karma Whore)
Also look at grc.com. They have a spyware-detection program.
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Optout
There's a program that I have used a few times called optout, you can download it at: http://grc.com/optout.htm
There's an interesting blurb on their site, mentioning a Spyware Control Act.
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you are not what you own -
Optout
There's a program that I have used a few times called optout, you can download it at: http://grc.com/optout.htm
There's an interesting blurb on their site, mentioning a Spyware Control Act.
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you are not what you own -
Computer reading: Use an LCD.
it is very difficult to sit there for hours on end and read the text on the screen. The text starts to blur
Not if you're using an LCD, especially with subpixel text rendering. It's at least five times sharper than the average CRT.
there wasn't really any space between the lines
That's what style sheets are for. Make one with one of those CSS tools and use it.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? -
Double Hi-Res graphics baby !
> With 7 bits columns, IIRC.
Yeap. And setting the high bit shifted those pixels overy by half a pixel. Could get 560 x 192 monochrome, baby !!
Strange, that the Apple ][ graphic techniques show up 20 years later in Sub-Pixel Font Rendering !
"A person hasn't learned to appreciate color monitors until they have played Gumball on a monochrome monitor and beaten the 1st level"
Cheers -
Re:Sub-Pixel Rasterizing (ClearType)
Sub-Pixel rasterization is, in a word, stupid. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should.
This technology is only beneficial in LCD environments with typical filter configurations.
Some good technical information on exactly what sub-pixel rasterizing and ClearType is all about can be found here. (I like it because it shows that Microsoft is once again reinventing the wheel and calling it "new".