Some sites claim to offer the lowest prices. That's enforceable under false advertising rules.
Orbitz has a low price guarantee, althoug the terms are amusing:
Orbitz Low Fare Promise
If you book an airline ticket on Orbitz.com and then find a lower airfare for
the same flights, dates, airline and travelers on another Web site, you may
be entitled to a $50 coupon per ticket toward your next Orbitz purchase.
The fare must be at least $5 less per ticket than the airfare purchased
on Orbitz.com.
The lower total airfare may not include Web site service, booking, processing,
shipping, paper-ticket or other fees.
You must provide the complete Web address (URL) where you found the lower
airfare.
You must file a claim by Midnight Central Time of the same day you booked
your Orbitz flights.
To submit a claim, go to your itinerary under the "My Trips" tab and click
the "Low Fare Promise" link. It will display a claim form with all the required
fields.
Remember to make a printout or take a screen shot of the page with the lower
airfare, either the itinerary confirmation or the summary page just prior to
purchase, in case a customer service representative has questions. Expect a
response to your claim within 10 to 15 business days.
Please read the Low Fare Promise terms and conditions below for full details.
Orbitz Low Fare Promise Terms and Conditions
The Orbitz Low Fare Promise is available to any customer who makes a qualifying
airfare purchase through the Orbitz.com website. Qualifying purchase must
occur at Orbitz.com on/after October 23, 2004.
The Orbitz Low Fare Promise applies only to airline tickets purchased on
Orbitz.com for travel within the domestic 50 United States, and only for tickets
purchased using a valid credit card with a United States billing address.
The Orbitz Low Fare Promise applies only to the total airfare and does not
apply to differences based on service, booking, processing, shipping, paper-ticket
and other fees not collected on the airline ticket.
If you find an airfare for the same flights and dates of travel, on the
same airline, with the same flight numbers, for the same passengers, itinerary,
cabin, and subject to the same fare restrictions on any other full service
travel Web site or airline site that is at least $5 lower than the airfare
you purchased on the same day on Orbitz.com, Orbitz will give you a coupon
in the amount of $50 for every ticket in your Orbitz reservation, redeemable
on your next Orbitz.com purchase.
To submit a claim, fill out and submit the claim form located next to your
itinerary under the My Trips tab on Orbitz.com. Once you select the qualifying
trip, click the "Low Fare Promise" link and the claim form will automatically
include the required details of your trip. You will need to provide the following
additional information:
Complete Web address (URL) reflecting the lower airfare you found online
Total airfare quoted on the other Web site for all tickets including
taxes (but excluding web site service, booking, processing, shipping or
other fees)
Your claim must be submitted by midnight Central Time of the same day you
purchased your ticket on Orbitz.com. Claims may be submitted only via the
online claim form at Orbitz.com and not through any other e-mail address or
any Orbitz phone number.
The Orbitz Low Fare Promise applies to lower airfares of $5 or greater found
on another full-service travel Web site or airline Web site. The confirmed
airfare you purchased on Orbitz.com will be compared to the airfare on the
other site at the last point immediately prior to purchase. Fares must be
compared with like fare restrictions, so for example, if an unrestricted airfare
is purchased on
See Kelly vs. Arriba, the appellate decision that established that "thumbnail images" in search engines are "fair use" under copyright law.
So a "video search engine" which displayed low-rez videos with low-bit-rate audio might be permissible.
That would actually be useful for sites that sell DVDs of old and foreign movies.
The word "plutonium" to refer to element 94 was coined by Glenn Seaborg at UC Berkeley in 1941. But that name wasn't used publicly until 1948, years after the war.
The German name for element 94 was "eka-osmium",named by Otto Hahn in 1938 based on 94's position in the periodic table.
Incidentally, a plutonium gun bomb, as shown, would fizzle. The core won't stay together long enough for the chain reaction to progress far enough to get a significant yield. That's why so much work was put into developing the implosion bomb.
What with the deficits and tax cuts, this would require a tax increase. No way is that going to happen.
Also, the statement that NASA received as much funding in the last 16 years as in the Apollo era is wrong. It's been observed before that NASA received about as much money in the 30-year post-Apollo era as it did during the Apollo era, and accomplished far less with it.
NASA hasn't designed a new launch vehicle that works in forty years. And who are they going to get to design one? There aren't that many aircraft designers left. All the key people on the Apollo and Saturn V programs, and most of the top thousand people, had serious experience in experimental aircraft and rocket design. There's no pool of people like that any more.
About 10-15 years from now, the Ambassador of the People's Republic of China will present the President of the United States with the flag that the Apollo 11 crew planted on the moon in 1969.
Actually, they call themselves "High Performance Enterprise PLC" on their "about" page, and the UL listing says "HIGH PERFORMANCE PC LTD". But the address in the UK matches.
I'd searched the UL database for the part number, but they listed as "HPU-XX150,180,200,230,235,250,275,280,300,320,330,350,380,400,425,430,450,475,480,500,525,550,580,6 25,650,680 and 70", instead of " HPU-3S350", etc. So they didn't show up in a search.
Checking with Companies House, the UK business registrar, we find "HIGH PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY", with a name change from " HIGH PERFORMANCE PC LIMITED" on 30/03/2005, which explains the name discrepancy.
(There are about 50 companies named "High Performance..." in the UK.)
The big picture of the power supply shows a CE label, but no UL certification number. That's always a bad sign. So let's go to the UL certification database.
There's a company listing:
HIPER ENTERPRISE CO LTD
E224709
5TH FL
79 MIN-SHENG EAST RD, SEC 4
TAIPEI 105, TAIWAN
But they have no listings for PC power supplies. They're listed as a maker of circuit and battery chargers. The Hiper web site says they're in Guangdong province, China. So this may be a different company.
What this outfit seems to do is buy power supplies and repackage them. But, because they change the wiring, fan, and connectors, any certification applying to the original power supply is now invalid. Hiper should have run their power supplies through UL certification under their own name. They didn't.
This matters. If you read serious reviews of power supplies, where they're connected to a dummy load and run at their rated power, you find that many power supplies won't deliver their rated power. Some catch fire under full load.
When you look at the loser power supplies in those reviews, the ones that burn up are never in the UL database. And most of the ones that work properly under full load are.
UL loads the things up to full load at the top end of their temperature range and runs them for a few days. That's all.
UL certification only means that it won't catch fire. That's a good first step, These guys didn't take it.
This sounds like a desperate attempt to hype the E-ink company, which is dying. Their web site is so broken that the products page is a bad link. Meanwhile, the Sony Libre has a similar display technology and actually works. That's a $400 tablet machine.
Making 100 million of anything isn't that hard.
Just call up Flextronics. It's making the first 100,000 profitably that's hard.
The near future for the Third World is probably systems based on cell phones. They're already at at the right price point and are headed down from there.
win2k is the best Windoze OS (better than XP, better than 2003)...most of these will state stability as their reason for using win2k
I'm one of them. You run Win2K. Windows XP runs you, by remote control from Redmond. There are still corporate sites installing new Win2K systems.
It's more reliable than Windows XP, because Microsoft keeps putting new stuff into Windows XP and breaking it. The XP machines require significantly more attention than the Win2K machines.
"Security" is being treated by most vendors and companies as a pest-control business. "How many threats did we detect today?" "What are the top 10 threats this week?" "How fast can we get the virus definitions updated?" But those aren't the real threats. It's the quiet, narrowly targeted attacks that cost companies real money.
Military security people make that distinction. They're trained to view kids throwing rocks over the fence as a minor threat, while focusing on a phony cleaning guy sneaking in and getting a peek at the good stuff. Computer security people don't get this. Yet.
Look at, say, the Symantec web site. It's entirely oriented toward protecting against pest-type threats. And "pest removal". If there's a serious attack, by the time you get to "virus removal", the crucial information has long since been stolen.
Additional note: there is some Linux support for this, including ipmitool, which lets you send system management commands to remote machines. AMT-equipped machines may respond to that tool. Somebody should test this.
Intel's "Active Management Technology" is described by Intel
here.
But there's no real information there, just endless PR and management-level papers, all claiming that if you have remote control, magically your machines will all just work. (We've heard this before, from Microsoft, who called it Zero Administration.)
From what little information is available, the following appears to be the case:
AMT is implemented by
some small auxiliary processor in the network controller. It's not, apparently, firmware that runs in system management mode. But that's not entirely clear.
AMT for clients is basically an implementation of Alert Standard Format, a remote management interface which previously required installing a special plug-in board. This probably means that it uses Remote Management Control Protocol (RCMP) to talk to the client. This uses UDP datagrams on ports 623 and 644. Sending an RCMP Presence Ping on port 623 to any machine with RCMP enabled should result in a reply. Port 644 has a reasonable security system, requiring a key exchange at the start of each session. Messages are cryptographically signed, but not encrypted.
If properly configured, only harmless functions should be enabled on port 623. If improperly configured...
The general idea is that a new computer must enroll in the system by doing one good boot of the OS and talking to the remote system administration machine for an initial key exchange of 160-bit keys. Once that's been done, secure sessions are possible. It's not clear what the initial state of a new system is.
One would hope that this stuff comes up disabled. But Intel isn't telling.
Key-setting appears to be done through normal OS operation. It doesn't apparently require an external hardware device to be plugged in, which would be far more secure.
Some RCMP functions of interest:
Unconditional Power Down
Force Hard Drive Boot
Force CD/DVD boot (may be redirected to net)
Lock Power/Reset/Sleep buttons.
Lock Keyboard
Blank Screen
User Password Bypass
Remote Control Device Action (control peripherals)
There are also, of course, many functions for examining the state of the target machine.
One very real possibility is that spyware, worms, or viruses might set the RCMP keys and enable RCMP on a machine. If it does that, the machine is 0wned. Really 0wned.
If an attacker can set the keys, an attacker can not only reboot the system remotely, they can disable the keyboard, power off button, sleep button, and reset button. Of course, you could pull the plug. Maybe. Visualize this happening on a WiFi enabled laptop.
This system is not all that badly designed, provided it stays turned off except in corporate environments that really want it and understand its implications. But if implemented dumbly (with, say, the same keys on all machines, or an insecure administration machine) it opens huge security holes. For example, if all the help desk machines have the master RCMP keys to all the machines in the organization, it's almost inevitable that there will be a leak.
Compare Kerberos, where there's a central machine that has to be physically secured, but all it does is key management.
Linux support for all this is possible; the interfaces are documented. And definitely, someone needs to explore RCMP messages on port 623 and find out what is enabled at by default.
And if anybody breaks into your corporate help desk machine, they 0wn the company.
Went to see "Madagascar" last night, and more screens were showing "The Longest Yard" than "Revenge of the Shit". Lucasfilm bought themselves a good opening weekend with heavy PR, but this film has no legs.
As the Hollywood Reporter puts it, "The end of the "Star Wars" movies leaves a gaping hole in the galaxy of geekdom. And it begs the larger question: Is the era of the superfan over? No longer is there any variation of "Star Trek" on TV. The Grateful Dead essentially passed with Jerry Garcia, and even Phish is done now. The seminal pop-cult experience may be a thing of the past."
In practice, you lose about 20% performance with a good microkernel OS. You get much more than that back from the reduced downtime and maintenance.
The big win with a microkernel is that you don't have to patch it all the time. They're small enough you can get the bugs out. Microkernels like VM and QNX settled down into stability years ago.
I'm posting this from Mozilla on a QNX machine.
QNX isn't going anywhere on the desktop, but that's a business problem, not a technical one. Desktop QNX actually works reasonably well. I'm not fanatical about QNX, but technically, it's fundamentally sounder than the Microsoft and Linux messes.
If you want to try QNX, you can downoad it here.
Get the "30 day evaluation version". It will still run after 30 days, but the Eclipse development environment turns off when the timer runs out.
The software industry has settled on a strategy for dealing with the fact that its operating systems are bloated and insecure. This strategy is roughly as follows:
Put virtual machines on top, like Java and.NET. Claim that they're more secure than the OS.
Put virtual machines underneath, like VMware. Claim that they're more secure than the OS.
Add software to catch known attacks, like firewalls, virus scanners, and spyware removers.
Patch, patch, patch.
It's not working.
It's not just a Microsoft problem, either; Linux is acquiring exactly the same set of problems as the kernel grows and grows.
It doesn't have to be this bad.
Dave Cutler, the architect of Windows NT, tried to fix it. NT 3.51 was the last version he controlled, and the last one that looks even vaguely like a "microkernel".
He once told Bill Gates "I won't pollute it [NT] with crap!" So he was taken off NT, and
for NT 4, the kode kiddies from the Windows 95 team were allowed to
put huge volumes of crap Win95 code in the kernel, for "compatibility". The end result is XP, which in practice is only slightly less vulnerable than Windows 95.
It's striking to run QNX, which is a true microkernel (about 60K of code), with drivers, file systems, and networking outside the kernel. It can run X windows, Firefox, multimedia players, and now has OpenGL. That's a demonstration that you don't need a bloated kernel. Nor do you need one that changes much. The QNX kernel changes very slowly; new capabilities are added outside the kernel, in user space.
Unfortunately, QNX on the desktop is going nowhere, because there are few applications and the current marketing push is for automotive applications. Nor is QNX intended as a secure operating system, just a reliable real-time one.
Despite this, it's a clear demonstration that the basic OS does not have to be big or constantly changing.
If the Hurd guys had a clue, and could write something as good as QNX, there might be some hope from that direction. But after ten years of screwing up, there's not much hope there.
The BodySearch has been around for several years. The original unit was very bulky, about 12 feet high, 8 feet long, and 6 feet wide. The detector should be 90 degrees from the emitter, relative to the target, which makes for a bulky unit. The BodySearch takes about 30 seconds per scan. It's effective, but other than a few sales to prisons, is just too big and slow to sell well.
AS&E also has a "drive-by scanner" in a van, for covert scanning. This is a higher powered device than the BodySearch. "Although radiation exposure levels are below those specified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the ZBV is not certified as a personnel scanner. Customers planning to operate the system in stationary mode must obtain an exception from government regulations."
Slightly more practical is the RapiScan Secure 1000. It's less bulky than the BodySearch; it's only 80 inches high, so it can be installed with less trouble, although it weighs half a ton. And it only takes 8 seconds per scan. Like the BodySearch, it's a true backscatter X-ray machine, and produces good images through clothing.
Two more generations and these things will be in nightclubs. Here's a paper (in German) with picture of a cute girl seen with a BodySearch machine. So now you know what it shows.
To make this work well, you need a conference room and a control room, with a window between them. In the control room is an experienced operator to run all the gear. Preferably someone with theatrical (not music) experience.
Yesterday, the Slashdot home page was, instead of showing Apache headlines, showing a message that the Slashdot RSS feed had been blacklisted. Apparently, Slashdot's RSS feed server blacklisted Slashdot's own home page builder.
Not really, prohibition wasn't about property rights which some would argue is the basis of a society.
That's a political position, and one so noisily promoted in the US (by the Heiritage Foundation and its friends) that it's become mainstream. But it's not fundamental to society.
In Europe, property rights are not generally considered to be more important than other rights.
Europe, unlike the US, had a feudal era. Until about 200 years ago, most real estate was owned by a few powerful barons, who leased it out.
It took some bloody revolutions to end that.
That history matters, and is reflected in the legal system. Trespass and squatting are minor offenses, and in many circumstances legal, in England, for example.
And copyright is not unquestionably "property".
Legally, it's a statutory monopoly. As a US judge said in the MGM vs. Grokster case:
Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it 'theft.' You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language.
The design problems of open source
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
The big problem with open source is that it's almost impossible to fix a major design error. Trouble at the bottom tends to be fixed by layering another layer on top. This is a big part of why software gets bigger and slower, even when functionality isn't improving.
Here are some of the biggest problems in computing.
Array = Pointer in C
This is the fundamental source of buffer overflows and most software crashes.
No language since C (other than C++) has worked that way. The Pascal/Modula/Ada family, Java, and all the scripting languages have subscript checking. But C does not. We pay a huge, huge price for this. Most of the instability in software worldwide comes from this one mistake.
Register-oriented I/O interfaces Back when transistors were expensive, the cheapest way to build I/O devices was to put them on the same bus as the memory and store directly into their registers. IBM mainframes had "channels" between devices and memory, but minicomputers couldn't afford that. So mainframes had secure I/O, where the device couldn't write all over memory and device drivers couldn't tell the device to do so. But minicomputers did not.
In the mainframe world, drivers could be in user space, and unprivileged. In the minicomputer world, drivers were deeply embedded in the operating system.
PCs followed the minicomputer approach, because it was cheaper and that mattered back in 1980. Transistor count stopped being an issue years ago, and peripheral controllers are more complex than IBM channels ever were. But the unprotected I/O model stayed, long after it was no longer necessary. Now, hardware designers are so used to the minicomputer model that they design new interfaces, like FireWire, to emulate register-oriented I/O, even though they're really packet networks. So we have drivers in the kernel and thus huge, unreliable, ever-changing kernels.
Weak interprocess communication
UNIX traditionally has lousy interprocess communcation. In the original UNIX implementations, the machines were so small that you assumed you were talking to a swapped-out process, so the only mechanisms were pipes (which were really files) and signals (which emulated hardware interrupts). These were terrible constructs. Yet what we have today in UNIX tends to be minor modifications to the pipe/signal model. Sockets are very like pipes, as is System V interprocess communication. Both are unidirectional and stream-oriented. What you want is a subroutine call between processes; what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. You can make one out of the other, but the overhead is high. (Check out any CORBA ORB.) This led to the One Big Program approach to software. It also leads to the temptatation to put too much in the kernel, because calling the kernel works well, while calling another program doesn't. Linux gives in to that temptation far too much.
The open source world can't fix any of these problems, because they require wrenching design-level changes. The Wintel world has at least tried to fix these problems, although their own legacy issues keep them from making much progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Orbitz Low Fare Promise
If you book an airline ticket on Orbitz.com and then find a lower airfare for the same flights, dates, airline and travelers on another Web site, you may be entitled to a $50 coupon per ticket toward your next Orbitz purchase.
Remember to make a printout or take a screen shot of the page with the lower airfare, either the itinerary confirmation or the summary page just prior to purchase, in case a customer service representative has questions. Expect a response to your claim within 10 to 15 business days.
Please read the Low Fare Promise terms and conditions below for full details.
Orbitz Low Fare Promise Terms and Conditions
So a "video search engine" which displayed low-rez videos with low-bit-rate audio might be permissible. That would actually be useful for sites that sell DVDs of old and foreign movies.
Incidentally, a plutonium gun bomb, as shown, would fizzle. The core won't stay together long enough for the chain reaction to progress far enough to get a significant yield. That's why so much work was put into developing the implosion bomb.
NASA hasn't designed a new launch vehicle that works in forty years. And who are they going to get to design one? There aren't that many aircraft designers left. All the key people on the Apollo and Saturn V programs, and most of the top thousand people, had serious experience in experimental aircraft and rocket design. There's no pool of people like that any more.
About 10-15 years from now, the Ambassador of the People's Republic of China will present the President of the United States with the flag that the Apollo 11 crew planted on the moon in 1969.
I'd searched the UL database for the part number, but they listed as "HPU-XX150,180,200,230,235,250,275,280,300,320,330 ,350,380,400,425,430,450,475,480,500,525,550,580,6 25,650,680 and 70", instead of " HPU-3S350", etc. So they didn't show up in a search.
Checking with Companies House, the UK business registrar, we find "HIGH PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY", with a name change from " HIGH PERFORMANCE PC LIMITED" on 30/03/2005, which explains the name discrepancy. (There are about 50 companies named "High Performance ..." in the UK.)
So they actually are legitimate.
There are so many phony power supplies out there that you do have to check. Read this Tom's Hardware article about power supply burnout.
There's a company listing:
HIPER ENTERPRISE CO LTD
E224709
5TH FL
79 MIN-SHENG EAST RD, SEC 4
TAIPEI 105, TAIWAN
But they have no listings for PC power supplies. They're listed as a maker of circuit and battery chargers. The Hiper web site says they're in Guangdong province, China. So this may be a different company.
What this outfit seems to do is buy power supplies and repackage them. But, because they change the wiring, fan, and connectors, any certification applying to the original power supply is now invalid. Hiper should have run their power supplies through UL certification under their own name. They didn't.
This matters. If you read serious reviews of power supplies, where they're connected to a dummy load and run at their rated power, you find that many power supplies won't deliver their rated power. Some catch fire under full load.
When you look at the loser power supplies in those reviews, the ones that burn up are never in the UL database. And most of the ones that work properly under full load are.
UL loads the things up to full load at the top end of their temperature range and runs them for a few days. That's all. UL certification only means that it won't catch fire. That's a good first step, These guys didn't take it.
Making 100 million of anything isn't that hard. Just call up Flextronics. It's making the first 100,000 profitably that's hard.
The near future for the Third World is probably systems based on cell phones. They're already at at the right price point and are headed down from there.
Yeah, right. What we have here is a 51-pound coin-op terminal with a 56Kb network connection and a few cell-phone level games.
With an optional interface to a stuffed-animal crane machine.
I'm one of them. You run Win2K. Windows XP runs you, by remote control from Redmond. There are still corporate sites installing new Win2K systems. It's more reliable than Windows XP, because Microsoft keeps putting new stuff into Windows XP and breaking it. The XP machines require significantly more attention than the Win2K machines.
And all our real work is on QNX, anyway.
Bill Gates has a hobby business on the side, by the way. It consists of buying up the rights to all the best pictures in the world.
"Security" is being treated by most vendors and companies as a pest-control business. "How many threats did we detect today?" "What are the top 10 threats this week?" "How fast can we get the virus definitions updated?" But those aren't the real threats. It's the quiet, narrowly targeted attacks that cost companies real money.
Military security people make that distinction. They're trained to view kids throwing rocks over the fence as a minor threat, while focusing on a phony cleaning guy sneaking in and getting a peek at the good stuff. Computer security people don't get this. Yet.
Look at, say, the Symantec web site. It's entirely oriented toward protecting against pest-type threats. And "pest removal". If there's a serious attack, by the time you get to "virus removal", the crucial information has long since been stolen.
Additional note: there is some Linux support for this, including ipmitool, which lets you send system management commands to remote machines. AMT-equipped machines may respond to that tool. Somebody should test this.
Correction: RMCP, not RCMP.
From what little information is available, the following appears to be the case:
- Unconditional Power Down
- Force Hard Drive Boot
- Force CD/DVD boot (may be redirected to net)
- Lock Power/Reset/Sleep buttons.
- Lock Keyboard
- Blank Screen
- User Password Bypass
- Remote Control Device Action (control peripherals)
There are also, of course, many functions for examining the state of the target machine.This system is not all that badly designed, provided it stays turned off except in corporate environments that really want it and understand its implications. But if implemented dumbly (with, say, the same keys on all machines, or an insecure administration machine) it opens huge security holes. For example, if all the help desk machines have the master RCMP keys to all the machines in the organization, it's almost inevitable that there will be a leak. Compare Kerberos, where there's a central machine that has to be physically secured, but all it does is key management.
Linux support for all this is possible; the interfaces are documented. And definitely, someone needs to explore RCMP messages on port 623 and find out what is enabled at by default.
And if anybody breaks into your corporate help desk machine, they 0wn the company.
Dumb article, too.
The next big play in the "browser wars" should be more aggressive ad blocking.
As the Hollywood Reporter puts it, "The end of the "Star Wars" movies leaves a gaping hole in the galaxy of geekdom. And it begs the larger question: Is the era of the superfan over? No longer is there any variation of "Star Trek" on TV. The Grateful Dead essentially passed with Jerry Garcia, and even Phish is done now. The seminal pop-cult experience may be a thing of the past."
Finally.
The big win with a microkernel is that you don't have to patch it all the time. They're small enough you can get the bugs out. Microkernels like VM and QNX settled down into stability years ago.
I'm posting this from Mozilla on a QNX machine. QNX isn't going anywhere on the desktop, but that's a business problem, not a technical one. Desktop QNX actually works reasonably well. I'm not fanatical about QNX, but technically, it's fundamentally sounder than the Microsoft and Linux messes.
If you want to try QNX, you can downoad it here. Get the "30 day evaluation version". It will still run after 30 days, but the Eclipse development environment turns off when the timer runs out.
-
Put virtual machines on top, like Java and
.NET. Claim that they're more secure than the OS.
-
Put virtual machines underneath, like VMware. Claim that they're more secure than the OS.
-
Add software to catch known attacks, like firewalls, virus scanners, and spyware removers.
-
Patch, patch, patch.
It's not working.It's not just a Microsoft problem, either; Linux is acquiring exactly the same set of problems as the kernel grows and grows.
It doesn't have to be this bad.
Dave Cutler, the architect of Windows NT, tried to fix it. NT 3.51 was the last version he controlled, and the last one that looks even vaguely like a "microkernel". He once told Bill Gates "I won't pollute it [NT] with crap!" So he was taken off NT, and for NT 4, the kode kiddies from the Windows 95 team were allowed to put huge volumes of crap Win95 code in the kernel, for "compatibility". The end result is XP, which in practice is only slightly less vulnerable than Windows 95.
It's striking to run QNX, which is a true microkernel (about 60K of code), with drivers, file systems, and networking outside the kernel. It can run X windows, Firefox, multimedia players, and now has OpenGL. That's a demonstration that you don't need a bloated kernel. Nor do you need one that changes much. The QNX kernel changes very slowly; new capabilities are added outside the kernel, in user space. Unfortunately, QNX on the desktop is going nowhere, because there are few applications and the current marketing push is for automotive applications. Nor is QNX intended as a secure operating system, just a reliable real-time one. Despite this, it's a clear demonstration that the basic OS does not have to be big or constantly changing.
If the Hurd guys had a clue, and could write something as good as QNX, there might be some hope from that direction. But after ten years of screwing up, there's not much hope there.
AS&E also has a "drive-by scanner" in a van, for covert scanning. This is a higher powered device than the BodySearch. "Although radiation exposure levels are below those specified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the ZBV is not certified as a personnel scanner. Customers planning to operate the system in stationary mode must obtain an exception from government regulations."
Slightly more practical is the RapiScan Secure 1000. It's less bulky than the BodySearch; it's only 80 inches high, so it can be installed with less trouble, although it weighs half a ton. And it only takes 8 seconds per scan. Like the BodySearch, it's a true backscatter X-ray machine, and produces good images through clothing.
Two more generations and these things will be in nightclubs. Here's a paper (in German) with picture of a cute girl seen with a BodySearch machine. So now you know what it shows.
Remember the basic rule of the FBI: "Don't embarass the Bureau." Visualize TV coverage of truckloads of donuts arriving at the Hoover Building.
The FBI's excuse for not solving crimes is supposedly that they're working on terrorism, but that's what we pay Homeland Security $33 billion for.
To make this work well, you need a conference room and a control room, with a window between them. In the control room is an experienced operator to run all the gear. Preferably someone with theatrical (not music) experience.
Yes, you too can shoot yourself in the foot.
That's a bug, not a feature.
That's a political position, and one so noisily promoted in the US (by the Heiritage Foundation and its friends) that it's become mainstream. But it's not fundamental to society.
In Europe, property rights are not generally considered to be more important than other rights. Europe, unlike the US, had a feudal era. Until about 200 years ago, most real estate was owned by a few powerful barons, who leased it out. It took some bloody revolutions to end that.
That history matters, and is reflected in the legal system. Trespass and squatting are minor offenses, and in many circumstances legal, in England, for example.
And copyright is not unquestionably "property". Legally, it's a statutory monopoly. As a US judge said in the MGM vs. Grokster case:
Here are some of the biggest problems in computing.
This is the fundamental source of buffer overflows and most software crashes. No language since C (other than C++) has worked that way. The Pascal/Modula/Ada family, Java, and all the scripting languages have subscript checking. But C does not. We pay a huge, huge price for this. Most of the instability in software worldwide comes from this one mistake.
Back when transistors were expensive, the cheapest way to build I/O devices was to put them on the same bus as the memory and store directly into their registers. IBM mainframes had "channels" between devices and memory, but minicomputers couldn't afford that. So mainframes had secure I/O, where the device couldn't write all over memory and device drivers couldn't tell the device to do so. But minicomputers did not. In the mainframe world, drivers could be in user space, and unprivileged. In the minicomputer world, drivers were deeply embedded in the operating system. PCs followed the minicomputer approach, because it was cheaper and that mattered back in 1980. Transistor count stopped being an issue years ago, and peripheral controllers are more complex than IBM channels ever were. But the unprotected I/O model stayed, long after it was no longer necessary. Now, hardware designers are so used to the minicomputer model that they design new interfaces, like FireWire, to emulate register-oriented I/O, even though they're really packet networks. So we have drivers in the kernel and thus huge, unreliable, ever-changing kernels.
UNIX traditionally has lousy interprocess communcation. In the original UNIX implementations, the machines were so small that you assumed you were talking to a swapped-out process, so the only mechanisms were pipes (which were really files) and signals (which emulated hardware interrupts). These were terrible constructs. Yet what we have today in UNIX tends to be minor modifications to the pipe/signal model. Sockets are very like pipes, as is System V interprocess communication. Both are unidirectional and stream-oriented. What you want is a subroutine call between processes; what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. You can make one out of the other, but the overhead is high. (Check out any CORBA ORB.) This led to the One Big Program approach to software. It also leads to the temptatation to put too much in the kernel, because calling the kernel works well, while calling another program doesn't. Linux gives in to that temptation far too much.
The open source world can't fix any of these problems, because they require wrenching design-level changes. The Wintel world has at least tried to fix these problems, although their own legacy issues keep them from making much progress.