I imagine that Juniper produces some of the 10% of those devices that disable the JTAG on their equipment, that is why they are promoting this in hacker circles.
I cracked open (physically) a Juniper packet filter the other day (a 1U box with only an ethernet in, ethernet out, and power). Inside was an Intel-made x86 CPU (I forget which one, but a fairly old one) on a minimal motherboard and a 3.5 inch HD set with a the 2GB clip enabled (the drive was 10GB). The filesystem was FAT16 with no long file names. There was no OS on the FAT partition, though the partition table was screwy and it may be located elsewhere. Anyway, my point was, being a standard Intel CPU, it does not have a JTAG port. However, a determined person with physical access could just as easy grab the binary running on that machine from whereever it is on the drive, or by reading the BIOS chip (which looked like a standard one though I'm guessing that's where the code is stored), or putting in an ICE on the RAM (standard DIMM socket) or on the socketed Intel CPU. They are far from immune.
Today, a 64-bit address space seems plenty large for whatever we might want to do with it, including virtual addressing for all system storage as well as RAM. Given how inconceivably large a number 2^64 is (16,777,216 TiB anyone?), it seems ludicrous that more could ever be required. But I'm sure Gates would have thought the same of 2^32 in 1981. 128-bit pointers still make me shake my head in disbelief, but who knows, maybe I'm the one lacking foresight now?
The storage space on all hard drives sold this year already exceeds 2^64 bytes. If you're addressing invidividual bytes (as you would with direct memory-mapped access), you will exceed 64-bit pointers. It would take an array of 131,072 128-TB drives to hit this limit, not entirely unreasonable. That's why Sun's ZFS uses 128-bit block pointers now, they expect to encounter this limit within the lifetime of that software. Not that I particularly worry about hitting this limit because of block-level addressing (I don't see mmap'd secondary storage happening until there is a breakthrough in the way we store things), but making assumptions that the 64-bit space is inexhaustable might be a bit shortsighted.
Why? If I knew I was going to die in 5 years, I wouldn't bother saving for retirement, or trying to get ahead in my career, or buying a house, or not getting that really nice sports car that I talked myself out of. I also wouldn't have any children if I would be passing on the disease to them, or just leaving them without a parent, for that matter.
I would also probably be bummed out for a while. But on a long enough scale, we are all dead.
However, in order to exploit a vulnerable system an attacker needs to be able to inject fragmented IPv6 packets on the target system's local network. This requires direct physical/logical access to the target's local network
So nobody from the net can crack your machine, they must already me on your local net. This greatly reduces the scope of this attack.
Ah, but you don't understand. This image format can do one thing that none of the rest of them can: It can contain an encrypted payload that only displays on monitors using HDCP connected to a computer that's booted a Trusted Platform OS, and the content can refuse to display if you haven't paid a subscription fee, its timeout has expired, or you've seen it too many times.
Acer is the number 4 maker of personal (ie, non-server) computers in the world, behind HP, Dell, and Lenovo and ahead of Apple. At least that's what the statistics say, I've yet to see anyone using an Acer.
But I just finished writing this inspirational xmas email in 32-point Comic Sans font with animated gifs of kittens and reindeer and attached 30-meg screensaver that I was going to sent to Everyone@dod.gov
the typical price of a destructive exploit has increased dramatically, driving an underground market that could exceed the value of the legitimate security software business. 'I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry,' Genes said."
Sounds like I need to switch jobs. Finally, a job where discovering Windows bugs will pay off instead of just generating more work for me.
The Zune may not ever be a financial success, but it will be out there for some time to come.
Ah, but you forget one very important thing: it's not Microsoft who decides what goes on retail shelves. Let's say Zune sales are lousy and return rates are high. The two biggest consumer electronics retailers in the United States, Best Buy and Walmart are going to start looking at the numbers very closely. Unlike the software world, these companies are not beholden to Microsoft and have very strong leverage on their suppliers. If they are losing money by stocking Zune devices, or even not making as much money as they could be if a different product occupied the same shelf space, they may very well give Zune the boot. If the Zunes gain a reputation for being crap, they may get tossed even if Microsoft manages to fix all of their bugs.
Microsoft made a big mistake here. They released a buggy product (I've used a Zune, this is my opinion), and come December 26th we will see how many of them get returned to the stores from whence they came. And if that number if very large there are going to be some very upset retailers and it will take a lot of cash to prevent MS from getting dumped in the next reload cycle.
We've all been looking at this as a GPL issue (which I agree is very valid). What I haven't seen brought up is two key projects that are sponsored by Novell: Mono and Gnome. With Mono now having implemented Windows Forms, and hopefully achieving nearly full compatibility with "Windows Native" dotnet apps, perhaps it has occured to Microsoft that they don't want Linux app migration to be that easy. This is the wedge they're driving. Windows Forms contains messy patent issues. Now, anyone can use them, as long as they use the Microsoft-blessed Novell Linux distribution, but the control is strictly in Microsoft's hands. No distribution is allowed outside of their control, and they can revoke even the current users' right by pulling their agreement and threatening to sue.
Someone mod this AC up. It's not that users "need" to click. It's that the mouse interface is designed to safely float over elements without triggering them (although the old X-mouse is a notable departure from this). Only when the user has hit the target is the mouse "active". This is because the mouse is an imprecise and difficult to control tool. Have you ever tried freehand drawing with it? Compare that to what you can do with a pen. Forcing precision on the mouse action requires finer movement, greatly increases the likelyhood of unintentionally selecting something, and is generally far more stressful. This is why the users seem to get anxious and want to click. They really want to avoid this horrid new interface that, for some reason, some jackass is trying to force on them.
Some years ago, I worked on an mp3 playing device (no, not Apple). Our users were quite often complaining that our random was not truly random, and seems to be clustering, favoring, disliking some thing or another. Some would swear that there was some intelligence to it, picking particular songs. I've seen the shuffle code, it's a simple array swap. I ran a numerical simulation on the output and found that the distribution of the array elements from their original position equal throughout. Further, there seemed to be no specific clustering, as the probability that any item would end up next to any of its peers was again equally distributed throughout. We had some of the customers submit their own ideas and tried them out in code. In general, we found that we never outperformed the simple array swap in terms of randomness, though most results were about the same.
The conclusion that we reached: If you have a lot of Jimmy Buffet, you're going to hear a lot of Jimmy Buffet. And on that one occassion that two Buffet songs play back to back, you're going to think to yourself "this random sucks". But it is, in fact, all in your head.
*I'm sure someone will want to bring up the seed issue. Let's just say that we had it covered.
Think of this as a learning experience If Linux had implemented BeOS's is_computer_on_fire()* system call, he would have been able to log the situation, send an email to his friend to alert the authorities, and shut down cleanly.
But you may be one of the fortunates who go to school where Hennessy is president, so you may have learned MIPS there =P
I take it you mean Stanford. I went to UCLA, but many people I've met from different schools in the US have used the same architecture book. I'm talking about computer architecture, not just assembly language. The complexity of the x86 processors is far too great to teach them to undergrads. However, in about a hundred hours of work, one lab partner and I were able to construct a working MIPS-architecture CPU (on a Xilinx FPGA) starting with nothing but gates, flipflops, and other basic elements.
Now, since you know x86 assembly, let me teach you MIPS assembly in one minute: 32 registers, r0-r31. r0 is hardcoded to zero. jal/bal (jump/branch and link) push the PC to r31. otherwise, all registers are equal.
li rD VAL ; load to register rD (destination) immediate value VAL lw rD rS ; load word at address stored in rS (source) to add/sub/... rD rA rB ; perform op on registers A and B, store to register D sw rD rS ; store word at rD to address in rS
You'll be doing a lot of load/stores. The instruction after a branch statement gets executed even if the branch is called. The rest is just details (extend to half-words and bytes at your convenience). There are no index registers, no flags, no predicates, nothing. Congratulations, you are now qualified to program a MIPS processor.
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How about favorable coverage of their anti-trust lawsuit against Intel? Or, you know, just good PR.
I imagine that Juniper produces some of the 10% of those devices that disable the JTAG on their equipment, that is why they are promoting this in hacker circles.
I cracked open (physically) a Juniper packet filter the other day (a 1U box with only an ethernet in, ethernet out, and power). Inside was an Intel-made x86 CPU (I forget which one, but a fairly old one) on a minimal motherboard and a 3.5 inch HD set with a the 2GB clip enabled (the drive was 10GB). The filesystem was FAT16 with no long file names. There was no OS on the FAT partition, though the partition table was screwy and it may be located elsewhere. Anyway, my point was, being a standard Intel CPU, it does not have a JTAG port. However, a determined person with physical access could just as easy grab the binary running on that machine from whereever it is on the drive, or by reading the BIOS chip (which looked like a standard one though I'm guessing that's where the code is stored), or putting in an ICE on the RAM (standard DIMM socket) or on the socketed Intel CPU. They are far from immune.
So Microsoft's big need is the Killer App that only runs well on Vista. You got it?
You mean DirectX 10? Sure, DX10 could run on XP if MS wanted it to, but then nobody would need to buy Vista.
Today, a 64-bit address space seems plenty large for whatever we might want to do with it, including virtual addressing for all system storage as well as RAM. Given how inconceivably large a number 2^64 is (16,777,216 TiB anyone?), it seems ludicrous that more could ever be required. But I'm sure Gates would have thought the same of 2^32 in 1981. 128-bit pointers still make me shake my head in disbelief, but who knows, maybe I'm the one lacking foresight now?
The storage space on all hard drives sold this year already exceeds 2^64 bytes. If you're addressing invidividual bytes (as you would with direct memory-mapped access), you will exceed 64-bit pointers. It would take an array of 131,072 128-TB drives to hit this limit, not entirely unreasonable. That's why Sun's ZFS uses 128-bit block pointers now, they expect to encounter this limit within the lifetime of that software. Not that I particularly worry about hitting this limit because of block-level addressing (I don't see mmap'd secondary storage happening until there is a breakthrough in the way we store things), but making assumptions that the 64-bit space is inexhaustable might be a bit shortsighted.
Finally his parents will get off his back to go back to school and do something with his life!
Why? If I knew I was going to die in 5 years, I wouldn't bother saving for retirement, or trying to get ahead in my career, or buying a house, or not getting that really nice sports car that I talked myself out of. I also wouldn't have any children if I would be passing on the disease to them, or just leaving them without a parent, for that matter.
I would also probably be bummed out for a while. But on a long enough scale, we are all dead.
So nobody from the net can crack your machine, they must already me on your local net. This greatly reduces the scope of this attack.
Ah, but you don't understand. This image format can do one thing that none of the rest of them can:
It can contain an encrypted payload that only displays on monitors using HDCP connected to a computer that's booted a Trusted Platform OS, and the content can refuse to display if you haven't paid a subscription fee, its timeout has expired, or you've seen it too many times.
"Lets make a Octa-core processor!"
Oh, here's one. Though it's been out since before Intel had quad-core chips.
Acer is the number 4 maker of personal (ie, non-server) computers in the world, behind HP, Dell, and Lenovo and ahead of Apple. At least that's what the statistics say, I've yet to see anyone using an Acer.
But I just finished writing this inspirational xmas email in 32-point Comic Sans font with animated gifs of kittens and reindeer and attached 30-meg screensaver that I was going to sent to Everyone@dod.gov
Firefox, Opera and most other non-IE browsers forbid this behavior by default
No, they don't forbid. They DON'T IMPLEMENT such a stupid idea. Microsoft had to go out of their way to ADD this "feature".
That's why we have to crush mankind! So you might as well get on board for the big win, Stormy.
But why so short?
What are you waiting for?
Let's start with Hurd task 5458 (currently 0% complete): Design and implement a sound system.
Vista is Bad. Use Linux. Use GPL software.
Forget Linux, I'm waiting for GNU/HURD. Any day now...
the typical price of a destructive exploit has increased dramatically, driving an underground market that could exceed the value of the legitimate security software business. 'I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry,' Genes said."
Sounds like I need to switch jobs. Finally, a job where discovering Windows bugs will pay off instead of just generating more work for me.
I wouldn't take programming advice from a guy who overloads the bit-shift operator to perform I/O.
The Zune may not ever be a financial success, but it will be out there for some time to come.
Ah, but you forget one very important thing: it's not Microsoft who decides what goes on retail shelves. Let's say Zune sales are lousy and return rates are high. The two biggest consumer electronics retailers in the United States, Best Buy and Walmart are going to start looking at the numbers very closely. Unlike the software world, these companies are not beholden to Microsoft and have very strong leverage on their suppliers. If they are losing money by stocking Zune devices, or even not making as much money as they could be if a different product occupied the same shelf space, they may very well give Zune the boot. If the Zunes gain a reputation for being crap, they may get tossed even if Microsoft manages to fix all of their bugs.
Microsoft made a big mistake here. They released a buggy product (I've used a Zune, this is my opinion), and come December 26th we will see how many of them get returned to the stores from whence they came. And if that number if very large there are going to be some very upset retailers and it will take a lot of cash to prevent MS from getting dumped in the next reload cycle.
We've all been looking at this as a GPL issue (which I agree is very valid). What I haven't seen brought up is two key projects that are sponsored by Novell: Mono and Gnome. With Mono now having implemented Windows Forms, and hopefully achieving nearly full compatibility with "Windows Native" dotnet apps, perhaps it has occured to Microsoft that they don't want Linux app migration to be that easy. This is the wedge they're driving. Windows Forms contains messy patent issues. Now, anyone can use them, as long as they use the Microsoft-blessed Novell Linux distribution, but the control is strictly in Microsoft's hands. No distribution is allowed outside of their control, and they can revoke even the current users' right by pulling their agreement and threatening to sue.
Someone mod this AC up. It's not that users "need" to click. It's that the mouse interface is designed to safely float over elements without triggering them (although the old X-mouse is a notable departure from this). Only when the user has hit the target is the mouse "active". This is because the mouse is an imprecise and difficult to control tool. Have you ever tried freehand drawing with it? Compare that to what you can do with a pen. Forcing precision on the mouse action requires finer movement, greatly increases the likelyhood of unintentionally selecting something, and is generally far more stressful. This is why the users seem to get anxious and want to click. They really want to avoid this horrid new interface that, for some reason, some jackass is trying to force on them.
Oh, we can do much better. Here are some favorites:
"guy who wrote this" "in case some idiot" "ugly hack" "rewrite this later" "hail mary" "this shouldn't work" "compiler happy" "what the fuck" "blows goats"
And I really love this one: i=i++
This is exactly what is going on. Good call, AC.
Some years ago, I worked on an mp3 playing device (no, not Apple). Our users were quite often complaining that our random was not truly random, and seems to be clustering, favoring, disliking some thing or another. Some would swear that there was some intelligence to it, picking particular songs. I've seen the shuffle code, it's a simple array swap. I ran a numerical simulation on the output and found that the distribution of the array elements from their original position equal throughout. Further, there seemed to be no specific clustering, as the probability that any item would end up next to any of its peers was again equally distributed throughout. We had some of the customers submit their own ideas and tried them out in code. In general, we found that we never outperformed the simple array swap in terms of randomness, though most results were about the same.
The conclusion that we reached: If you have a lot of Jimmy Buffet, you're going to hear a lot of Jimmy Buffet. And on that one occassion that two Buffet songs play back to back, you're going to think to yourself "this random sucks". But it is, in fact, all in your head.
*I'm sure someone will want to bring up the seed issue. Let's just say that we had it covered.
Think of this as a learning experience If Linux had implemented BeOS's is_computer_on_fire()* system call, he would have been able to log the situation, send an email to his friend to alert the authorities, and shut down cleanly.
*Yes, it's actually in the OS.
But you may be one of the fortunates who go to school where Hennessy is president, so you may have learned MIPS there =P
I take it you mean Stanford. I went to UCLA, but many people I've met from different schools in the US have used the same architecture book. I'm talking about computer architecture, not just assembly language. The complexity of the x86 processors is far too great to teach them to undergrads. However, in about a hundred hours of work, one lab partner and I were able to construct a working MIPS-architecture CPU (on a Xilinx FPGA) starting with nothing but gates, flipflops, and other basic elements.
Now, since you know x86 assembly, let me teach you MIPS assembly in one minute:
32 registers, r0-r31. r0 is hardcoded to zero. jal/bal (jump/branch and link) push the PC to r31. otherwise, all registers are equal.
li rD VAL ; load to register rD (destination) immediate value VAL
lw rD rS ; load word at address stored in rS (source) to
add/sub/... rD rA rB ; perform op on registers A and B, store to register D
sw rD rS ; store word at rD to address in rS
You'll be doing a lot of load/stores. The instruction after a branch statement gets executed even if the branch is called. The rest is just details (extend to half-words and bytes at your convenience). There are no index registers, no flags, no predicates, nothing. Congratulations, you are now qualified to program a MIPS processor.