In some cases you must have arbitrary functions that could be just anywhere, but I doubt you need to do that for all cases.
In those other cases can't you have a list of valid function entry points and so what you pass is the number of the item on the list you want?
You might take a performance hit _initially_. But I thought the likes of Intel and AMD were having trouble figuring out how to use up transistors to increase performance?
But instead of doing lots of useful stuff[1], they have just decided to make multiple cores instead and say to the programmers "OK it's your problem now".
[1] There's much they could do to make stuff better- e.g. how about helping to speed up gettimeofday - they said "don't use TSC", but there is no real fast alternative on the various x86 platforms.
Return addresses are code just as much as call or jump addresses are code.
Variables should not be mixed with them, especially if they could contain data from potential attackers.
Mixing return addresses with variables means that it is easier for me to make a buggy program "return" to arbitrary code of my choice.
Whereas if the data stack was separate, while I can still do some damage by having the buggy program work on the wrong data, it is harder to get it to run arbitrary code of my choice. It may still be possible, but it's more work.
It's bad practice to keep putting shit (external data) next to food (code) and say "as long as people do things right it'll be safe", or say "hey it's their fault if they make mistakes".
That's not so bad if Google can generate public point of view groups (out of datamining many POVs), users can also create their own public POV goups, and users can choose a group's POV to search from.
Then you can stumble on things you normally don't see.
Or make better search for stuff when your usual search POVs are not working.
Sometimes you might have reasons to be searching for stuff you'd normally not search for.
For instance you might be searching for a new restaurant that your friend X might like, in the area he is moving to next month.
There is no point customizing your own POV for that. Best to find a suitable existing POV.
I do know at least one person who was downloading "everything" - he used to have lots of bandwidth.
I also know other people who download stuff, but pick the stuff they want to watch/play first because of ISP throttling/crappiness. Due to limited speeds they have to focus on downloading the stuff they want first.
That's terrible "antivirus" software. It's extremely stupid for it to just rely on names and locations.
So if I called it "DoublePlusGood Software" and put some keys in HKLM\RandomCrap\ the antivirus software would think it's OK when scanning? That's hilarious! Funniest thing I've heard this evening, honestly!:)
What next, a metal detector that only detects metal as long as it's labeled correctly and placed in the right location?:).
That's what I call a problem with the "antivirus" software, not the registry.
I'd personally regard that sort of crappy antivirus software as fake too. It would be nice of you if you could let me know what antivirus software that is so that I can blacklist it and its creators.
Real antivirus software would actually check the binaries the entries referred to, instead of just relying on what they are called.
"For low capacity requirements, Flash beats HDDs all the way"
Not all flash. Flash drives are often still very slow for writes. Often a lot slower! There was one hyped drive (fast reads etc) that turned out to only be able to manage 4 write transactions a second! That's TERRIBLE!
If there were a 128GB flash drive that was really fast for writes (and reads) and cost as much as a 500GB hard drive, and was as reliable, it would really sell.
Intel is doing something about that. But at the moment it's still early, so I'm just going to wait and see for now.
What I wonder about is the failure, failure detection and recovery mode for flash drives.
Hard drives often give you a hint before they die. Once you see stuff like "reallocated sector count" go from zero to something else, it's time to buy a new drive. Or the make funny noises, or start getting rather slower (many retries to read).
With hard drives a decent data recovery company may have chance of recovering your data if your drive died. What's it like for flash drives?
I actually find it strange. I thought someone trying to make money from selling software would be more interested in _sales_ (and profit). Instead of trying to prove whether DRM increases or decreases "piracy".
Here's a hint to Ubisoft wannabes:
If you make a really crap game, piracy will go down, but sales would go down too. If you make a good game, both piracy and sales will go up.
If you make an online game (one where most of the fun bits are online, not just the DRM bits), you can reduce piracy to near zero - but your operating and upfront costs may go up too.
I said "_the_ millions" which means the infected millions. I would have left out the "the", if I meant something different. I put it there for a reason.
If I were talking about uninfected+infected users a different phrase would be more appropriate.
A user who is prone to infection is different from a user who isn't. A user prone to infection is just as likely to be infected whether they ran Windows or Ubuntu.
The number of infected windows computers may even rival the number of Desktop Linux computers worldwide:) [1].
Macs have 10% market share and they ARE getting the same shit, just not so often _yet_:
If they hit 20-30% share, things will start to heat up for OSX, since with a 3:1 or 2:1 ratio - not targeting OSX becomes a significant missed "opportunity" - your botnets would not grow as fast if you just targeted Windows.
Lastly, you said the registry was bad because stuff could be hidden there.
But to most "windows class" users there would be little difference between "hiding stuff" in the registry or/etc. Most of them won't even know that either exist in the first place!
Whereas you'd have just as much luck hiding stuff in the registry from the experts as you would in/etc or wherever.
So I don't see this "hiding" thing as a problem.
If you suspect your system is compromised, the safe thing to do is reinstall and update from a trusted source, then restore data and documents from backups.
Slashdot Mirror
One of those multipage reviews again.
Anyone have a summary?
That business plan seems really familiar.
:).
I think it's an ancient one
Instead of getting on with more modern ways of doing business, the RIAA prefers the old style stuff eh?
One way is to start a site where people contribute to a pool of money and try to predict the death date of somebody.
;)
The person who predicts the closest date, gets to collect the money.
There are lots of details to be ironed out of course.
But figuring out the details is left as an exercise to the reader.
There are transistors to "waste". But you may not have CPU time to waste (note that apparently java is quite fast nowadays).
After all, Intel and AMD have effectively said they are having difficulty making CPUs run faster.
Some features might be able to be added while having the CPUs run at the same speed.
Maybe they can't do what I suggested and maintain reasonable performance, but maybe they can think of better stuff.
In some cases you must have arbitrary functions that could be just anywhere, but I doubt you need to do that for all cases.
In those other cases can't you have a list of valid function entry points and so what you pass is the number of the item on the list you want?
You might take a performance hit _initially_. But I thought the likes of Intel and AMD were having trouble figuring out how to use up transistors to increase performance?
But instead of doing lots of useful stuff[1], they have just decided to make multiple cores instead and say to the programmers "OK it's your problem now".
[1] There's much they could do to make stuff better- e.g. how about helping to speed up gettimeofday - they said "don't use TSC", but there is no real fast alternative on the various x86 platforms.
Return addresses are code just as much as call or jump addresses are code.
Variables should not be mixed with them, especially if they could contain data from potential attackers.
Mixing return addresses with variables means that it is easier for me to make a buggy program "return" to arbitrary code of my choice.
Whereas if the data stack was separate, while I can still do some damage by having the buggy program work on the wrong data, it is harder to get it to run arbitrary code of my choice. It may still be possible, but it's more work.
It's bad practice to keep putting shit (external data) next to food (code) and say "as long as people do things right it'll be safe", or say "hey it's their fault if they make mistakes".
Bad hygiene.
Why do they still push arguments onto the call stack?
Mixing data and code seems to be poor practice.
I suspect if the data stack was kept separate from the call stack it would be easier to do branch predictions.
So what do you think of stuff like this?
http://digg.com/pc_games/EVE_Creators_CCP_Under_Fire_Again_for_Alleged_Corruption_Open_Letter_Made
What discourages me from playing Eve Online are the keywords: "corruption", "rigging", "cover up".
That's like voluntarily choosing (and paying!) to live in a universe where you know the Gods (or demigods at least) are evil and corrupt.
Why bother when you are already forced to "enjoy such realism" in real life?
That's not so bad if Google can generate public point of view groups (out of datamining many POVs), users can also create their own public POV goups, and users can choose a group's POV to search from.
Then you can stumble on things you normally don't see.
Or make better search for stuff when your usual search POVs are not working.
Sometimes you might have reasons to be searching for stuff you'd normally not search for.
For instance you might be searching for a new restaurant that your friend X might like, in the area he is moving to next month.
There is no point customizing your own POV for that. Best to find a suitable existing POV.
The ISS is falling all the time. It just keeps missing the ground (and most of the atmosphere).
Sorry, it's time to watch Fox News :).
IMO they did do at least one useful and interesting experiment.
It's called space tourism.
Of course, it wasn't NASA's idea (and I hear they didn't like it).
But may be the most useful experiment the ISS has ever done or will ever do.
If "zero g" is all that you're looking for, all you need to do is fall :).
> When trojan software labels itself as nvidia.cpl or atidrv.sys, or msofficectl, have fun scanning for it searching for "AntiVirus2009"
So landmine detectors can only detect mines if they are labelled "Land mine" and placed in the right places?
Do you really have any idea of what you are talking about?
The registry was a mistake, but not for the reason you said.
If you don't want to learn stuff and prefer calling me names, that's fine with me. Your loss not mine.
Yes, but are they the majority or the minority?
I do know at least one person who was downloading "everything" - he used to have lots of bandwidth.
I also know other people who download stuff, but pick the stuff they want to watch/play first because of ISP throttling/crappiness. Due to limited speeds they have to focus on downloading the stuff they want first.
That's terrible "antivirus" software. It's extremely stupid for it to just rely on names and locations.
:)
:).
So if I called it "DoublePlusGood Software" and put some keys in HKLM\RandomCrap\ the antivirus software would think it's OK when scanning? That's hilarious! Funniest thing I've heard this evening, honestly!
What next, a metal detector that only detects metal as long as it's labeled correctly and placed in the right location?
That's what I call a problem with the "antivirus" software, not the registry.
I'd personally regard that sort of crappy antivirus software as fake too. It would be nice of you if you could let me know what antivirus software that is so that I can blacklist it and its creators.
Real antivirus software would actually check the binaries the entries referred to, instead of just relying on what they are called.
AFAIK just putting random keys into the registry don't cause your software to automatically be run or loaded on boot.
You have to put those random keys in certain places and those places aren't random for each machine.
"Apache certainly has more than 20% market share - they have more than Microsoft, btw, - but look at the stats of who is the one that gets exploited."
PHP stuff? Just guessing coz I'm too lazy to look it up.
I haven't seen that many IIS6 or IIS7 exploits. Whereas PHP and PHP webapps appear to be exploited every now and then.
Nowadays it appears to be neither Apache nor IIS that people prefer to attack - they attack the stuff running on it.
Similarly they prefer not to attack Windows XP directly, they exploit the users or apps running on it.
I'm sure they all started feeling sheepish after that.
"For low capacity requirements, Flash beats HDDs all the way"
Not all flash. Flash drives are often still very slow for writes. Often a lot slower! There was one hyped drive (fast reads etc) that turned out to only be able to manage 4 write transactions a second! That's TERRIBLE!
If there were a 128GB flash drive that was really fast for writes (and reads) and cost as much as a 500GB hard drive, and was as reliable, it would really sell.
Intel is doing something about that. But at the moment it's still early, so I'm just going to wait and see for now.
What I wonder about is the failure, failure detection and recovery mode for flash drives.
Hard drives often give you a hint before they die. Once you see stuff like "reallocated sector count" go from zero to something else, it's time to buy a new drive. Or the make funny noises, or start getting rather slower (many retries to read).
With hard drives a decent data recovery company may have chance of recovering your data if your drive died. What's it like for flash drives?
I think the main problem is when you ask for on site support.
They'll look at you as if you came from another planet or something.
Because it looks pretty?
;).
Jewellery doesn't have to cost a lot of money to be pretty.
Same goes for the girls
So it was a bit like whoring yourself out but minus the sex?
:)
With a bit more effort, you'll be a consultant in no time.
I actually find it strange. I thought someone trying to make money from selling software would be more interested in _sales_ (and profit). Instead of trying to prove whether DRM increases or decreases "piracy".
Here's a hint to Ubisoft wannabes:
If you make a really crap game, piracy will go down, but sales would go down too.
If you make a good game, both piracy and sales will go up.
If you make an online game (one where most of the fun bits are online, not just the DRM bits), you can reduce piracy to near zero - but your operating and upfront costs may go up too.
I said "_the_ millions" which means the infected millions. I would have left out the "the", if I meant something different. I put it there for a reason.
If I were talking about uninfected+infected users a different phrase would be more appropriate.
A user who is prone to infection is different from a user who isn't. A user prone to infection is just as likely to be infected whether they ran Windows or Ubuntu.
The number of infected windows computers may even rival the number of Desktop Linux computers worldwide :) [1].
Macs have 10% market share and they ARE getting the same shit, just not so often _yet_:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/11/mac_trojan
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/06/new_trojan_leverages_unpatched.html
If they hit 20-30% share, things will start to heat up for OSX, since with a 3:1 or 2:1 ratio - not targeting OSX becomes a significant missed "opportunity" - your botnets would not grow as fast if you just targeted Windows.
Lastly, you said the registry was bad because stuff could be hidden there.
But to most "windows class" users there would be little difference between "hiding stuff" in the registry or /etc. Most of them won't even know that either exist in the first place!
Whereas you'd have just as much luck hiding stuff in the registry from the experts as you would in /etc or wherever.
So I don't see this "hiding" thing as a problem.
If you suspect your system is compromised, the safe thing to do is reinstall and update from a trusted source, then restore data and documents from backups.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=47DDCFA9-645D-4495-9EDA-92CDE33E99A9&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0f27260-58da-40db-8785-689cf6a05c73&displaylang=en
A lot of windows machines don't run windows update and so don't run that tool. Some of them because they have an invalid license.