Are you telling me you can't find a handful of smart kids in your Computer Science department that would rather do remedial computer work than work at the mall? You've literally got an entire department of unemployed cheap labor and you are looking to India? That doesn't speak too highly about your graduates...
The blog post also seems to imply that you'd need root access to actually install the exploit. In particular: "However, we found that Umbreon also patches the loader library (/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.19.so as an example) to use/etc/ld.so. instead, where is a 7-character-string, matching the length of “preload”."
So, basically, it needs write access to patch a string in ld.so so that it can hijack the preload functionality. Presumably it does this because a lot of distros will use SELinux to prevent access to/etc/ld.so.preload. The basic idea behind this isn't anything new but, it does seem like it does a number of things to prevent detection.
I am aware of the possibility to run Flash Player in a VM. I was referring to somenickname's suggestion to "Go somewhere else" rather than doing so.
And, what I mean was, vote with your e-mails/visits. If a site that you really want to visit requires flash, send them an e-mail and tell them that you've taken your business to a competitor because Flash is too risky to use. Probably won't take too many e-mails before they start trying to get their shit together.
Almost no one wants or cares about this. I've been Flash-free for several years now and it's very rare to run into any kind of issue. If you do run into a website that needs flash, treat it the same way you'd treat a website that requires you to turn off your ad blocker: Go somewhere else.
Linux will probably support the chips before Windows does. It's not like Intel is going to send out a memo to every internet company on the planet and say, "Hey, sorry guys, new chips are Windows only. Please change your infrastructure."
Regardless of support for older versions of Windows, it would be utter insanity to not support Linux (which would also lead to BSD support). Yeah, you might need a newer kernel but, the entire damn internet runs on Linux. Chip vendors aren't going to stunt that upgrade path.
As for virtualization, it should be fine to run older versions in a VM. A Windows VM doesn't see the bits that might affect compatibility.
This user is not driven by irrational hate against Microsoft and Windows since he would like to continue to use an older version of Windows.
Irrational? Really? I don't recall ever meeting anyone that didn't hate Windows that wasn't a Windows developer. People didn't flee from Windows Phone because it was bad. They fled because it was associated with Microsoft and Windows. After decades of shit from Microsoft, the brand is so tarnished that people relish the ability to escape it.
The issue is that a lot of code has traditionally been 80 characters wide. That way anyone who looks at it in a standard size terminal will see the exact thing that the author saw when he wrote the code. Tabs are ambiguous in that, in a traditional 80 character wide display, you may have to guess what tab size the author used and changing that tab size may have unintended consequences.
I imagine that most people have their editor set to do smart spacing. The editor is smart enough to properly line up the next line based on the content of the previous line. So, it's not really onerous to use spaces and has the added benefit of being unambiguous.
Amusing anecdote: Some very old Unix software is fanatical about using tabs. Not because of style considerations, because it's old enough that the extra disk space consumed by using spaces was unacceptable when the software was first written.
Don't hold your breath. I'm pretty sure Lenovo fired everyone who understood the term "useful" a few years ago. Now it's all about who can out-gimmick Apple.
Uh huh, you go right on believing that. The day that computers are able to directly interface with my brain is the day that I finally don my tinfoil hat.
That's the primary motivation. In fact, fashion is the primary motivation behind most hardware design decisions now. If you want a high end ultra-portable laptop, you now have to buy a fashion statement. Nobody makes a functional high end ultra-portable anymore.
I've tried to replace my ThinkPad X220 on several occasions now (always lured by the fancy new screen resolutions) and every time I've sent the "upgrade" back for a refund because it's unusable in a real work environment. Pretty? Sure. Suitable for writing software? Fuck. No.
Fuck thickness. Power users want a real (NOT chicklet) keyboard, a ThinkPad nub, a high resolution matte screen. Screws on the bottom of the laptop to indicate where to upgrade the RAM and disk. More screws on the bottom to indicate where to replace the keyboard when you wear it out. Make it thick enough that you can decorate the edges with a vast array of full sized ports. Make the battery removable so you can travel with a bunch of them (bonus points for having an onboard 5 minute battery to allow hot swapping). If you include a trackpad at all, don't be a fucking idiot and make it overlap the natural points where your palms rest. Put a nice CPU in it with good, active cooling. Make it weigh 2-3 pounds.
Or, I dunno... Just make it fucking thinner, I guess.
Cool. Can it simulate nubs on the F and J keys? If it can't then your hands can't find their way back to where they need to be and, your ability to touch type is now lost. I agree that the artificial learning part is pretty cool but, cool doesn't trump useful.
I understand that this laptop isn't meant for power users but, frankly, widescreen laptops weren't meant for power users either. How many power users are still using a laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio? How vehemently did they object (Hint: A LOT)? I'd be happy to let this slide as a toy that no one will use for real work but, when I see a modern day ThinkPad, I'm inclined to believe that the Yoga series is a staging ground for things to come.
I long for the day when all my devices are so thin that they cannot support *any* input devices. Think how glorious it will be when you are holding a supercomputer that is only a few microns thick! It will be so thin that it's practically two dimensional!
Companies needing to compete on wages sounds like excellent news for employees. I've recently been looking for a job in an area that has a few small tech companies but not enough to drive up wages. As a result, they all offer similar salaries that are 25% below the national average.
If there isn't enough nearly public land for the activity then don't buy a drone. If you don't live near lakes that allow boats, you don't buy one anyway, use it where it doesn't belong and then shrug and say, "Sorry, no other place to use my boat".
A better analogy is if these guys had come at night, put a camera on a tree and pointed it at her house. Would it be legal for her to take down that camera and destroy it? Presumably, yes.
You can also use something like firejail (https://firejail.wordpress.com/) for this. I'm not involved in the project but, it's very simple to use compared to something like SELinux. It comes with a number of pre-configured profiles for major pieces of software and, by default, things like Firefox can only see a limited view of the filesystem. For example, by default, Firefox can see ~/Downloads but not ~/Documents. I haven't noticed any performance or stability issues with it so, it has been a welcome extra line of defense.
I dunno if that's true these days. Unity definitely caters to a specific workflow but, that workflow is not new and has been around a lot longer than Unity or Ubuntu (It's actually reminiscent of NextStep). When Unity was first released, it was admittedly unusable garbage. These days it just has some minor quirks. There is also a Unity Tweak Tool that can help you fiddle with things until it feels more natural. It's not without faults, to be sure. But, it's gotten back to the point where I could recommend it to people. After many years of boycotting vanilla Ubuntu, I've switched back to it and have no complaints at all.
The funny thing is that the upgrade path was significantly broken by systemd. On a clean 16.04 machine, you can type "/etc/init.d/foo restart" and it works fine. It's just a wrapper to the correct systemd command. If, however, you upgraded your system from 12.04 to 1X.04, the upgrade process probably didn't correctly update the scripts in/etc/init.d. So, now you are stuck on a system that may or may not respond the same way that your new machines respond. Even though they are running the same damn operating system.
Oh, cool, that puts it much more into perspective. With an average age of 26, I imagine that they have equal representation between 46 year olds and 6 year olds.
The primary advantage of young engineers is that they are cheap and disposable. That's not to say that young engineers are necessarily bad engineers. I've met plenty of 22 year old rockstars that I've enjoyed working with and have even learned from. But, when you explicitly state that you want to hire young engineers, it can actually be re-phrased as, "We want a cheap, disposable workforce that, hopefully, with time, will throw enough shit at the wall that some of it might stick".
It's also a lot easier to poorly re-invent wheels when you are young. I understand the sentiment that he wants young people willing to take chances but, this isn't some startup company catering to a hipster internet fad. This is an initiative to produce real world, useful products that have a potential to kill people or cause millions of dollars in property damage from fires. It would be ludicrous to focus on getting young engineers for a project like this.
I don't have a smartphone but, I live in an area where there is no coverage (Welcome to the United States). When people come visit me, their smartphones die within hours because of the lack of coverage. If the rational behind open Wifi is to locate people who can't make phone calls because of damaged infrastructure, those phones ran out of batteries long ago.
The entire system is corrupt to the core, I agree. But, it's been rigged in such a way to resemble a sporting event and people will blindly pick a side and then vehemently defend it. I really don't know how to convince people to vote in their best interest. They are completely fixated on voting for "their team". It doesn't matter that said team doesn't represent them, has no interest in representing them and would happily throw them into a tree grinder if it meant they would get re-elected.
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Are you telling me you can't find a handful of smart kids in your Computer Science department that would rather do remedial computer work than work at the mall? You've literally got an entire department of unemployed cheap labor and you are looking to India? That doesn't speak too highly about your graduates...
The blog post also seems to imply that you'd need root access to actually install the exploit. In particular: "However, we found that Umbreon also patches the loader library (/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.19.so as an example) to use /etc/ld.so. instead, where is a 7-character-string, matching the length of “preload”."
So, basically, it needs write access to patch a string in ld.so so that it can hijack the preload functionality. Presumably it does this because a lot of distros will use SELinux to prevent access to /etc/ld.so.preload. The basic idea behind this isn't anything new but, it does seem like it does a number of things to prevent detection.
I am aware of the possibility to run Flash Player in a VM. I was referring to somenickname's suggestion to "Go somewhere else" rather than doing so.
And, what I mean was, vote with your e-mails/visits. If a site that you really want to visit requires flash, send them an e-mail and tell them that you've taken your business to a competitor because Flash is too risky to use. Probably won't take too many e-mails before they start trying to get their shit together.
Almost no one wants or cares about this. I've been Flash-free for several years now and it's very rare to run into any kind of issue. If you do run into a website that needs flash, treat it the same way you'd treat a website that requires you to turn off your ad blocker: Go somewhere else.
Linux will probably support the chips before Windows does. It's not like Intel is going to send out a memo to every internet company on the planet and say, "Hey, sorry guys, new chips are Windows only. Please change your infrastructure."
Regardless of support for older versions of Windows, it would be utter insanity to not support Linux (which would also lead to BSD support). Yeah, you might need a newer kernel but, the entire damn internet runs on Linux. Chip vendors aren't going to stunt that upgrade path.
As for virtualization, it should be fine to run older versions in a VM. A Windows VM doesn't see the bits that might affect compatibility.
This user is not driven by irrational hate against Microsoft and Windows since he would like to continue to use an older version of Windows.
Irrational? Really? I don't recall ever meeting anyone that didn't hate Windows that wasn't a Windows developer. People didn't flee from Windows Phone because it was bad. They fled because it was associated with Microsoft and Windows. After decades of shit from Microsoft, the brand is so tarnished that people relish the ability to escape it.
The issue is that a lot of code has traditionally been 80 characters wide. That way anyone who looks at it in a standard size terminal will see the exact thing that the author saw when he wrote the code. Tabs are ambiguous in that, in a traditional 80 character wide display, you may have to guess what tab size the author used and changing that tab size may have unintended consequences.
I imagine that most people have their editor set to do smart spacing. The editor is smart enough to properly line up the next line based on the content of the previous line. So, it's not really onerous to use spaces and has the added benefit of being unambiguous.
Amusing anecdote: Some very old Unix software is fanatical about using tabs. Not because of style considerations, because it's old enough that the extra disk space consumed by using spaces was unacceptable when the software was first written.
Don't hold your breath. I'm pretty sure Lenovo fired everyone who understood the term "useful" a few years ago. Now it's all about who can out-gimmick Apple.
Uh huh, you go right on believing that. The day that computers are able to directly interface with my brain is the day that I finally don my tinfoil hat.
That's the primary motivation. In fact, fashion is the primary motivation behind most hardware design decisions now. If you want a high end ultra-portable laptop, you now have to buy a fashion statement. Nobody makes a functional high end ultra-portable anymore.
I've tried to replace my ThinkPad X220 on several occasions now (always lured by the fancy new screen resolutions) and every time I've sent the "upgrade" back for a refund because it's unusable in a real work environment. Pretty? Sure. Suitable for writing software? Fuck. No.
Fuck thickness. Power users want a real (NOT chicklet) keyboard, a ThinkPad nub, a high resolution matte screen. Screws on the bottom of the laptop to indicate where to upgrade the RAM and disk. More screws on the bottom to indicate where to replace the keyboard when you wear it out. Make it thick enough that you can decorate the edges with a vast array of full sized ports. Make the battery removable so you can travel with a bunch of them (bonus points for having an onboard 5 minute battery to allow hot swapping). If you include a trackpad at all, don't be a fucking idiot and make it overlap the natural points where your palms rest. Put a nice CPU in it with good, active cooling. Make it weigh 2-3 pounds.
Or, I dunno... Just make it fucking thinner, I guess.
Cool. Can it simulate nubs on the F and J keys? If it can't then your hands can't find their way back to where they need to be and, your ability to touch type is now lost. I agree that the artificial learning part is pretty cool but, cool doesn't trump useful.
I understand that this laptop isn't meant for power users but, frankly, widescreen laptops weren't meant for power users either. How many power users are still using a laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio? How vehemently did they object (Hint: A LOT)? I'd be happy to let this slide as a toy that no one will use for real work but, when I see a modern day ThinkPad, I'm inclined to believe that the Yoga series is a staging ground for things to come.
DO NOT WANT.
I long for the day when all my devices are so thin that they cannot support *any* input devices. Think how glorious it will be when you are holding a supercomputer that is only a few microns thick! It will be so thin that it's practically two dimensional!
Input devices are overrated.
Companies needing to compete on wages sounds like excellent news for employees. I've recently been looking for a job in an area that has a few small tech companies but not enough to drive up wages. As a result, they all offer similar salaries that are 25% below the national average.
If there isn't enough nearly public land for the activity then don't buy a drone. If you don't live near lakes that allow boats, you don't buy one anyway, use it where it doesn't belong and then shrug and say, "Sorry, no other place to use my boat".
A better analogy is if these guys had come at night, put a camera on a tree and pointed it at her house. Would it be legal for her to take down that camera and destroy it? Presumably, yes.
You can also use something like firejail (https://firejail.wordpress.com/) for this. I'm not involved in the project but, it's very simple to use compared to something like SELinux. It comes with a number of pre-configured profiles for major pieces of software and, by default, things like Firefox can only see a limited view of the filesystem. For example, by default, Firefox can see ~/Downloads but not ~/Documents. I haven't noticed any performance or stability issues with it so, it has been a welcome extra line of defense.
I dunno if that's true these days. Unity definitely caters to a specific workflow but, that workflow is not new and has been around a lot longer than Unity or Ubuntu (It's actually reminiscent of NextStep). When Unity was first released, it was admittedly unusable garbage. These days it just has some minor quirks. There is also a Unity Tweak Tool that can help you fiddle with things until it feels more natural. It's not without faults, to be sure. But, it's gotten back to the point where I could recommend it to people. After many years of boycotting vanilla Ubuntu, I've switched back to it and have no complaints at all.
The funny thing is that the upgrade path was significantly broken by systemd. On a clean 16.04 machine, you can type "/etc/init.d/foo restart" and it works fine. It's just a wrapper to the correct systemd command. If, however, you upgraded your system from 12.04 to 1X.04, the upgrade process probably didn't correctly update the scripts in /etc/init.d. So, now you are stuck on a system that may or may not respond the same way that your new machines respond. Even though they are running the same damn operating system.
Systemd... The gift that keeps on giving...
Oh, cool, that puts it much more into perspective. With an average age of 26, I imagine that they have equal representation between 46 year olds and 6 year olds.
The primary advantage of young engineers is that they are cheap and disposable. That's not to say that young engineers are necessarily bad engineers. I've met plenty of 22 year old rockstars that I've enjoyed working with and have even learned from. But, when you explicitly state that you want to hire young engineers, it can actually be re-phrased as, "We want a cheap, disposable workforce that, hopefully, with time, will throw enough shit at the wall that some of it might stick".
It's also a lot easier to poorly re-invent wheels when you are young. I understand the sentiment that he wants young people willing to take chances but, this isn't some startup company catering to a hipster internet fad. This is an initiative to produce real world, useful products that have a potential to kill people or cause millions of dollars in property damage from fires. It would be ludicrous to focus on getting young engineers for a project like this.
I don't have a smartphone but, I live in an area where there is no coverage (Welcome to the United States). When people come visit me, their smartphones die within hours because of the lack of coverage. If the rational behind open Wifi is to locate people who can't make phone calls because of damaged infrastructure, those phones ran out of batteries long ago.
The entire system is corrupt to the core, I agree. But, it's been rigged in such a way to resemble a sporting event and people will blindly pick a side and then vehemently defend it. I really don't know how to convince people to vote in their best interest. They are completely fixated on voting for "their team". It doesn't matter that said team doesn't represent them, has no interest in representing them and would happily throw them into a tree grinder if it meant they would get re-elected.
GO TEAM!