If you can force a Windows Update cycle, you can change the hard-coded values. Microsoft Update can patch any part of the OS and can force a reboot. (A reboot can be forced on any machine with updates turned on, even if auto reboot is supposedly turned off.)
If you can make changes to DNS, you can change the IP address for "the important *.microsoft.com sites", redirecting the updates to an attack site.
So possession of both of those keys gives full control of all Windows Update enabled clients.
The truly powerful signing key is for Windows Update. If you have that key, you can take over every Microsoft computer in the world. Change the operating system. Install anything, including a new key. Reboot the machine.
Who has that key? Do we know?
Whoever has both the DNS root key and the Windows Update signing key rules the Internet. Or at least all the Microsoft client systems. They can redirect Windows Update requests to themselves, then download their own update and have it accepted.
With the new hardware upgrade (256MB RAM, 1GB non-volatile, 433MHz CPU) the OLPC is now considered capable of running Windows XP. This may nor may not be a good thing.
That's a cute little paper. If other physicists think it makes sense, that little experiment is worth doing, even though some people will have to go up to the northern tip of Greenland to do it.
Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.
on
Firefox 3.0 Preview
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Too much in the browser, again.
It's a browser. Not a "platform". We went through this already, with Mozilla, which had to be chopped down to provide a browser of manageable size. The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.
In Firefox 2, there's already too much bloat. Saving images of pages hogs memory, and didn't visibly improve performance.
The project seems to have been captured by the "browser as a platform" people again. Nobody cares about XUL, people. All users want is a browser.
In a few years, all web pages will have to work on the minimal browser comes with the OLPC machine. The OLPC is going to force computing to go on a much-needed weight reduction program.
Oh, the hemp guys again. Funny how they're never into the other coarse-fibre plants, like jute (used to make burlap), sisal (used to make twine), bagasse (leftover sugar cane, sometimes used to make wallboard) and kenaf (sometimes used to make paper).
This is another traffic-building blog spam. It's from another blog. None of these "articles" have a link to anything that looks like a real source, or a picture. No Cisco press release mentions this. But all these blogs have plenty of ads.
I think this is a garbled description of one of the academic "swarming robot" projects, many of which have WiFi gear on board. Those have been around for a while, and there was an article about them in IEEE Trans. on Automation and Robotics this month. It's not a Cisco product, and it's probably not even a Cisco research effort.
This has been coming for a while, and shouldn't surprise anybody. I was expecting it to come from NVidia, though, which had been looking into putting a CPU on their graphics chips and cutting Intel/AMD out of the picture. Since they already had most of the transistor count, this made sense. They already had the nForce, which has just about everything but the CPU and RAM (GPU, network interface, disk interface, audio, etc) on one chip. But they never took the last step. Probably not because they couldn't do it technically.
We're obviously headed for the one-chip consumer PC.
The standalone GPU chip market may not last. It's likely to go the way of the separate MMU chip, the separate FPU chip, and the separate network controller chip.
Battery energy density is finally getting good enough for this sort of thing. Electric cars with real performance are at last possible, although the trunk full of laptop batteries still costs too much.
For aircraft, the price point is higher, so this could work. There are lots of little electric-powered unmanned aircraft around, from toys to small military recon units.
An outfit called Aviation Tomorrow was making noise about an electric-powered kitplane back in 2002-2005. They got to the point where they'd announced the first flight test in 2005, then disappeared. What seems to have gone wrong is that they originally planned a battery powered plane, which would have worked, then switched to hydrogen and Ballard fuel cells, which didn't.
The embarrassing fact about the fuel cell industry is that almost nobody is shipping a usable product. It's still all prototypes. Five years ago, Ballard was about to launch a commercial product with Coleman, but they couldn't make it work well, and Coleman backed out. APC supposedly sells a fuel cell product for server backup power, but it doesn't really seem to be installed in any quantity. (For one thing, it requires chilled water for cooling, which is a real problem if you need power to chill the water.)
The article is a link to a spam blog. The original content is in this press release, which was copied without attribution. The original source and contact information were removed, six ads were added, and a false claim of copyright was made.
The people behind this are Web Doodle LLC of Missoula, MT, run (as of 2002) by Branden Long. They have other similar spam blogs.
... send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique.
That's what we need to clean up WHOIS information for domain registration.
If this guy wants to attend Nortel's annual meeting, he should buy a share of their stock. If you have a significant holding, you have to disclose that when writing about the company.
Nobody has hardware diagnostics any more. It used to be that when you had a hardware problem, you booted the hardware diagnostics disk and ran tests. Better manufacturers provided you with such a disk.
Today, most of the "PC diagnostic" tools run on Windows, which assumes Windows is 1) installed, and 2) will run. This makes sense, because Windows is most likely to be the defective component.
I was born in Ukraine in the former USSR and lived in Yakutia (North East of Siberia) above the Arctic Circle for 6 years. I can tell you this: it's freaking cold in the winters. Of-course it can be a plus for development of more indoor activities, like computer programming.
Like Boston. Some years ago, someone from MIT was recruiting me for the Media Lab, and as we were walking across the campus to the T station, it was sleeting. He commented "There are fewer distractions out here". I got back on the plane to California.
The problem is the whole concept of "admin access". What's needed is more mandatory security. Something like this, which is what NSA calls "mandatory security".
Every file, program, etc. has a "security level" and "security compartments", and "integrity level" and "integrity compartments". Information can only flow into (not out of) a security compartment, upward in security level, and downward in integrity level, unless it's passed through a trusted program that "sanitizes" it.
Browsers should be divided into several parts. One part talks to the user and launches page displayers. Page displayers run at integrity level "outside world", integrity compartments "none", as does the window and network connection they are given. So they can't do much. You can download and run anything you want in that jail, but it can't affect anything outside the compartment.
The user interface part of the browser (commands, toolbars, etc.) runs at integrity level "browser", above "outside world", but below anything important, and in compartment (say) "Firefox".
So if you download a toolbar, it comes in at "outside world". The user interface part of the browser can't run it, unless an "upgrader" passes it. Even if some toolbar is imported into the "Firefox" compartment, it can only affect "Firefox" stuff. It can't install something that runs outside the browser compartment.
This is what the NSA Secure Linux people had in mind, but it never caught on. The applications weren't modified to work under such severe restrictions.
The key idea here is that untrusted software is compartmented, and trusted software is rare and, most importantly, tiny. The compartmentalization means that you can look at a hostile file with an untrusted program, like Microsoft Word, but it can't mess up anything at a higher level or in another compartment. If you want to get the data out of that compartment, you have to run it through an upgrader. (A good way to upgrade a.doc file would be to convert the.doc file to.odf with untrusted software like OpenOffice, then run that through a small trusted program that parsed the XML, throwing out any tags that didn't belong). The only trusted component here is the XML filter.
Mail can be processed similarly, first converting to some easily checked format, then
running it through a dumb checker. Note that the converter doesn't have to be trusted, so attacking the converter may be possible, but won't cause a serious problem. This avoids a problem we have today - complex security software running at too high a level, and thus becoming a problem in itself. Even the security software has to be partitioned.
Note that there's no problem running games. Games can run at "outside world" level in the "World of Warcraft" compartment. Games can have their own local files, but those files are in the game's compartment and can't be read from outside it.
There are costs. Incoming images might have to undergo JPEG to PNG conversion, then
pass through a PNG validity checker, for example. There are things you can't do, and there are things that become harder. But real security is quite possible.
The diamond industry is coming unglued. They're not that rare, they're not that hard to make, multiple companies are cranking out diamonds, and de Beers lost an antitrust suit, so the monopoly is coming apart.
The resale value of diamonds is about 40% of list price. If that. (The phrase "dump value" is used in the industry.) Look on eBay for even cheaper ones. If you want real diamonds on your computer's LEDs, it won't cost you much.
This is just another case mod project, one with delusions of grandeur.
Re:Well.. What are they doing wrong? ...
on
Rethinking the MMOG
·
· Score: 5, Informative
5. What about griefing? There's always idiots that do that. How do we deal with them?
America's Army has the best solution to that - the in-game Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.. "If a player violates enough ROE he is transported to a virtual jail cell at Fort Leavenworth with nothing to do but clink against the bars, pondering his sins. As if to create remorse, one can view the tip of a sunset from the lone, high window the cell but only if one is standing on the toilet."
If all the effort spent on security approaches we know won't work, like looking for known attacks, were spent on approaches that can work, like fixing operating systems and applications so external content runs in jails that work, and developing reliable means for sanitizing content, we'd be much further along.
Think about it. Symantec is a billion dollar company selling a product that barely works. Nobody is spending that kind of money making operating systems more secure.
The problem with all this so-called "virus security" is that it's aimed against bulk attacks that are mostly annoyances. It won't detect focused attacks aimed at a business or government site intended to steal serious money or information.
Military security people are trained to make that distinction. Some effort has to be devoted to chasing off kids throwing rocks over the fence, but they're not a real threat. The real threats are subtle, until it's too late. The commercial computer security industry does not get this at all, and doesn't want to.
Major political milestone today: a Republican senator said that impeaching Bush "might be an option".
This is starting to look like the last months of the Nixon presidency. Gonzales is on the way out, with more disclosures coming every few days. Even the Republicans want him out. Bush is trying frantically to keep Karl Rove from testifying under oath. Cheney's old chief of staff was convicted of perjury last week.
Bush's approval rating is down to 30-34%, depending on the poll. Cheney is somewhere around 18%.
It's like 1973 all over again.
Surplus is not what it used to be
on
A Space Junkyard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Here in Silicon Valley, surplus is not what it used to be. The military stuff is gone.
No more satellite parts. No beautiful little electromechanical units. It's mostly failed computer brands. Lots of older Sun and SGI gear. Older rackmount networking gear too bulky to use any more.
Endless piles of old PC motherboards. Unsuccessful consumer products.
Several of the surplus stores have gone out of business. Anything good goes on eBay now. What remains is scrap.
This is probably ineffective against anyone with a decent antenna. All it takes is a slot bigger than a wavelength and RF will leak through. You might not be able to pick up the leak with the tiny omnidirectional antenna on a laptop, but a directional antenna, even the classic Pringles can, will provide significantly more gain.
Real TEMPEST-shielded rooms are solid steel, with welded seams, mesh over any opening, fiber optic data connections, filters on the power, and an airlock-type arrangement with copper fingers to make an RF-tight seal. It's not that hard to make a conductive wall. It's making the surface electrically seamless, without gaps, that's hard.
It's straightforward to test a shielded room, with a transmitter inside and a receiver outside. All the gear is available from ham radio outlets.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can force a Windows Update cycle, you can change the hard-coded values. Microsoft Update can patch any part of the OS and can force a reboot. (A reboot can be forced on any machine with updates turned on, even if auto reboot is supposedly turned off.)
If you can make changes to DNS, you can change the IP address for "the important *.microsoft.com sites", redirecting the updates to an attack site.
So possession of both of those keys gives full control of all Windows Update enabled clients.
The truly powerful signing key is for Windows Update. If you have that key, you can take over every Microsoft computer in the world . Change the operating system. Install anything, including a new key. Reboot the machine.
Who has that key? Do we know?
Whoever has both the DNS root key and the Windows Update signing key rules the Internet. Or at least all the Microsoft client systems. They can redirect Windows Update requests to themselves, then download their own update and have it accepted.
Unfortunately, this isn't a joke.
Convenience, basically. NASA has an old U-2 based at Ames, it has the right cameras for the job, and they have pilots who can fly a U-2.
With the new hardware upgrade (256MB RAM, 1GB non-volatile, 433MHz CPU) the OLPC is now considered capable of running Windows XP. This may nor may not be a good thing.
That's a cute little paper. If other physicists think it makes sense, that little experiment is worth doing, even though some people will have to go up to the northern tip of Greenland to do it.
Too much in the browser, again. It's a browser. Not a "platform". We went through this already, with Mozilla, which had to be chopped down to provide a browser of manageable size. The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.
In Firefox 2, there's already too much bloat. Saving images of pages hogs memory, and didn't visibly improve performance.
The project seems to have been captured by the "browser as a platform" people again. Nobody cares about XUL, people. All users want is a browser.
In a few years, all web pages will have to work on the minimal browser comes with the OLPC machine. The OLPC is going to force computing to go on a much-needed weight reduction program.
How many times have we seen articles about how Apple's consumer market share is going to rise? And it never does.
Today, Apple's computer business is a distraction from its core business area of entertainment electronics.
Oh, the hemp guys again. Funny how they're never into the other coarse-fibre plants, like jute (used to make burlap), sisal (used to make twine), bagasse (leftover sugar cane, sometimes used to make wallboard) and kenaf (sometimes used to make paper).
We fixed it for you. Quit complaining.
I can remember when you couldn't see the Hollywood sign from downtown LA most days. And in Cleveland, you couldn't see downtown from five miles away.
This is another traffic-building blog spam. It's from another blog. None of these "articles" have a link to anything that looks like a real source, or a picture. No Cisco press release mentions this. But all these blogs have plenty of ads.
I think this is a garbled description of one of the academic "swarming robot" projects, many of which have WiFi gear on board. Those have been around for a while, and there was an article about them in IEEE Trans. on Automation and Robotics this month. It's not a Cisco product, and it's probably not even a Cisco research effort.
This has been coming for a while, and shouldn't surprise anybody. I was expecting it to come from NVidia, though, which had been looking into putting a CPU on their graphics chips and cutting Intel/AMD out of the picture. Since they already had most of the transistor count, this made sense. They already had the nForce, which has just about everything but the CPU and RAM (GPU, network interface, disk interface, audio, etc) on one chip. But they never took the last step. Probably not because they couldn't do it technically.
We're obviously headed for the one-chip consumer PC. The standalone GPU chip market may not last. It's likely to go the way of the separate MMU chip, the separate FPU chip, and the separate network controller chip.
Battery energy density is finally getting good enough for this sort of thing. Electric cars with real performance are at last possible, although the trunk full of laptop batteries still costs too much.
For aircraft, the price point is higher, so this could work. There are lots of little electric-powered unmanned aircraft around, from toys to small military recon units. An outfit called Aviation Tomorrow was making noise about an electric-powered kitplane back in 2002-2005. They got to the point where they'd announced the first flight test in 2005, then disappeared. What seems to have gone wrong is that they originally planned a battery powered plane, which would have worked, then switched to hydrogen and Ballard fuel cells, which didn't.
The embarrassing fact about the fuel cell industry is that almost nobody is shipping a usable product. It's still all prototypes. Five years ago, Ballard was about to launch a commercial product with Coleman, but they couldn't make it work well, and Coleman backed out. APC supposedly sells a fuel cell product for server backup power, but it doesn't really seem to be installed in any quantity. (For one thing, it requires chilled water for cooling, which is a real problem if you need power to chill the water.)
The article is a link to a spam blog. The original content is in this press release, which was copied without attribution. The original source and contact information were removed, six ads were added, and a false claim of copyright was made.
The people behind this are Web Doodle LLC of Missoula, MT, run (as of 2002) by Branden Long. They have other similar spam blogs.
That's what we need to clean up WHOIS information for domain registration.
If this guy wants to attend Nortel's annual meeting, he should buy a share of their stock. If you have a significant holding, you have to disclose that when writing about the company.
Nobody has hardware diagnostics any more. It used to be that when you had a hardware problem, you booted the hardware diagnostics disk and ran tests. Better manufacturers provided you with such a disk.
Today, most of the "PC diagnostic" tools run on Windows, which assumes Windows is 1) installed, and 2) will run. This makes sense, because Windows is most likely to be the defective component.
I was born in Ukraine in the former USSR and lived in Yakutia (North East of Siberia) above the Arctic Circle for 6 years. I can tell you this: it's freaking cold in the winters. Of-course it can be a plus for development of more indoor activities, like computer programming.
Like Boston. Some years ago, someone from MIT was recruiting me for the Media Lab, and as we were walking across the campus to the T station, it was sleeting. He commented "There are fewer distractions out here". I got back on the plane to California.
The problem is the whole concept of "admin access". What's needed is more mandatory security. Something like this, which is what NSA calls "mandatory security".
Every file, program, etc. has a "security level" and "security compartments", and "integrity level" and "integrity compartments". Information can only flow into (not out of) a security compartment, upward in security level, and downward in integrity level, unless it's passed through a trusted program that "sanitizes" it.
Browsers should be divided into several parts. One part talks to the user and launches page displayers. Page displayers run at integrity level "outside world", integrity compartments "none", as does the window and network connection they are given. So they can't do much. You can download and run anything you want in that jail, but it can't affect anything outside the compartment.
The user interface part of the browser (commands, toolbars, etc.) runs at integrity level "browser", above "outside world", but below anything important, and in compartment (say) "Firefox".
So if you download a toolbar, it comes in at "outside world". The user interface part of the browser can't run it, unless an "upgrader" passes it. Even if some toolbar is imported into the "Firefox" compartment, it can only affect "Firefox" stuff. It can't install something that runs outside the browser compartment.
This is what the NSA Secure Linux people had in mind, but it never caught on. The applications weren't modified to work under such severe restrictions.
The key idea here is that untrusted software is compartmented, and trusted software is rare and, most importantly, tiny. The compartmentalization means that you can look at a hostile file with an untrusted program, like Microsoft Word, but it can't mess up anything at a higher level or in another compartment. If you want to get the data out of that compartment, you have to run it through an upgrader. (A good way to upgrade a .doc file would be to convert the .doc file to .odf with untrusted software like OpenOffice, then run that through a small trusted program that parsed the XML, throwing out any tags that didn't belong). The only trusted component here is the XML filter.
Mail can be processed similarly, first converting to some easily checked format, then running it through a dumb checker. Note that the converter doesn't have to be trusted, so attacking the converter may be possible, but won't cause a serious problem. This avoids a problem we have today - complex security software running at too high a level, and thus becoming a problem in itself. Even the security software has to be partitioned.
Note that there's no problem running games. Games can run at "outside world" level in the "World of Warcraft" compartment. Games can have their own local files, but those files are in the game's compartment and can't be read from outside it.
There are costs. Incoming images might have to undergo JPEG to PNG conversion, then pass through a PNG validity checker, for example. There are things you can't do, and there are things that become harder. But real security is quite possible.
Yeah, some of them are fake, but there's a huge supply of cheap diamonds out there. It's really hard to sell diamonds.
Industrial diamonds are appearing in more low-end products. Checkout scanner glasses. Low-end knife sharpening grindstones. Heat sinks. I'm surprised that the overpriced laptop didn't come with a diamond-coated screen.
Colored diamonds, probably from the factory in Sarasota, Florida.
The diamond industry is coming unglued. They're not that rare, they're not that hard to make, multiple companies are cranking out diamonds, and de Beers lost an antitrust suit, so the monopoly is coming apart.
The resale value of diamonds is about 40% of list price. If that. (The phrase "dump value" is used in the industry.) Look on eBay for even cheaper ones. If you want real diamonds on your computer's LEDs, it won't cost you much.
This is just another case mod project, one with delusions of grandeur.
5. What about griefing? There's always idiots that do that. How do we deal with them?
America's Army has the best solution to that - the in-game Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.. "If a player violates enough ROE he is transported to a virtual jail cell at Fort Leavenworth with nothing to do but clink against the bars, pondering his sins. As if to create remorse, one can view the tip of a sunset from the lone, high window the cell but only if one is standing on the toilet."
If all the effort spent on security approaches we know won't work, like looking for known attacks, were spent on approaches that can work, like fixing operating systems and applications so external content runs in jails that work, and developing reliable means for sanitizing content, we'd be much further along.
Think about it. Symantec is a billion dollar company selling a product that barely works. Nobody is spending that kind of money making operating systems more secure.
The problem with all this so-called "virus security" is that it's aimed against bulk attacks that are mostly annoyances. It won't detect focused attacks aimed at a business or government site intended to steal serious money or information.
Military security people are trained to make that distinction. Some effort has to be devoted to chasing off kids throwing rocks over the fence, but they're not a real threat. The real threats are subtle, until it's too late. The commercial computer security industry does not get this at all, and doesn't want to.
Major political milestone today: a Republican senator said that impeaching Bush "might be an option".
This is starting to look like the last months of the Nixon presidency. Gonzales is on the way out, with more disclosures coming every few days. Even the Republicans want him out. Bush is trying frantically to keep Karl Rove from testifying under oath. Cheney's old chief of staff was convicted of perjury last week. Bush's approval rating is down to 30-34%, depending on the poll. Cheney is somewhere around 18%.
It's like 1973 all over again.
Here in Silicon Valley, surplus is not what it used to be. The military stuff is gone. No more satellite parts. No beautiful little electromechanical units. It's mostly failed computer brands. Lots of older Sun and SGI gear. Older rackmount networking gear too bulky to use any more. Endless piles of old PC motherboards. Unsuccessful consumer products.
Several of the surplus stores have gone out of business. Anything good goes on eBay now. What remains is scrap.
This is probably ineffective against anyone with a decent antenna. All it takes is a slot bigger than a wavelength and RF will leak through. You might not be able to pick up the leak with the tiny omnidirectional antenna on a laptop, but a directional antenna, even the classic Pringles can, will provide significantly more gain.
Real TEMPEST-shielded rooms are solid steel, with welded seams, mesh over any opening, fiber optic data connections, filters on the power, and an airlock-type arrangement with copper fingers to make an RF-tight seal. It's not that hard to make a conductive wall. It's making the surface electrically seamless, without gaps, that's hard.
It's straightforward to test a shielded room, with a transmitter inside and a receiver outside. All the gear is available from ham radio outlets.