Actually I have no idea whether it'll work. I'm pretty certain it won't be FCC compliant though...
If it works it may interfere with your access to slashdot...
Hmm someone has posted a mike and speaker suggestion higher up, but later than my post. Wonder if I'll be modded redundant by mods who don't check the dates and times;).
If they use dynamic wear levelling it's bad sector time soon...
If they use static wear levelling - the performance is worse, because they basically have to move the free space around (make one read and two writes).
I don't see how kernel versions are relevant to market perceptions.
AFAIK the end users who know or can figure out what kernel version they are using can handle "large numbers".
The rest? You'd be lucky if they know whether they are using opensuse or Ubuntu or windows:). Kernel version? What's that? You'd be lucky if they can tell you what version of ubuntu/suse/windows they have without you telling them step by step. Bonus points if they can tell you what build version of windows they are using;).
Nobody in marketing talks about windows build versions. Similarly Linux kernel version numbering is irrelevant to marketing.
Thing is Linux breaks the ABI compatibility so often, the version number is irrelevant - they could just have a single number that increments for all I care. For other software the version number is important - a major release = expect to lose some backward compatibility, minor release = should be ok without big probs (unless you're using stuff like MySQL where the YeeHaw! Devs do crazy stuff like break "order by desc for innodb" in a minor release because they added some "performance _feature_").
Yeah this debate is getting quite boring, especially since it keeps appearing on slashdot.
If people here can't do rough conversions in their heads (it's not as if we need such high precision in most of such stories) at least a _slashdotter_ should be able to use google to do it.
People complain about dupes from the editors, go see how many of the posts to this article are dupes of previous debates over metric vs imperial.
Give a slashdotter an inch, and you'll get 1.609 kilometres of the same old debates;).
(Yes I'm guilty of posting the same old stuff over and over again myself, but IMO this imperial vs metric debate is far less likely to change anything than the copyright infringement != theft debates and the other usual stuff that crop up, and it's less funny than the "In Soviet Russia" stuff).
I believe the "bell curve" for men is flatter than for women.
There are more male geniuses, crack pots and retards than female ones. There are more males who can run 100m in < 10 seconds than females. There are more grandmaster male chess players than females. There are more male CEOs. There are more males in prison.
There are more males who like to compete than there are females, more males who always have something to prove, no surprise males tend to dominate in fields where being the top or one of the top is important.
Your patients don't really care if you are the top nurse or not - as long as you're not too bad. But if you're doing brain surgery on them, "not too bad" isn't what most patients want to hear;).
I'm half joking but if women have a compulsion to wash their hands frequently, they'd either keep it secret out of embarassment or see a doctor for help, whereas it's not a stretch that a fair number of males could group together and discuss the best soap to use, and brag about how many times they wash a day and how little water they use to do so etc. They already do that for tons of silly hobbies.
And once in a while some of those silly hobbies turn out to be useful.
You can outsource most engineering and science jobs.
It's harder to outsource many of the "women dominated" jobs - good luck outsourcing nursing, school teachers, flight attendants, etc to India.
So why the push for engineering and science? If you want more engineers and scientists in your country, pay more.
If you don't want to pay more, go figure.
Stop trying to trick women into helping increase the supply (more supply = lower pay on average) only to outsource their jobs on the first bad quarter.
There aren't that many male nurses - though their higher upper body strength would help a lot in moving patients. Should there be a male quota for nursing too? Why not?
Non radio uses- if it's a solid and not a mesh dish, you could mount a microphone at the focal point and try to listen to stuff far away. Alternatively mount a speaker at the focal point and use it to say "Boo" to the neighbourhood cat;).
For radio uses- add one high powered tesla coil and, well go figure:).
"But if the column is indexed, then the indexes may not match the row content. It "
Doesn't matter. Even if it's indexed, it's not as if the vendor's system would want a different program to be returned by the select. It'll want that very same program. It's just getting that program with one less bug.
If it had required a change in size (smaller or bigger), I'd have said "can't do it". Hey I'm lazy. And though I may be crazy, I'm not that crazy.
If you are already running stuff in a virtual machine it should not be too difficult to clone them while they are running. VMware already allows rapid live migration of virtual machines to different hosts (vmotion), I believe xen can do that too nowadays.
But if they are not running on a virtual machine it will be difficult, because with most virtualization solutions, the virtual hardware would be different from the real hardware. The NIC drivers, video, SCSI etc would be different.
Well the article says: "tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored."
I doubt shutting that sort of thing down for a short while is going to be such a big problem.
You'll have to shutdown to make backups for evidence purposes, and possibly to regain access to the system (which was what the "reboot" bit was about).
I'd then be comparing files with old backups.
Now the big issue is:
a) Do you yank the plug and risk data loss/corruption due to unclean shutdown (run sync like mad and hope for the best?) or b) Do you attempt a clean shutdown and risk running a booby trap that you didn't spot.
If it's just a file server, a) isn't so bad. If it's a db server, hope it's not MySQL and hope your drives don't lie about stuff being on the platters.
If you run the VM in an x86 emulator that did not emulate the bugs, then yes it would mitigate the attack.
However emulation is slower than virtualisation. Virtualization is where the virtual machine runs code natively (stuff like vmware modifies the executed code a bit if necessary and does it on the fly).
Stuff like "old-skool" Xen don't even modify the code ( need more cooperation from the O/S to "fake it").
So I doubt it'll help.
If the attacks are really practical and the exploited bugs unpatchable, it could be a much bigger deal than the infamous Intel math bug. It would have been easy to workaround the math bug, probably without that much loss in performance.
And here I was considering getting a new PC this year. I wonder about the AMD errata. Oh well.
I'm on AMD at home, but I bet a fair number of sites I use do run on Intel systems. If they go down, it'll be rather annoying.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if PowerPC, AMD etc have exploitable errata too. But if you were going to pick a CPU to exploit, you might as well try Intel first.
Yes it requires a "real DNS server" to do the queries.
That said, I've looked at the dnsmasq source and the BIND9 source, and done some patches to both. I don't really know C, but looking at the code, I'd use BIND9 over dnsmasq.
At home I'm using djbdns, djbdns has its problems but I can live with them.
One bug less in the vendor's software (was working for a systems integration and engineering company then). Vendor was notified of bug (and "proper" fix suggestion). Customer was happy. The bosses approved it.
You can file it under "Worst Idea Ever" if you want.
I file it under: "Works For Me".
Anyway, point is, if encryption is not used, you cannot assume a db password would prevent access to the DB data. Many dbs also have "proper" ways of regaining access as long as you have "root" or equivalent.
If Microsoft stopped releasing new _slightly_ incompatible versions of windows for long enough, someone will likely catch up and make a Windows compatible O/S.
Then Microsoft to Microsoft Windows will be like IBM to IBM PC BIOS.
For example: if people really stuck to Windows XP + DX9 for say the next 5 years, in that time WINE will come up with very good XP and DX9 compatibility, then someone could presumably package it nicely enough to release as a "drop in" replacement for Windows - different theme etc, but works like Windows XP.
If that happens Microsoft would lose significant control, just like Intel has lost significant control over where x86 is heading - they tried to EOL x86 and push the market onto the Itanic, but AMD produced AMD64 and so Intel had to do something like AMD64 (EMT64).
WINE is already pretty darn close. Probably too close for Microsoft's comfort. Microsoft might sue for patent infringement etc, but it is not certain they'll win, or win in all countries.
The only problem is if encryption was used AND he hasn't left an open session somewhere which you can somehow get access to.
If the data is not encrypted it doesn't matter if the SQL DB uses passwords or not. Same for the webserver and other stuff.
I've patched programs stored in a DB without knowing the DB admin password, just by hexediting the DB files. Didn't have to wait for the vendor's developers in the USA to get back to us;).
As long as you have read access to the unencrypted data you have enough access - even if it means changing the drives and reloading the data.
Unless you know fully what he has done, you should not continue using it and assume that everything is working properly and will continue to work properly.
Typically corrupted data is worse than destroyed data.
At least when the data is gone, the problem is a lot more obvious.
Imagine if the payrolls have been tampered with (payroll files are mentioned in the article) rather than destroyed. And the law (and other) documents have had the word "not" randomly removed in 0.5% of the occurrences;), and a few numbers changed by a few percent.
"HIV transmission among homosexual males is in large part due to the laws preventing homosexuals marriage... not being allowed to marry leads to more promiscuous behavior"
Citation please. That's quite a remarkable claim.
Somehow being allowed to marry will reduce HIV transmission rather than the knowledge that you might eventually get AIDs and die earlier won't?
The condom stuff doesn't work as well as promising and trying to not sleep around? Funny I've been hearing the opposite for years.
The last I checked in the countries where homosexual behaviour is legal, they don't execute people for committing adultery or fornication (having sex with someone you are not married to).
If they did that sort of thing, that would definitely reduce STD transmission. There would be a strong selection against those who were promiscuous (the more partners you have the higher chance for you to get caught and be "taken out of circulation" ).
Now is that cure worse than the disease? Depends on the disease and treatment available?
As far as I know there are many homosexuals who are faithful to their partners, and there are those who aren't. I'm not convinced marriage is going to change things significantly. Nothing stops homosexuals from swearing the usual marriage vows to each other. In the countries concerned is not the marriage law that stops people from committing adultery.
If you measure advancement in $$$, science, tech, power, etc probably not.
If you measure advancement in other ways, maybe so.
It may well be that the OP is thinking that advances are love, compassion and mercy, and that the $$$, tech and power are just tools to achieve those advancements, or just minor advancements.
Have we achieved more love, compassion and mercy?
I suppose most of the "advanced" nations fight wars differently from the old days where enslavement and mass "genocide" was common (may be even "standard procedure" - just look in the Bible and other ancient texts for what typically happens to the loser after a war). Note mass killing is not the same as what happened in the old days - in the old days when they kill everyone, they kill _everyone_, some even put salt on the fields so that anyone who got away won't be able to plant crops.
In some nations the richer ones are taxed to help the poor, sick etc. Is that an advancement? Perhaps it depends on what proportion of the taxed are actually happy to be taxed for that purpose, and how effective it ends up being.
I call those people "slash and burn" CEOs/shareholders.
You see lots of people saying bad things about people/countries who burn or chop down forests to put plantations/property/livestock on them.
But even that sort of thing is a lot longer term than the next quarter.
Oh yeah maybe in the long run global warming will kill us. But in the long run we are all dead. And in the next few hundred years, what are the odds we'd work out a way to survive off this planet in a _sustainable_ way before killing ourselves or be killed by something beyond our control? As a long term investor are you willing to bet on that? Nobody is working on space stations with artificial "gravity", NASA are only working on survivable short term missions (to moon, mars).
If no, then it should be no surprise if some people think the best plan is the short term gain one.
All our eggs are in a basket that is in a bad shape. So many rational people understandably think that the best decision for them is "eat, drink, be merry for tomorrow we die".
A sufficiently big mansion could hide that shanty town well and long enough. Lots of rich dictators in Myanmar and other countries appear to think that way. Lots of CEOs think that way - and their "mansions" may not even be in the same countries as the shanty towns they create.
Nowadays the only difference between software and hardware is:
1) Software is something you configure/modify. 2) Hardware is something someone else configures/modifies.
To Joe Average a wireless router is mainly/completely hardware. To many slashdotters a wireless router is mainly software.
To some people the Intel CPU is completely hardware. To some people in Intel (and other places), the Intel CPU is at least partly software (you can soft-patch the Intel CPU to workaround _some_ bugs - that's what some of those BIOS updates actually do - they're not fixing firmware bugs, but CPU bugs).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I have no idea whether it'll work. I'm pretty certain it won't be FCC compliant though...
;).
If it works it may interfere with your access to slashdot...
Hmm someone has posted a mike and speaker suggestion higher up, but later than my post. Wonder if I'll be modded redundant by mods who don't check the dates and times
So what happens when you run low on disk space?
If they use dynamic wear levelling it's bad sector time soon...
If they use static wear levelling - the performance is worse, because they basically have to move the free space around (make one read and two writes).
That's what the manufacturers claim. But has anyone really tested it? At least for a few months of continuous writing.
Anyway, the problem with current flash drives is they are usually _slower_ for writes than hard drives.
I don't see how kernel versions are relevant to market perceptions.
:). Kernel version? What's that? You'd be lucky if they can tell you what version of ubuntu/suse/windows they have without you telling them step by step. Bonus points if they can tell you what build version of windows they are using ;).
AFAIK the end users who know or can figure out what kernel version they are using can handle "large numbers".
The rest? You'd be lucky if they know whether they are using opensuse or Ubuntu or windows
Nobody in marketing talks about windows build versions. Similarly Linux kernel version numbering is irrelevant to marketing.
Thing is Linux breaks the ABI compatibility so often, the version number is irrelevant - they could just have a single number that increments for all I care. For other software the version number is important - a major release = expect to lose some backward compatibility, minor release = should be ok without big probs (unless you're using stuff like MySQL where the YeeHaw! Devs do crazy stuff like break "order by desc for innodb" in a minor release because they added some "performance _feature_").
Yeah this debate is getting quite boring, especially since it keeps appearing on slashdot.
If people here can't do rough conversions in their heads (it's not as if we need such high precision in most of such stories) at least a _slashdotter_ should be able to use google to do it.
Here you go:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=40+million+cubic+yards+in+cubic+meters&meta=
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=1720+feet+in+meters
People complain about dupes from the editors, go see how many of the posts to this article are dupes of previous debates over metric vs imperial.
Give a slashdotter an inch, and you'll get 1.609 kilometres of the same old debates ;).
(Yes I'm guilty of posting the same old stuff over and over again myself, but IMO this imperial vs metric debate is far less likely to change anything than the copyright infringement != theft debates and the other usual stuff that crop up, and it's less funny than the "In Soviet Russia" stuff).
I believe the "bell curve" for men is flatter than for women.
;).
There are more male geniuses, crack pots and retards than female ones.
There are more males who can run 100m in < 10 seconds than females.
There are more grandmaster male chess players than females.
There are more male CEOs.
There are more males in prison.
There are more males who like to compete than there are females, more males who always have something to prove, no surprise males tend to dominate in fields where being the top or one of the top is important.
Your patients don't really care if you are the top nurse or not - as long as you're not too bad.
But if you're doing brain surgery on them, "not too bad" isn't what most patients want to hear
I'm half joking but if women have a compulsion to wash their hands frequently, they'd either keep it secret out of embarassment or see a doctor for help, whereas it's not a stretch that a fair number of males could group together and discuss the best soap to use, and brag about how many times they wash a day and how little water they use to do so etc. They already do that for tons of silly hobbies.
And once in a while some of those silly hobbies turn out to be useful.
You can outsource most engineering and science jobs.
It's harder to outsource many of the "women dominated" jobs - good luck outsourcing nursing, school teachers, flight attendants, etc to India.
So why the push for engineering and science? If you want more engineers and scientists in your country, pay more.
If you don't want to pay more, go figure.
Stop trying to trick women into helping increase the supply (more supply = lower pay on average) only to outsource their jobs on the first bad quarter.
There aren't that many male nurses - though their higher upper body strength would help a lot in moving patients. Should there be a male quota for nursing too? Why not?
Non radio uses- if it's a solid and not a mesh dish, you could mount a microphone at the focal point and try to listen to stuff far away. Alternatively mount a speaker at the focal point and use it to say "Boo" to the neighbourhood cat ;).
:).
For radio uses- add one high powered tesla coil and, well go figure
"But if the column is indexed, then the indexes may not match the row content. It "
Doesn't matter. Even if it's indexed, it's not as if the vendor's system would want a different program to be returned by the select. It'll want that very same program. It's just getting that program with one less bug.
If it had required a change in size (smaller or bigger), I'd have said "can't do it". Hey I'm lazy. And though I may be crazy, I'm not that crazy.
Yes. That was what I was thinking of.
But note that: "the user-mode part of ReactOS is almost entirely WINE-based". ( http://www.reactos.org/en/about_whatisreactos.html )
So if Microsoft takes out WINE it will probably take out ReactOS too.
If you are already running stuff in a virtual machine it should not be too difficult to clone them while they are running. VMware already allows rapid live migration of virtual machines to different hosts (vmotion), I believe xen can do that too nowadays.
But if they are not running on a virtual machine it will be difficult, because with most virtualization solutions, the virtual hardware would be different from the real hardware. The NIC drivers, video, SCSI etc would be different.
Well the article says: "tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored."
I doubt shutting that sort of thing down for a short while is going to be such a big problem.
You'll have to shutdown to make backups for evidence purposes, and possibly to regain access to the system (which was what the "reboot" bit was about).
I'd then be comparing files with old backups.
Now the big issue is:
a) Do you yank the plug and risk data loss/corruption due to unclean shutdown (run sync like mad and hope for the best?)
or
b) Do you attempt a clean shutdown and risk running a booby trap that you didn't spot.
If it's just a file server, a) isn't so bad. If it's a db server, hope it's not MySQL and hope your drives don't lie about stuff being on the platters.
If you run the VM in an x86 emulator that did not emulate the bugs, then yes it would mitigate the attack.
However emulation is slower than virtualisation. Virtualization is where the virtual machine runs code natively (stuff like vmware modifies the executed code a bit if necessary and does it on the fly).
Stuff like "old-skool" Xen don't even modify the code ( need more cooperation from the O/S to "fake it").
So I doubt it'll help.
If the attacks are really practical and the exploited bugs unpatchable, it could be a much bigger deal than the infamous Intel math bug. It would have been easy to workaround the math bug, probably without that much loss in performance.
And here I was considering getting a new PC this year. I wonder about the AMD errata. Oh well.
I'm on AMD at home, but I bet a fair number of sites I use do run on Intel systems. If they go down, it'll be rather annoying.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if PowerPC, AMD etc have exploitable errata too. But if you were going to pick a CPU to exploit, you might as well try Intel first.
Yes it requires a "real DNS server" to do the queries.
That said, I've looked at the dnsmasq source and the BIND9 source, and done some patches to both. I don't really know C, but looking at the code, I'd use BIND9 over dnsmasq.
At home I'm using djbdns, djbdns has its problems but I can live with them.
Maybe some day I'll write my own DNS server.
> But if you passed me straight up ANSI C, and were like "does this have any vulnerabilities?",
;).
Given enough lines of C code, if you guess "Yes", I think you'd be right > 90% of the time.
One bug less in the vendor's software (was working for a systems integration and engineering company then). Vendor was notified of bug (and "proper" fix suggestion). Customer was happy. The bosses approved it.
You can file it under "Worst Idea Ever" if you want.
I file it under: "Works For Me".
Anyway, point is, if encryption is not used, you cannot assume a db password would prevent access to the DB data. Many dbs also have "proper" ways of regaining access as long as you have "root" or equivalent.
There's at least one other reason.
If Microsoft stopped releasing new _slightly_ incompatible versions of windows for long enough, someone will likely catch up and make a Windows compatible O/S.
Then Microsoft to Microsoft Windows will be like IBM to IBM PC BIOS.
For example: if people really stuck to Windows XP + DX9 for say the next 5 years, in that time WINE will come up with very good XP and DX9 compatibility, then someone could presumably package it nicely enough to release as a "drop in" replacement for Windows - different theme etc, but works like Windows XP.
If that happens Microsoft would lose significant control, just like Intel has lost significant control over where x86 is heading - they tried to EOL x86 and push the market onto the Itanic, but AMD produced AMD64 and so Intel had to do something like AMD64 (EMT64).
WINE is already pretty darn close. Probably too close for Microsoft's comfort. Microsoft might sue for patent infringement etc, but it is not certain they'll win, or win in all countries.
The only problem is if encryption was used AND he hasn't left an open session somewhere which you can somehow get access to.
;).
If the data is not encrypted it doesn't matter if the SQL DB uses passwords or not. Same for the webserver and other stuff.
I've patched programs stored in a DB without knowing the DB admin password, just by hexediting the DB files. Didn't have to wait for the vendor's developers in the USA to get back to us
As long as you have read access to the unencrypted data you have enough access - even if it means changing the drives and reloading the data.
Unless you know fully what he has done, you should not continue using it and assume that everything is working properly and will continue to work properly.
;), and a few numbers changed by a few percent.
Typically corrupted data is worse than destroyed data.
At least when the data is gone, the problem is a lot more obvious.
Imagine if the payrolls have been tampered with (payroll files are mentioned in the article) rather than destroyed. And the law (and other) documents have had the word "not" randomly removed in 0.5% of the occurrences
"HIV transmission among homosexual males is in large part due to the laws preventing homosexuals marriage... not being allowed to marry leads to more promiscuous behavior"
Citation please. That's quite a remarkable claim.
Somehow being allowed to marry will reduce HIV transmission rather than the knowledge that you might eventually get AIDs and die earlier won't?
The condom stuff doesn't work as well as promising and trying to not sleep around? Funny I've been hearing the opposite for years.
The last I checked in the countries where homosexual behaviour is legal, they don't execute people for committing adultery or fornication (having sex with someone you are not married to).
If they did that sort of thing, that would definitely reduce STD transmission. There would be a strong selection against those who were promiscuous (the more partners you have the higher chance for you to get caught and be "taken out of circulation" ).
Now is that cure worse than the disease? Depends on the disease and treatment available?
As far as I know there are many homosexuals who are faithful to their partners, and there are those who aren't. I'm not convinced marriage is going to change things significantly. Nothing stops homosexuals from swearing the usual marriage vows to each other. In the countries concerned is not the marriage law that stops people from committing adultery.
But this is cool if it works:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html
http://www.gizmag.com/go/7214/
It depends on how you measure advancement.
If you measure advancement in $$$, science, tech, power, etc probably not.
If you measure advancement in other ways, maybe so.
It may well be that the OP is thinking that advances are love, compassion and mercy, and that the $$$, tech and power are just tools to achieve those advancements, or just minor advancements.
Have we achieved more love, compassion and mercy?
I suppose most of the "advanced" nations fight wars differently from the old days where enslavement and mass "genocide" was common (may be even "standard procedure" - just look in the Bible and other ancient texts for what typically happens to the loser after a war). Note mass killing is not the same as what happened in the old days - in the old days when they kill everyone, they kill _everyone_, some even put salt on the fields so that anyone who got away won't be able to plant crops.
In some nations the richer ones are taxed to help the poor, sick etc. Is that an advancement? Perhaps it depends on what proportion of the taxed are actually happy to be taxed for that purpose, and how effective it ends up being.
I call those people "slash and burn" CEOs/shareholders.
You see lots of people saying bad things about people/countries who burn or chop down forests to put plantations/property/livestock on them.
But even that sort of thing is a lot longer term than the next quarter.
Oh yeah maybe in the long run global warming will kill us. But in the long run we are all dead. And in the next few hundred years, what are the odds we'd work out a way to survive off this planet in a _sustainable_ way before killing ourselves or be killed by something beyond our control? As a long term investor are you willing to bet on that? Nobody is working on space stations with artificial "gravity", NASA are only working on survivable short term missions (to moon, mars).
If no, then it should be no surprise if some people think the best plan is the short term gain one.
All our eggs are in a basket that is in a bad shape. So many rational people understandably think that the best decision for them is "eat, drink, be merry for tomorrow we die".
A sufficiently big mansion could hide that shanty town well and long enough. Lots of rich dictators in Myanmar and other countries appear to think that way. Lots of CEOs think that way - and their "mansions" may not even be in the same countries as the shanty towns they create.
Nowadays the only difference between software and hardware is:
1) Software is something you configure/modify.
2) Hardware is something someone else configures/modifies.
To Joe Average a wireless router is mainly/completely hardware.
To many slashdotters a wireless router is mainly software.
To some people the Intel CPU is completely hardware.
To some people in Intel (and other places), the Intel CPU is at least partly software (you can soft-patch the Intel CPU to workaround _some_ bugs - that's what some of those BIOS updates actually do - they're not fixing firmware bugs, but CPU bugs).