No, you don't have to run as root first.
on
T-Mobile G1 Rooted
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· Score: 4, Informative
It's apparently weirder than that. Running "telnetd" as an ordinary user apparently allows remote logins as root. This happens even though the "telnetd" executable does not apparently come with permissions set-UID to root. If that's correct, there's a security hole somewhere else that's being used by accident here. Is "login" a set-UID program on Android phones?
(As a robotics guy, I hate the name "Android" being used for a telephone. It's the worst choice since "U.S. Robotics" which ended up as a modem company.)
There are some advantages to libraries over frameworks. (Working definition: if you call it, it's a library; if it calls you, it's a framework.) Frameworks are great if your problem fits into the model defined by the framework. Since many web applications are rather standardized, that covers much of web development.
The real problem with frameworks shows up when you need more than one of them in the same program. You can usually use more than one library, but using more than one framework is at best painful and often impossible.
It's annoying when something which could have been implemented as a library is architected as a framework because frameworks are "cooler" than libraries.
The movie "2001" had "laptops" that seemed to work. But they were actually built into the tables they sat on and had film projected onto their screens from the rear. And the original Star Trek had a portable slate-like device.
Kay described the Dynabook in the classic PARC publication "Personal Dynamic Media", which was around 1972-1973. There's a picture of a woman stretched out on the grass typing on a laptop-like device. It's a cardboard mockup, but the form factor was about that of a heavy laptop of the late 1990s. Kay called the Xerox Alto the "Interim Dynabook"; it did what the Dynabook was supposed to do, but took about 12U of rack space and a big CRT to do it.
This makes me feel very old. I got a tour of PARC in 1975, met Kay, and saw the first Alto (they were making their own CRTs and were having trouble getting a uniform phosphor coating on the tube), the first networked laser printer, the first Ethernet (described as "an Alohanet with a captive ether"), and the first Smalltalk. It's interesting what Kay thought computers were going to be for. He though that graphical discrite-event simulation was going to be a big deal. He had a demo of a hospital simulation, where patients entered, went through Admitting, Waiting Room, Treatment, Ward, Cashier, Discharge, etc., and you could click on the patient icons (I remember "I a victim of Bowlerthumb") as a message.
None of us thought that the uses of computers would become so banal.
Now Amazon needs to do this for DVDs.
After all, Amazon doesn't have a shoplifting problem.
Given that DVDs are a shock-insensitive waterproof object shipped inside a rigid case, they should be mailed with far less packaging. A manila envelope would be sufficient. Most of the perimeter seals, "Security Device Enclosed", and shrink wrap could be dispensed with. One seal that's broken on opening would be enough to identify packages that have been opened.
The USAF has the big advantage that they're not trying to grow their web traffic. If nobody on free mail services can talk to them, no problem. If executable downloads don't make it through the mail filters, no problem. If every incoming document gets run through a conversion to ODF to strip any funny stuff, no problem. If every incoming image is rendered and recompressed at the firewall, no problem. If their users's machines need a dongle to authenticate, no problem. If their servers have to run NSA Secure Linux or LynxOS or EAL4 QNX, no problem. They can take a hardass attitude if they want to.
I liked PropCycle too. But it wasn't free flight; you were constrained to a track. I'm amazed that someone hasn't done a gym version of something like Crimson Skies, which is available in a motion-platform arcade version.
The gym I use had some stair-climbers with web browsers for a while, but they were from a dot-com. When the dot-com failed, the units continued to work, but without a server to update them, they played the same ads over and over. Eventually the things were removed.
Since this thing is understood, it's possible to inject phony credit card numbers into the attack. If law enforcement and a bank worked together on this, they could inject flagged credit card numbers and watch where they were used, then make some arrests.
For that matter, a denial of service attack could be made against the attacker by injecting huge numbers of bogus credit card numbers, the use of any of which triggered law enforcement attention.
Maybe when Bush is gone, and the FBI and Justice Department get some decent management, we'll see some action in this area. This is what FBI Baltimore should be doing, instead of sending out child porno and seeing who bites.
It's not unreasonable to get 18 hour battery life. You're not going to get it with some multicore power hog machine, at least not yet, but for a lower-powered processor in a somewhat larger case, why not? The OLPC does it, and with less space for the battery.
Connectors: power, USB, VGA or HDMI, 100baseT. WiFi.
Enough processing power to run a fast browser. Something at the Atom/Via level.
18 hour or better battery life.
Modest software suite: Browser, OpenOffice, media players.
Hard drive or flash, but no swapping.
Secure to EAL4 or above.
$199 at launch; declines 20% per year.
Packaged in bubble pack and sold at drugstores.
A big fraction of users don't need more than that. It's sort of an OLPC for grownups. (The OLPC is cute, but just too tiny for adults, and 3 years behind the technology now.)
"Forum banning" could be done more intelligently. Use a Bayesian filter and user feedback to measure "cluelessness". The higher the cluelessness score, the longer the delay before the posting appears. Flaming will be discouraged when it takes days for a posting to appear. But errors by the filtering system won't have drastic consequences.
(This doesn't help with spam; it's a jerk filter, not a spam filter.)
As someone called in to a local radio station, "Haven't those guys passed their sell-by date?". Will there be an Elvis expansion pack?
Some other genres are worse.
Rock Band could probably emulate all existing house music with about half an hour of samples and a state machine to mix them. Oh, wait.
Sony is not making the PS2 platform "open". You still can't create a program disk for the PS2, because content has to be signed to load, and Sony is retaining control of the signing keys.
This article really should be titled something like "Sony simplifies approval process for PS2 programs."
If anybody could create program disks for the PS2, we might see it used as a business machine, in kiosks, for retail applications, call centers, thin clients, etc. It's cheap, stateless, and low-maintenance.
Most of the stuff the US is still export-controlling either has commercial uses or non-US sources. If you look at the indictments, the big one was about someone exporting carbon fibre materials to the China Space Agency. Why is the US trying to stop that? There's some noise about how carbon fibre might be somehow used to enrich uranium. China already has its own enrichment plants, nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors. They don't need a centrifuge enrichment plant, except maybe for cost reduction.
The US tries, for some reason, to slow down China's space program by refusing to export certain space-related items. Not that it makes much difference; the Chinese space program seems to be doing just fine.
It's hard to think of anything in computing that you can't get outside the US. Nor is there any military computing application that really requires more compute power that you couldn't put together from stuff you could mail order from Taiwan or China.
Arms control and technology export control are different issues. Arms control is intended to make it harder for people we don't like to get firepower in bulk. It's not about the underlying technology; it's about production. Most of the cases mentioned are pure arms control issues.
They didn't mention the Bensen Gyrocopter from "You Only Live Twice". That was a real, flyable aircraft, although the version that came in four big suitcases (a scene stolen from "Thief of Baghdad") was a dummy.
OK, this is a classic plasma rocket - ionize an inert gas (here argon) and push it out with an electric field (not done in this test). So what are the numbers? How much argon are they using per unit thrust? How much electric power does this take. Is 200KW the input, or the output?
You still have to carry reaction mass; that's the argon. So you can't just keep boosting as long as you have power.
It's not a bad idea, but it's not clear how good the implementation is.
Ferrites do work for filtering RF spikes. If you have a scope, you can see the
effects when you put a ferrite around a lead. More electronics companies need to
do this at the factory. A few little ferrite beads in the right spots can fix many
interference problems at a few cents per unit.
The last time I had serious trouble with this, it was because the spikes from a high-powered motor controller were getting into the encoder signals for the motor. Running the power leads for the motor through a ferrite ring five times (five loops, making a toroidial filter) fixed the problem.
Incidentally, ferrites are not permanent magnets, just inductors.
The US's Part 15 only applies to RF emitters; devices that don't emit RF at all, like audio amplifiers, don't need Part 15 certification. Part 15 doesn't say anything about sensitivity to interference.
The European Union, however, does regulate sensitivity to interference under the Electromagnetic Compatibility Directive. So the EU tries to address the problem.
The EU standards require a test for susceptibility to high power AM, FM, TV and airport-type radar signals. Those were viewed as the worst case when the directive was published. Electronics that's not designed for it is likely to crash when faced with
a megawatt airport radar at a few hundred meters. (Remember, with most radars, the peak power is huge but the duty cycle is low.) But the EU directive doesn't address nearby TDMA sources. That's probably something the EU will have to address.
There's something to be said for spread-spectrum emitters, like WiFi and Sprint PCS phones. They have a broad enough output spectrum that they tend not to interfere with much.
I have to ask why anyone good would really want to go into game programming at this point.
The era when you could get rich that way is more or less over. The fundamental problems of graphics, game physics, organizing a big world, making the NPCs act reasonably smart, and cramming all this into a painful machine like a PS3 have mostly been solved. Now it's mostly a grunt job. The hours are awful and the pay is low for the skill level required.
It was kind of cool back when we were first figuring out how to make a physics engine that actually worked right. Now that's a solved problem.
However, there's an ongoing demand for low-level programmers to work on the details of big worlds. The lower-tier schools can provide the cannon fodder for those jobs.
Whole sections of value cards, all incompatible, are showing up in stores now.
A Hispanic organization has been researching the various "Call Mexico" phone cards, and on average they deliver about 60% of their face value.
It turns out that some of them have no value at all.
Just run standard Microsoft office software with Microsoft networking and Windows Search enabled, and you won't have these problems. This is an issue that Microsoft does try hard to address.
He's whining that someone sent him pirated music over Empathy's IM file transfer system, and now he can't find it to open it in the Amarok music player. So he says we need a new file system technology. Right.
Picking a logic analyzer is a harder problem. A logic analyzer is a device for collecting and reducing many channels of parallel digital data coming in from a device under test. The data reduction part is a hard problem. There's a vast amount of data coming in, and you need to find the interesting/important/wrong stuff. It's really a form of log analysis.
Some logic analyzers are just input devices to PCs. There's an open source logic analyzer program for use with such capture devices. Take a look at this for some USB-based interface hardware. They also offer some units that can emulate a scope in hardware. For a real entry-level product, see this low end unit. There's a demo video.
Cost goes up with data rate and channels captured. If you need to look at 10GHz signals, it's going to cost you.
10 MHz, quite cheap.
Just think of COBOL as a scripting language for business applications. Yes, the syntax is wordy. But the big advantage of COBOL isn't in the procedural code. It's in the data declarations. COBOL has very clear ways to talk about external data structures, and good integration with external data in files and databases.
In the early days of the U.S. space program, there was some talk of sending someone on a one-way trip to the moon, there to wait until larger rockets could deliver a vehicle able to make the return trip. One-way supply rockets would keep the poor guy alive while work progressed on the big boosters. It was a desperate plan to beat the USSR.
Aldrin, in his astronaut days, was not one of the proponents of that scheme.
Remember, Microsoft OSs have a "kill switch" implicitly built into Windows Update. If you use Windows Update, Microsoft has total control of your computers. That's not acceptable given Russia's renewed determination not to be under the control of the United States.
Even with Windows Update turned off, there are all those little things, like "codec downloads" and "DRM downloads" which can insinuate new Microsoft software onto a computer. That's unacceptable to a sovereign nation.
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It's apparently weirder than that. Running "telnetd" as an ordinary user apparently allows remote logins as root. This happens even though the "telnetd" executable does not apparently come with permissions set-UID to root. If that's correct, there's a security hole somewhere else that's being used by accident here. Is "login" a set-UID program on Android phones?
(As a robotics guy, I hate the name "Android" being used for a telephone. It's the worst choice since "U.S. Robotics" which ended up as a modem company.)
There are some advantages to libraries over frameworks. (Working definition: if you call it, it's a library; if it calls you, it's a framework.) Frameworks are great if your problem fits into the model defined by the framework. Since many web applications are rather standardized, that covers much of web development.
The real problem with frameworks shows up when you need more than one of them in the same program. You can usually use more than one library, but using more than one framework is at best painful and often impossible.
It's annoying when something which could have been implemented as a library is architected as a framework because frameworks are "cooler" than libraries.
The movie "2001" had "laptops" that seemed to work. But they were actually built into the tables they sat on and had film projected onto their screens from the rear. And the original Star Trek had a portable slate-like device.
Kay described the Dynabook in the classic PARC publication "Personal Dynamic Media", which was around 1972-1973. There's a picture of a woman stretched out on the grass typing on a laptop-like device. It's a cardboard mockup, but the form factor was about that of a heavy laptop of the late 1990s. Kay called the Xerox Alto the "Interim Dynabook"; it did what the Dynabook was supposed to do, but took about 12U of rack space and a big CRT to do it.
This makes me feel very old. I got a tour of PARC in 1975, met Kay, and saw the first Alto (they were making their own CRTs and were having trouble getting a uniform phosphor coating on the tube), the first networked laser printer, the first Ethernet (described as "an Alohanet with a captive ether"), and the first Smalltalk. It's interesting what Kay thought computers were going to be for. He though that graphical discrite-event simulation was going to be a big deal. He had a demo of a hospital simulation, where patients entered, went through Admitting, Waiting Room, Treatment, Ward, Cashier, Discharge, etc., and you could click on the patient icons (I remember "I a victim of Bowlerthumb") as a message.
None of us thought that the uses of computers would become so banal.
Now Amazon needs to do this for DVDs. After all, Amazon doesn't have a shoplifting problem.
Given that DVDs are a shock-insensitive waterproof object shipped inside a rigid case, they should be mailed with far less packaging. A manila envelope would be sufficient. Most of the perimeter seals, "Security Device Enclosed", and shrink wrap could be dispensed with. One seal that's broken on opening would be enough to identify packages that have been opened.
The USAF has the big advantage that they're not trying to grow their web traffic. If nobody on free mail services can talk to them, no problem. If executable downloads don't make it through the mail filters, no problem. If every incoming document gets run through a conversion to ODF to strip any funny stuff, no problem. If every incoming image is rendered and recompressed at the firewall, no problem. If their users's machines need a dongle to authenticate, no problem. If their servers have to run NSA Secure Linux or LynxOS or EAL4 QNX, no problem. They can take a hardass attitude if they want to.
I liked PropCycle too. But it wasn't free flight; you were constrained to a track. I'm amazed that someone hasn't done a gym version of something like Crimson Skies, which is available in a motion-platform arcade version.
The gym I use had some stair-climbers with web browsers for a while, but they were from a dot-com. When the dot-com failed, the units continued to work, but without a server to update them, they played the same ads over and over. Eventually the things were removed.
Since this thing is understood, it's possible to inject phony credit card numbers into the attack. If law enforcement and a bank worked together on this, they could inject flagged credit card numbers and watch where they were used, then make some arrests. For that matter, a denial of service attack could be made against the attacker by injecting huge numbers of bogus credit card numbers, the use of any of which triggered law enforcement attention.
Maybe when Bush is gone, and the FBI and Justice Department get some decent management, we'll see some action in this area. This is what FBI Baltimore should be doing, instead of sending out child porno and seeing who bites.
I would like a perpetual motion machine, too.
It's not unreasonable to get 18 hour battery life. You're not going to get it with some multicore power hog machine, at least not yet, but for a lower-powered processor in a somewhat larger case, why not? The OLPC does it, and with less space for the battery.
How about this?
A big fraction of users don't need more than that. It's sort of an OLPC for grownups. (The OLPC is cute, but just too tiny for adults, and 3 years behind the technology now.)
"Forum banning" could be done more intelligently. Use a Bayesian filter and user feedback to measure "cluelessness". The higher the cluelessness score, the longer the delay before the posting appears. Flaming will be discouraged when it takes days for a posting to appear. But errors by the filtering system won't have drastic consequences.
(This doesn't help with spam; it's a jerk filter, not a spam filter.)
As someone called in to a local radio station, "Haven't those guys passed their sell-by date?". Will there be an Elvis expansion pack?
Some other genres are worse. Rock Band could probably emulate all existing house music with about half an hour of samples and a state machine to mix them. Oh, wait.
Sony is not making the PS2 platform "open". You still can't create a program disk for the PS2, because content has to be signed to load, and Sony is retaining control of the signing keys.
This article really should be titled something like "Sony simplifies approval process for PS2 programs."
If anybody could create program disks for the PS2, we might see it used as a business machine, in kiosks, for retail applications, call centers, thin clients, etc. It's cheap, stateless, and low-maintenance.
Most of the stuff the US is still export-controlling either has commercial uses or non-US sources. If you look at the indictments, the big one was about someone exporting carbon fibre materials to the China Space Agency. Why is the US trying to stop that? There's some noise about how carbon fibre might be somehow used to enrich uranium. China already has its own enrichment plants, nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors. They don't need a centrifuge enrichment plant, except maybe for cost reduction. The US tries, for some reason, to slow down China's space program by refusing to export certain space-related items. Not that it makes much difference; the Chinese space program seems to be doing just fine.
It's hard to think of anything in computing that you can't get outside the US. Nor is there any military computing application that really requires more compute power that you couldn't put together from stuff you could mail order from Taiwan or China.
Arms control and technology export control are different issues. Arms control is intended to make it harder for people we don't like to get firepower in bulk. It's not about the underlying technology; it's about production. Most of the cases mentioned are pure arms control issues.
They didn't mention the Bensen Gyrocopter from "You Only Live Twice". That was a real, flyable aircraft, although the version that came in four big suitcases (a scene stolen from "Thief of Baghdad") was a dummy.
OK, this is a classic plasma rocket - ionize an inert gas (here argon) and push it out with an electric field (not done in this test). So what are the numbers? How much argon are they using per unit thrust? How much electric power does this take. Is 200KW the input, or the output?
You still have to carry reaction mass; that's the argon. So you can't just keep boosting as long as you have power.
It's not a bad idea, but it's not clear how good the implementation is.
Ferrites do work for filtering RF spikes. If you have a scope, you can see the effects when you put a ferrite around a lead. More electronics companies need to do this at the factory. A few little ferrite beads in the right spots can fix many interference problems at a few cents per unit.
The last time I had serious trouble with this, it was because the spikes from a high-powered motor controller were getting into the encoder signals for the motor. Running the power leads for the motor through a ferrite ring five times (five loops, making a toroidial filter) fixed the problem.
Incidentally, ferrites are not permanent magnets, just inductors.
The US's Part 15 only applies to RF emitters; devices that don't emit RF at all, like audio amplifiers, don't need Part 15 certification. Part 15 doesn't say anything about sensitivity to interference.
The European Union, however, does regulate sensitivity to interference under the Electromagnetic Compatibility Directive. So the EU tries to address the problem.
The EU standards require a test for susceptibility to high power AM, FM, TV and airport-type radar signals. Those were viewed as the worst case when the directive was published. Electronics that's not designed for it is likely to crash when faced with a megawatt airport radar at a few hundred meters. (Remember, with most radars, the peak power is huge but the duty cycle is low.) But the EU directive doesn't address nearby TDMA sources. That's probably something the EU will have to address.
There's something to be said for spread-spectrum emitters, like WiFi and Sprint PCS phones. They have a broad enough output spectrum that they tend not to interfere with much.
I have to ask why anyone good would really want to go into game programming at this point. The era when you could get rich that way is more or less over. The fundamental problems of graphics, game physics, organizing a big world, making the NPCs act reasonably smart, and cramming all this into a painful machine like a PS3 have mostly been solved. Now it's mostly a grunt job. The hours are awful and the pay is low for the skill level required.
It was kind of cool back when we were first figuring out how to make a physics engine that actually worked right. Now that's a solved problem.
However, there's an ongoing demand for low-level programmers to work on the details of big worlds. The lower-tier schools can provide the cannon fodder for those jobs.
Whole sections of value cards, all incompatible, are showing up in stores now.
A Hispanic organization has been researching the various "Call Mexico" phone cards, and on average they deliver about 60% of their face value. It turns out that some of them have no value at all.
Just run standard Microsoft office software with Microsoft networking and Windows Search enabled, and you won't have these problems. This is an issue that Microsoft does try hard to address.
He's whining that someone sent him pirated music over Empathy's IM file transfer system, and now he can't find it to open it in the Amarok music player. So he says we need a new file system technology. Right.
We actually used that line on our recruiting poster from our 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge team.
It's not a joke any more. Hasn't been for a while now.
Picking a logic analyzer is a harder problem. A logic analyzer is a device for collecting and reducing many channels of parallel digital data coming in from a device under test. The data reduction part is a hard problem. There's a vast amount of data coming in, and you need to find the interesting/important/wrong stuff. It's really a form of log analysis.
Some logic analyzers are just input devices to PCs. There's an open source logic analyzer program for use with such capture devices. Take a look at this for some USB-based interface hardware. They also offer some units that can emulate a scope in hardware. For a real entry-level product, see this low end unit. There's a demo video.
Cost goes up with data rate and channels captured. If you need to look at 10GHz signals, it's going to cost you. 10 MHz, quite cheap.
What do you want a logic analyzer for, anyway?
Just think of COBOL as a scripting language for business applications. Yes, the syntax is wordy. But the big advantage of COBOL isn't in the procedural code. It's in the data declarations. COBOL has very clear ways to talk about external data structures, and good integration with external data in files and databases.
In the early days of the U.S. space program, there was some talk of sending someone on a one-way trip to the moon, there to wait until larger rockets could deliver a vehicle able to make the return trip. One-way supply rockets would keep the poor guy alive while work progressed on the big boosters. It was a desperate plan to beat the USSR.
Aldrin, in his astronaut days, was not one of the proponents of that scheme.
Remember, Microsoft OSs have a "kill switch" implicitly built into Windows Update. If you use Windows Update, Microsoft has total control of your computers. That's not acceptable given Russia's renewed determination not to be under the control of the United States.
Even with Windows Update turned off, there are all those little things, like "codec downloads" and "DRM downloads" which can insinuate new Microsoft software onto a computer. That's unacceptable to a sovereign nation.