To Apple, OS X is dead. Lion is the first push towards killing it.
From everything I'm seeing so far from Apple, They will be betting on iOS in the future for their OS offerings. It's got a huge userbase, has much more apps available, and has proven to scale very well to large format screens and processors.
I mean, when's the last time you saw a Steve Jobs E-mail that said "Sent from my iMac" instead of his iPad?
The problem with that is that it limits the functionality of the device for such a small use of it's design life. I mean seriously, how many times are you going to take a standardized test?
On top of this, The Nspire has a test mode called Press to test that can be used to limit functionality. It even has a light on some models that blinks when it is active to tell proctors that the mode is activated. Now with this in mind, In theory they shouldn't need to cripple the calc with lack of programming functions so much because if you're taking a test, you just turn on press to test and the calc cripples itself for the duration of the test.
Of course with ASM level programming you could fake the test mode and lights so that the calc is live, but looks like it's crippled. But then Ti could just focus on hardening the press to test mode from attack instead of making their entire built up programming community of over 20 years stand up and beeline for the nearest Casio or HP calc they can find.
Ti has a long history of screwing with homebrew apps, especially ASM apps.
They only started supporting ASM on their calcs when they couldn't stop zshell and fargo devs from getting the most out of their 85 and 92 calcs, and then the SDK was crippled with a stupid code signing scheme that limited code size, which the community hacked around.
As for their current offerings, I swear that Ti anymore builds their calcs based on high school teacher input instead of Math professors and scientist input. Teachers want familiarity with older calcs they've been using for years, pretty graphics and ease of use while professors and scientists want raw power and calculation expandability. Teachers don't want programming capabilities because in their mind it turns them into a gameboy (Completely ignoring the fact that programming takes math to make a game work right not to mention gets students interested in computer programming) while professors want programming to solve complex problems without having to enter 20 equations manually each time in an inexpensive handheld package.
I think this is the same reason the Ti-82 OS keeps living on and on and the Ti-85 OS is dead. Even though the Ti-85 OS was much more superior in many aspects and ran on basically the same hardware as an 82 with a slightly bigger screen, it was too different from the 82 so teachers shunned it. The Ti-92 is the last calc OS they made with Both Teachers and Math Professionals in mind. Thankfully they haven't snuffed it like they did the Ti-85/6 yet but who knows, they'll probably replace it with the Ti-84 super saiyan edition anytime now with bright flashing yellow case, 16 MB of flash and the same limitations and 24K Ram Footprint the Ti-82 has had for almost 20 years now.
First, you can't trust the user to distinguish the malicious sample from the legit sample (unless he's in that 1%). They'll just run both of them. With that in mind, the OS itself needs to be able to distinguish the samples, and the only distinguishing factor an OS itself can have against a malicious program is a good malware scanner which can block known malicious samples before the user gets control. The problem is that this isn't the best solution since most malware today is virtually 0 minute and most AV defenses relies on defs that can't catch the new entries. I've seen some scanners that take heuristic, cloud, and behavioral approaches to malware, but they tend to false positive and get the user more involved than they should be in order to make a solid decision, which based on the four rules is a bad thing. In a perfect world case, A would get removed automatically while B would run. In our non perfect world, both A and B may or may not run. A would run because the scanner doesn't know it's a virus (in which based on the 4 rules it runs) or B would not run because heuristics picked it up and the user clicked yes to quarantine.
Another approach I've seen is the walled garden approach most mobile phones are taking, where you can only download executables from an approved store. While this centralizes software downloading and eliminates unapproved downloads such as malware, it's also not foolproof since viruses can sneak in the app store such as what happened to Google a few months back as well as give you a real headache at home when it comes to running a self created internal program (which leads to "jailbreaking", then to a possible malware infection), but for a corporate situation, this might be the best choice since the IT dept probably has a 1%er somewhere in it calling the shots as to what gets executed or not, so they can allow Program B, while the policy blocks everything else not needed, which includes A.
Either way, the point to the rules is that there isn't really a good solution to them. All you can do is mitigate the problem to make it happen less through proactive approaches and security simplification to the point that it's either automated or practically automated. A great example of this are the three most popular browser plugins out there.
1) Java 2) Actobat 3) Flash
Java does security updates all wrong. It expects the user to click on an taskbar icon to initiate the update with no auto update option available, but since it's not a button in front of them they never click on it, so it never gets updated, so Java becomes a big time infection vector for malware since chances are it's out of date. This phenomenon almost prompts me want to make rule 3.1) When they need to click on it, they wont.
Acrobat has both a taskbar icon and an option to install without prompting. The best option is to set the updater to just install the update no questions asked but it defaults to the taskbar icon. see Java to see why thats bad.
Flash does it mostly right but is implemented kinda wrong. At startup a box pops up which asks you to update. while this isn't a fully automated solution, it at least has a button, which they will click on. the only problem is the startup portion. if they leave their computer on for weeks then they won't see the update for weeks.
Article makes it sound like Win7 is getting inundated with viruses, but when you look at the counts it paints a different story.
Windows 7: Increase of 33% 1Q2010: 3/1000 2Q2010: 4/1000 - 64 Bit: 2.5/1000
Windows XP: Decrease of 22% 1Q2010: 18/1000 2Q2010:14/1000
Basically, You're still safer using windows 7 vs other Windows versions.
Current Numbers from MS are Here. Not exactly sure how computerworld got those numbers since MS numbers are higher and lower than others but there you go.
I was talking more about the Virtual Encryped Disk file based encryption rather than Full Disk Encryption. FDE wouldn't be much help in a rootkit situation but using Truecrypt to make Virtual disk files and only opening them when necessary would be a more ideal choice.
Another option would be to use 7zip files with encryption.
At this point, I feel SEO poisoning is so bad on Google that I find myself using other search engines more since they don't seem to be as big of a target.
Altavista, Ask and Bing have just been giving me more relevant search results lately. Google seems to like to show more SEO sites, forum reposters that just repost the same forum entries over and over and "Meta Search" sites such as software informer and alibaba.
Image search Rogueware poisoning is yet another reason to start looking somewhere else for search results.
Even half baked it would work in the market if they price wasn't so astronomical.
If they sold the thing at $300-400 they couldn't keep them in stores. At the same price as the ipad, they might as well slap a "buy a IPad" sticker on them.
I bought a Viewsonic G tablet recently for $300 and even with the buggy tapntap android interface it still was worth it simply because it has a full internet experience and a decent running flash player. If Viewsonic adds honeycomb + android market to the G tablet at some point they would dominate the android tablet market at that price range.
nVidia and AMD got along great before AMD bought ATi. nVidia really helped keep them floating back when AMD couldn't make a decent motherboard chipset to save their life. nForce was all the rage for AMD heads.
During the Athlon XP era, AMD did make a good chipset in the AMD 750. The problem was that all of the mobo manufactures at the time were using the VIA 686b southbridge instead of the AMD 766, which had a bus mastering bug which tended to cause crashes and eventually hard drive corruption.
Just about all of the chipset out there before nforce sucked when it came to reliability. VIA's would crash, AMD's would work good if you could find one with a AMD southbridge, but good luck with that, and forget about ALi or SIS.
Then Nforce came out with dual channel DDR RAM and hypertransport, which widened the bus channel significantly and most importantly did not crash under heavy load. You could totally saturate the bus on an Nforce and it would still go strong unlike any other chipset at the time which would saturate on just a hard drive copy. Nforce2 was even better and was the chipset to beat on the Socket A platform.
It's a shame that this announcement is most likely going to result in the end of Nforce chipsets. Nvidia hasn't announced a new chipset for either Intel or AMD in years, Intel supports SLi, and now that AMD supports SLi, it just supports the rummors that Nvidia is killing the chipset division..
Personally, I want creationism taught in school, but in the correct context that this is what the theory of the origin of life was 2000-4000 years ago when theology was the science of the day. From there, cover all the other theory's that obsoleted older theories throughout history until you reach the current theories. Use it to teach the scientific method.
On the bright side, if a teacher wants to teach Intelligent Design, (s)he can show 30 year old reruns of Battlestar Galactica and call it a documentary without fear of reprisal.
Except that it's unlikely that this will totally clean the problem.
This Exploit Rooted phones. That means Google lost control of the phone the second the user installed and run the malicious app. They could remove all of the malicious apps all day long but all that does is remove the Trojan Horse that dropped the rootkit.
As for the removal tool Google is planning to send. If the virus programmers have any sort of brain the first thing they're going to do is block the removal tool from removing the rootkit by sending a patch to the rootkit. It wouldn't surprise me if the rootkit doesn't phone home soon and download something to either spoof that the rootkit was removed or block the rootkit remover altogether and disable apps (either from Google or a third party) designed to remove the exploit. Google giving them a heads up through the blog post that they got 72 hours to code such a patch just made the virus writers job even easier.
Now I'm not saying that Google is handling this totally incorrectly. If I was Google, I would have taken many of the steps that they are currently doing, except I would not publicly lay out the plan until after it was executed. I know it would give Google Bad PR by sending apps without user knowledge, but it would have minimized a counterattack time frame from the virus writers and would have been the safer option overall. I just hope that Google has another strategy if this one fails, such as carrier involvement to recover and possibly disable remaining infected phones until it can be cleaned by a carrier tech.
Considering that their roughly the same price (at the low end) and the Lenovo is going to do just about everything a PC can do (minus heavy duty gaming) vs the iPad, which will do what an iphone can do. I'd stick with the Lenovo. It's just a more open and capable platform. And if you're asking why the Xoom isn't in this comparison? at $600 it's not even in the same league. The Lenovo wins hands down on price alone.
The only things the tablets bring to the table is size and battery life, and I think I'll put up with a power cord and a little heftier weight from both my netbook and my fatter wallet.
Considering that Microsoft is more anti-copyleft than anti-open source, I would have to agree that the language is specifically against copyleft licenses.
Don't have mod points today, but the OP is dead on.
You look at the Malware scene today, and the first things that better come to your mind is "Social Engineering" and "Trojan Horse". Just about every Malware writer worth their salt knows it's easier to hack the user over the OS. They know the below 4 laws really well and they are not afraid to use them against users.
Laws of Computer Stupidity 1) 99% of computer users do not know what they are doing. 2) Computer users do not read. 3) If a computer user can click on it, they will. 4) You can patch software, but you can't (legally) patch stupid.
Let em whine. I'm sorry, These ad firms put themselves into this mess.
The day ad firms decided to allow advertisers to use Flash and JavaScript in their advertisements is the day I started blocking them. Seriously, What was wrong with simple images and text? Was the monkey way too easy to punch or something?
been running Firefox for about 3 years now. Primarialy because I got sick of malvertisements.
With Firefox, You install Adblock plus, add the Easylist + EasyPrivacy list and you're done. I might have got 1 malware redirect in 3 years with that combo. IE would get that in a week.
IE8 and 9s InPrivate FIltering is a step in the right direction, Especially since you can import lists to it and get the same functionality as AdBlockPlus, but the problem is that you have to update the rules manually (been using This list for awhile), and it's cumbersome to import adblock lists into IE every week to keep up. If someone made an BHO that would automatically update the InPrivate list, or MS would add a subscription option to it, I would probably go back to IE9.
I thought CompactFlash was moving over to SATA soon in the form of CFast. I know PCI-E would result it more robust IO devices but we already have a standard for that in ExpressCard.
yes second that just to knock down the malware footprint.
If you do want to use Windows XP however, make him a user account to minimize malware damage and look into windows SteadyState (witch is at EOL but still available at MS until the end of this year) or DeepFreeze to lock down the system. That way if he gets an infection you just shut the system down and it's gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Captain Planet.
Just put him on a hamster wheel and tell him to start running. And the best part. The cleaner the world gets, the stronger and faster he becomes.
Although the one liners could get pretty old.
To Apple, OS X is dead. Lion is the first push towards killing it.
From everything I'm seeing so far from Apple, They will be betting on iOS in the future for their OS offerings. It's got a huge userbase, has much more apps available, and has proven to scale very well to large format screens and processors.
I mean, when's the last time you saw a Steve Jobs E-mail that said "Sent from my iMac" instead of his iPad?
The problem with that is that it limits the functionality of the device for such a small use of it's design life. I mean seriously, how many times are you going to take a standardized test?
On top of this, The Nspire has a test mode called Press to test that can be used to limit functionality. It even has a light on some models that blinks when it is active to tell proctors that the mode is activated. Now with this in mind, In theory they shouldn't need to cripple the calc with lack of programming functions so much because if you're taking a test, you just turn on press to test and the calc cripples itself for the duration of the test.
Of course with ASM level programming you could fake the test mode and lights so that the calc is live, but looks like it's crippled. But then Ti could just focus on hardening the press to test mode from attack instead of making their entire built up programming community of over 20 years stand up and beeline for the nearest Casio or HP calc they can find.
Ti has a long history of screwing with homebrew apps, especially ASM apps.
They only started supporting ASM on their calcs when they couldn't stop zshell and fargo devs from getting the most out of their 85 and 92 calcs, and then the SDK was crippled with a stupid code signing scheme that limited code size, which the community hacked around.
As for their current offerings, I swear that Ti anymore builds their calcs based on high school teacher input instead of Math professors and scientist input. Teachers want familiarity with older calcs they've been using for years, pretty graphics and ease of use while professors and scientists want raw power and calculation expandability. Teachers don't want programming capabilities because in their mind it turns them into a gameboy (Completely ignoring the fact that programming takes math to make a game work right not to mention gets students interested in computer programming) while professors want programming to solve complex problems without having to enter 20 equations manually each time in an inexpensive handheld package.
I think this is the same reason the Ti-82 OS keeps living on and on and the Ti-85 OS is dead. Even though the Ti-85 OS was much more superior in many aspects and ran on basically the same hardware as an 82 with a slightly bigger screen, it was too different from the 82 so teachers shunned it. The Ti-92 is the last calc OS they made with Both Teachers and Math Professionals in mind. Thankfully they haven't snuffed it like they did the Ti-85/6 yet but who knows, they'll probably replace it with the Ti-84 super saiyan edition anytime now with bright flashing yellow case, 16 MB of flash and the same limitations and 24K Ram Footprint the Ti-82 has had for almost 20 years now.
First, you can't trust the user to distinguish the malicious sample from the legit sample (unless he's in that 1%). They'll just run both of them. With that in mind, the OS itself needs to be able to distinguish the samples, and the only distinguishing factor an OS itself can have against a malicious program is a good malware scanner which can block known malicious samples before the user gets control. The problem is that this isn't the best solution since most malware today is virtually 0 minute and most AV defenses relies on defs that can't catch the new entries. I've seen some scanners that take heuristic, cloud, and behavioral approaches to malware, but they tend to false positive and get the user more involved than they should be in order to make a solid decision, which based on the four rules is a bad thing. In a perfect world case, A would get removed automatically while B would run. In our non perfect world, both A and B may or may not run. A would run because the scanner doesn't know it's a virus (in which based on the 4 rules it runs) or B would not run because heuristics picked it up and the user clicked yes to quarantine.
Another approach I've seen is the walled garden approach most mobile phones are taking, where you can only download executables from an approved store. While this centralizes software downloading and eliminates unapproved downloads such as malware, it's also not foolproof since viruses can sneak in the app store such as what happened to Google a few months back as well as give you a real headache at home when it comes to running a self created internal program (which leads to "jailbreaking", then to a possible malware infection), but for a corporate situation, this might be the best choice since the IT dept probably has a 1%er somewhere in it calling the shots as to what gets executed or not, so they can allow Program B, while the policy blocks everything else not needed, which includes A.
Either way, the point to the rules is that there isn't really a good solution to them. All you can do is mitigate the problem to make it happen less through proactive approaches and security simplification to the point that it's either automated or practically automated. A great example of this are the three most popular browser plugins out there.
1) Java
2) Actobat
3) Flash
Java does security updates all wrong. It expects the user to click on an taskbar icon to initiate the update with no auto update option available, but since it's not a button in front of them they never click on it, so it never gets updated, so Java becomes a big time infection vector for malware since chances are it's out of date. This phenomenon almost prompts me want to make rule 3.1) When they need to click on it, they wont.
Acrobat has both a taskbar icon and an option to install without prompting. The best option is to set the updater to just install the update no questions asked but it defaults to the taskbar icon. see Java to see why thats bad.
Flash does it mostly right but is implemented kinda wrong. At startup a box pops up which asks you to update. while this isn't a fully automated solution, it at least has a button, which they will click on. the only problem is the startup portion. if they leave their computer on for weeks then they won't see the update for weeks.
I've been saying this for years. Hell. it's in my Sig.
Eventually, software would get so security conscious that it would be easier to fool the user rather than hack the software.
Article makes it sound like Win7 is getting inundated with viruses, but when you look at the counts it paints a different story.
Windows 7: Increase of 33%
1Q2010: 3/1000
2Q2010: 4/1000 - 64 Bit: 2.5/1000
Windows XP: Decrease of 22%
1Q2010: 18/1000
2Q2010:14/1000
Basically, You're still safer using windows 7 vs other Windows versions.
Current Numbers from MS are Here. Not exactly sure how computerworld got those numbers since MS numbers are higher and lower than others but there you go.
Just to clarify my parent post.
I was talking more about the Virtual Encryped Disk file based encryption rather than Full Disk Encryption. FDE wouldn't be much help in a rootkit situation but using Truecrypt to make Virtual disk files and only opening them when necessary would be a more ideal choice.
Another option would be to use 7zip files with encryption.
Just another reason why you should be using file encryption such as Truecrypt to encrypt everything personal.
Even if it's on your own hard drive. You're only one rootkit away from giving it away to the world.
At this point, I feel SEO poisoning is so bad on Google that I find myself using other search engines more since they don't seem to be as big of a target.
Altavista, Ask and Bing have just been giving me more relevant search results lately. Google seems to like to show more SEO sites, forum reposters that just repost the same forum entries over and over and "Meta Search" sites such as software informer and alibaba.
Image search Rogueware poisoning is yet another reason to start looking somewhere else for search results.
Even half baked it would work in the market if they price wasn't so astronomical.
If they sold the thing at $300-400 they couldn't keep them in stores. At the same price as the ipad, they might as well slap a "buy a IPad" sticker on them.
I bought a Viewsonic G tablet recently for $300 and even with the buggy tapntap android interface it still was worth it simply because it has a full internet experience and a decent running flash player. If Viewsonic adds honeycomb + android market to the G tablet at some point they would dominate the android tablet market at that price range.
nVidia and AMD got along great before AMD bought ATi. nVidia really helped keep them floating back when AMD couldn't make a decent motherboard chipset to save their life. nForce was all the rage for AMD heads.
During the Athlon XP era, AMD did make a good chipset in the AMD 750. The problem was that all of the mobo manufactures at the time were using the VIA 686b southbridge instead of the AMD 766, which had a bus mastering bug which tended to cause crashes and eventually hard drive corruption.
Just about all of the chipset out there before nforce sucked when it came to reliability. VIA's would crash, AMD's would work good if you could find one with a AMD southbridge, but good luck with that, and forget about ALi or SIS.
Then Nforce came out with dual channel DDR RAM and hypertransport, which widened the bus channel significantly and most importantly did not crash under heavy load. You could totally saturate the bus on an Nforce and it would still go strong unlike any other chipset at the time which would saturate on just a hard drive copy. Nforce2 was even better and was the chipset to beat on the Socket A platform.
It's a shame that this announcement is most likely going to result in the end of Nforce chipsets. Nvidia hasn't announced a new chipset for either Intel or AMD in years, Intel supports SLi, and now that AMD supports SLi, it just supports the rummors that Nvidia is killing the chipset division..
Personally, I want creationism taught in school, but in the correct context that this is what the theory of the origin of life was 2000-4000 years ago when theology was the science of the day. From there, cover all the other theory's that obsoleted older theories throughout history until you reach the current theories. Use it to teach the scientific method.
On the bright side, if a teacher wants to teach Intelligent Design, (s)he can show 30 year old reruns of Battlestar Galactica and call it a documentary without fear of reprisal.
They're just trying to show the public how much "lost revenues" "pirating" has cost them.
All they need now is a bald guy in a white suit stroking a cat and they'll be set.
Except that it's unlikely that this will totally clean the problem.
This Exploit Rooted phones. That means Google lost control of the phone the second the user installed and run the malicious app. They could remove all of the malicious apps all day long but all that does is remove the Trojan Horse that dropped the rootkit.
As for the removal tool Google is planning to send. If the virus programmers have any sort of brain the first thing they're going to do is block the removal tool from removing the rootkit by sending a patch to the rootkit. It wouldn't surprise me if the rootkit doesn't phone home soon and download something to either spoof that the rootkit was removed or block the rootkit remover altogether and disable apps (either from Google or a third party) designed to remove the exploit. Google giving them a heads up through the blog post that they got 72 hours to code such a patch just made the virus writers job even easier.
Now I'm not saying that Google is handling this totally incorrectly. If I was Google, I would have taken many of the steps that they are currently doing, except I would not publicly lay out the plan until after it was executed. I know it would give Google Bad PR by sending apps without user knowledge, but it would have minimized a counterattack time frame from the virus writers and would have been the safer option overall. I just hope that Google has another strategy if this one fails, such as carrier involvement to recover and possibly disable remaining infected phones until it can be cleaned by a carrier tech.
Lenovo Ideapad tablet Still technically an tablet but more of an x86 netbook)
Apple iPad
Considering that their roughly the same price (at the low end) and the Lenovo is going to do just about everything a PC can do (minus heavy duty gaming) vs the iPad, which will do what an iphone can do. I'd stick with the Lenovo. It's just a more open and capable platform. And if you're asking why the Xoom isn't in this comparison? at $600 it's not even in the same league. The Lenovo wins hands down on price alone.
The only things the tablets bring to the table is size and battery life, and I think I'll put up with a power cord and a little heftier weight from both my netbook and my fatter wallet.
I also find it hard to believe that they would exclude their own open source licenses on their own platform.
Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)
Microsoft Reciprocal License
Considering that Microsoft is more anti-copyleft than anti-open source, I would have to agree that the language is specifically against copyleft licenses.
Don't have mod points today, but the OP is dead on.
You look at the Malware scene today, and the first things that better come to your mind is "Social Engineering" and "Trojan Horse". Just about every Malware writer worth their salt knows it's easier to hack the user over the OS. They know the below 4 laws really well and they are not afraid to use them against users.
Laws of Computer Stupidity
1) 99% of computer users do not know what they are doing.
2) Computer users do not read.
3) If a computer user can click on it, they will.
4) You can patch software, but you can't (legally) patch stupid.
Considering their market cap, and Oracle's interest in chip companies, It wouldn't surprise me if Larry Ellison isn't their next CEO.
but... JesusSat doesn't have a nice ring to it...
Let em whine. I'm sorry, These ad firms put themselves into this mess.
The day ad firms decided to allow advertisers to use Flash and JavaScript in their advertisements is the day I started blocking them. Seriously, What was wrong with simple images and text? Was the monkey way too easy to punch or something?
So how is this any different from Forcing InPrivate Filtering on and adding a filter list to it like you can with IE8?
Is it going to have a constantly updated list like AdBlockPlus?
been running Firefox for about 3 years now. Primarialy because I got sick of malvertisements.
With Firefox, You install Adblock plus, add the Easylist + EasyPrivacy list and you're done. I might have got 1 malware redirect in 3 years with that combo. IE would get that in a week.
IE8 and 9s InPrivate FIltering is a step in the right direction, Especially since you can import lists to it and get the same functionality as AdBlockPlus, but the problem is that you have to update the rules manually (been using This list for awhile), and it's cumbersome to import adblock lists into IE every week to keep up. If someone made an BHO that would automatically update the InPrivate list, or MS would add a subscription option to it, I would probably go back to IE9.
I thought CompactFlash was moving over to SATA soon in the form of CFast. I know PCI-E would result it more robust IO devices but we already have a standard for that in ExpressCard.
yes second that just to knock down the malware footprint.
If you do want to use Windows XP however, make him a user account to minimize malware damage and look into windows SteadyState (witch is at EOL but still available at MS until the end of this year) or DeepFreeze to lock down the system. That way if he gets an infection you just shut the system down and it's gone.