So, your code is *not* just a jump to a registration routine that happens to run in a Z80 VM. That would indeed be trivial to hack.
Instead, the code runs in the Z80 VM at a high level. Presumably, you run 99% of the cycles in native code, but the high level control is Z80 VM. So, let's say the top-level loop has 1000 or so instructions of Z80 code, some of which are the registration routine.
If the attacker looks for the code that displays a dialog saying "you are not registered" they will simply find the code for branching in the VM, which is executing many times for other purposes.
If I were the attacker, my approach would probably then be to find the address of the code that would be executed by the VM if it had *not* branched, and to replace the "you are not registered" code with a jump back to that location.
Alternatively, I might observe that the same code was being executed again and again, and surmise that it had multiple purposes. I might splice in a test for the Nth execution of the code and have it not branch. That would slow down the VM, but since you aren't running much code in the VM it won't make a big difference.
Bottom line? Yes, it probably would trip up some people. If your program is only $30, they will get discouraged. If it's $300 they will probably figure it out.
Most likely negligible. An efficient system wouldn't put magnetic fields into the passenger compartment--it would be a waste. I wager anything that leaks can be blocked by a fairly thin ferro-magnetic shield.
OK, reactor boy is great. Is it better than the JATO car story? I'd call this a genre, but I can only think of these two stories. Then of course there are "geek legends" that are actually true, like the guy who built the roller-coaster in Indiana. Can anybody think of more geek legends, if we can think of enough then there could be a poll.
Note, mere "hacking" doesn't qualify. In order to be a geek legend, you have to be a single person, or perhaps a very small group, you have to be outside the corporate setting, you have to work with a technology that is dangerous and thought to be beyond the scope of what such a group can deal with. For example, concoct a story about a guy who built a submarine in his garage, took it out to sea, and penetrated a carrier battle group. Nobody can verify it because the Navy immediatly classified his plans, moved the model to storage, and ordered him to clam up (under threat of treason charges) for national security reasons because the plans might allow enemies to penetrate carrier groups. If you want to author such a story, feel free to take this idea and flesh it out. Post it to/.. I think we would all enjoy it.
That's too bad. If they declared war on Britain and America, they might actually have a chance. I guess they will just have to suffer with their current government.
The operative word here is wants to hack on. Sure, there are lots of people who want to use it, but how many are there with the time, the ability, and the desire to maintain it?
From now on, perhaps I should put a disclaimer on all my stuff that says:
The following article contains U.S. bits. Be sure to check with your local government(s) before importing the remaining bits. By agreeing to do this, you are assuming liability for compliance with local laws. This agreement also applies to the bits in this agreement, so if you already read the agreement and it is not in compliance with local law, you are SOL not me.
In all seriousness, this could work because the Zimbabwe ISPs would have to check to make sure that the bits were legal for import before importing them, since I can always disclaim that the bits are not intended for export. Faced with such a daunting task, their ISPs would soon shut down.
This seems only fair, since nobody forced them to start an ISP in Zimbabwe anyway.
People are starving for inexpensive, easy to setup, wireless. Some day we'll be able to just slap a $20 antenna on any suburban rooftop and log onto a network. Until then, there are a lot of people looking for "solutions". Move fast if this excites you. Entrepreneurs are already moving on it.
If this doesn't turn you on, exploit fears of terrorism. That could include surveillance, security, privacy issues, encryption... anything spook-related.
Of course, you'll be lucky to get something you actually like in this economy.
Windows has detected a burned-out tube. Please turn off the computer, replace the tube, check to make sure there is adequate fuel in your diesel generator, and reboot.
Yeah, and something tells me they aren't planning any grade-crossings at 500 km/h. A lot of this is probably cultural too. How many drunk rednecks are there in Russia who try to race trains at grade crossings? Until recently, Russia's equivalent of the redneck couldn't afford a pickup. Maybe these stats will change over time.
Well, we could translate it into Encyclopedia Brittanicas, but then nobody would tell you how much it costs.
(don't moderate this comment unless you've had an encounter with an EB salesman in pre-internet times. Something tells me their sales strategy is much more customer friendly now for obvious reasons).
Bah! An efficient workplace requires people who know how to work with eachother, relationships, context, the right ammount of routine balanced against variety.
The mass-produced interchangeable part paradigm works very well with machines. Since the dawn of the assembly-line, corporate wonks have been trying to do it with people, and with miserable results.
Yeah, sure, incentivize your interchangeable drones to come to work earlier and enter a FIFO queue of interchageable work terminals. Looks great on paper.
I can see several things happening. First, the obvious worst-case scenario is where people feel (justifiably so) that they are being treated like robots, and a sense of disatisfaction, isolation, and anger sets in. You'll never know if you're sitting next to the guy who's gonna go postal today.
Second (and far more likely) the traditional type of social organization will start to impose itself on the system. People won't regard this arrangement in the nice, neat, theoretical way that management would like. People will exchange the possibility of a "better" cube for the *same* cube each day to provide continuity. There will be people who "save" cubes like people save seats in bars and churches (Theoreticly anybody could sit at Norm's seat at Cheers, but in practice, nobody does).
Unless they are shift-workers, people will "mark their territory" and after a while people will start saying stuff like "oh, that's Jane's cube" if some other person tries to sit there.
If management tries to deter this by enforcing a policy of cleaning cubes at the end of the day, the anger thing might happen, or people might bring "personality packs" that they set up and tear down at the end of the day.
Then, management might have start forcing employees to log in at a different terminal each day, thus wiping away the last vestige of this territorial pack mentality.
What of these packs? Well, there will be tribes of course. Over there in the corner, that's the JVM tribe, there's the sales tribe, the object modeling tribe, etc. Why would a salesman want to sit next to an object modeler? How do you know where to point the nerf gun if the territory keeps shifting? It would be like Afghanistan. Friendly nerf fire casualties could skyrocket until the system works itself out.
Once the territories are established, leaders will emerge, hierarchies will form, etc. It's inevitable.
The system they are describing, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. It could in fact, be a much better framework in which to establish cliques and hierarchies than simply *assigning* places to people.
However, if it's coupled with an attempt by management to overturn the normal social order, they are just wasting their time and actually making things worse. Nevermind all this network stuff. Face-time still matters. Your online friends and co-workers just aren't the same as people you actually have lunch with and throw things at.
Have you ever even tried to build a working distro completely from sources without even a pre-existing binary image for a minimal OS to work from?
So, if you can't "make all" with this thing, then it's just a useless bunch of code. What's the harm in distributing useless code, except to the guys who waste the time distributing it?
It's a shocking business mistake, but that is not the grounds on which to reject it, but rather the sheer contempt for the community from whose work they seek to profit
If it's really such a shocking business mistake, the market will "take care" of them. When I first read this article, I thought the poster had carelessly typed binary instead of source. After all, Free Software people are always griping about the source, not the binary. If there's any reason to reject this, it's because it won't build cleanly on your box, not because of some overzealous misguided interpretation of what "the community" expects.
I don't think even RMS would have problems with a source-only distro. After all, if it comes with source and makefiles, it's... well... source! How do they say... "if it isn't source, it's not software"? So what's the problem? Granted, it's really foolish not to include even a minimal kernel and binary build tools to compile everything else, but there is nothing in the GPL that says you aren't allowed to be a fool.
I could also see why they might label it as the worst kind of theft because...
...the victim is totally defenseless. A shopkeeper might shoot you. Even an old lady might struggle for her purse, but a creator whose social contract is broken has no defense. So in this regard the pirate is worse than someone who snatches a purse from an old lady.
He's already done that. OK... since he's an atheist he doesn't denounce things as "mortal sins" but he says proprietary software is immoral, which is about as close as you are going to get from an atheist.
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
Yeah! Last thing we need is fresh grads who actually know how stuff works. Give 'em to me thinking everything is a black box. Why, best thing is if they view the computer, the company, the government, the whole world and everything in it as a mysterious black box. That way Mr. Scorpio and I can fill their heads with our Mantra of Death(TM) while they lounge in their business hamocks. I sure hope this works better than our last endeavor.
No, that's not Slashdot. Waiting a month to post the article, and tossing in a link to some guy who has a modified version of the distro hosted on a server with a 500 gig hard transfer limit. That's Slashdot.:)
When I was a kid, one of the older boys... 13-ish, 14-ish, actually made a ring of fire with gasoline around some people and set it ablaze. They had been spending the day firing illegal fireworks and stuff, and that was one of the straws the broke the camels back. The cops were called. I didn't witness the alleged ring-of-fire incident; it may have been just a tale told by the older kids, but the cops *were* called (as confirmed by adults talking about it) and I did see something I had never seen before--a model rocket (no doubt they were planning to fire it at an angle less than that recommended by the Estes junior rocketeer's guidelines). At any rate, maybe Johnny Cash had something to do with it... Ring of Fire was Cash, right? or was that Elvis?
A while later, this kid was playing army with b-b guns, and he got shot in the neck. He was lucky it didn't hit anything important. Maybe he thought he would "be all that he could be" if he decided to engage in live fire exercises instead of just playing football or something...
Then again, I can't think of what might have inspired this guy I knew to blow a log 6 feet into the air with home-made explosives, or for me to start a fire with methanol on a concrete driveway and extinguish it mere seconds before my friend's mother turned the corner, or to play with bottle-rockets, matches and stuff. It seemed like there was that age... like... 13 to 14, where fire and explosions were the thing to do. Most of us grew out of it. The ones who had all of their fingers left and didn't grow out of it must have joined the army or something.
The US is a social/capitalist democracy, and very often we are living in the No Man's Land between the two sides.
The US is a republic with a mixed socialist/capitalist economy. Actually, most countries have mixed socialist/capitalist economies, even the Soviet Union had some capitalism. I agree with the second part of your statement. It is a strange brew indeed sometimes...
Social security, some utilities, transportation, education: usually socialist. You can't opt out of social security. Opting out of utilities is usually impractical for technical reasons. You can't opt out of transportation subsidies. You can opt out of socialized education in the US, but you still have to pay for it. The arts are partially socialized (PBS, NEA) but most art is produced by the free market. Actually, finding an industry that is not to some extent socialized in the US is rather difficult! Just look at the recent farm subsidy. Radical hippy music festivals aren't subsidized... rather ironic considering the leftist leanings of people you often find at such events. Let's see... talk radio isn't subsidized. I'd like to see Rush Limbaugh apply for an NEA grant, just for the humor value.
Actually, in economic terms Russia is probably now more capitalist than the USA. In terms of free speech though, they have shut down some media outlets in ways that would never happen here. The only way a media outlet could get shut down here is to go bankrupt, broadcast porn/filth in the wrong way, or steal somebody else's content. It's fair enough for me.
Get the guys from Junkyard Wars (aka Scrapheap Challenge for those in the UK) to "bodge" together a motorcycle engine, a propellor, 100kg of C4, a GPS receiver and some control circuitry. Brand new and in quantity these could probably go for about $10,000.
Let's see... for the price of one of these drones (assume $20 million for the drone), we could launch 2000 of our expendable smart bombs.
Now, now, I know theirs will probably be supersonic, but let's face it: most of the enemies can't hit the broad side of a barn, and if we send 5 or 6 of these things on target at least one will get through.
That's the big problem with the US military: too much money spent on big showpiece weapons. They've forgotten what won WWII. It was massive industrial output. We no longer have the ability to flood the battlefield with thousands of cheap weapons. God forbid somebody gets lucky and shoots down a B-2. That's what... a billion dollars? Yikes!
Yeah, I know, we're doing great now, but when it comes to military stuff "now" is yesterday. The future won't look all that bright if we keep buying our weapons from Gucci.
Bzzzt! The GPL does *not* benefit the taxpayers. If GPL software dominates the market, there will be few players in the market. It will have all the characteristics of a monopoly, except there won't be any company to break up. BSD OTOH, allows your so-called "parasites" to step in and compete to remedy such situations.
It would be really ironic if Russia, with its simple flat tax, became more capitalistic than America whose software industry will be effectively socialized if GPL'd software dominates.
Slashdot Mirror
So, your code is *not* just a jump to a registration routine that happens to run in a Z80 VM. That would indeed be trivial to hack.
Instead, the code runs in the Z80 VM at a high level. Presumably, you run 99% of the cycles in native code, but the high level control is Z80 VM. So, let's say the top-level loop has 1000 or so instructions of Z80 code, some of which are the registration routine.
If the attacker looks for the code that displays a dialog saying "you are not registered" they will simply find the code for branching in the VM, which is executing many times for other purposes.
If I were the attacker, my approach would probably then be to find the address of the code that would be executed by the VM if it had *not* branched, and to replace the "you are not registered" code with a jump back to that location.
Alternatively, I might observe that the same code was being executed again and again, and surmise that it had multiple purposes. I might splice in a test for the Nth execution of the code and have it not branch. That would slow down the VM, but since you aren't running much code in the VM it won't make a big difference.
Bottom line? Yes, it probably would trip up some people. If your program is only $30, they will get discouraged. If it's $300 they will probably figure it out.
Is there anything I'm missing?
Big Brother is watching you watching Big Brother watch you watch Big Brother watching you.
Most likely negligible. An efficient system wouldn't put magnetic fields into the passenger compartment--it would be a waste. I wager anything that leaks can be blocked by a fairly thin ferro-magnetic shield.
OK, reactor boy is great. Is it better than the JATO car story? I'd call this a genre, but I can only think of these two stories. Then of course there are "geek legends" that are actually true, like the guy who built the roller-coaster in Indiana. Can anybody think of more geek legends, if we can think of enough then there could be a poll.
Note, mere "hacking" doesn't qualify. In order to be a geek legend, you have to be a single person, or perhaps a very small group, you have to be outside the corporate setting, you have to work with a technology that is dangerous and thought to be beyond the scope of what such a group can deal with. For example, concoct a story about a guy who built a submarine in his garage, took it out to sea, and penetrated a carrier battle group. Nobody can verify it because the Navy immediatly classified his plans, moved the model to storage, and ordered him to clam up (under threat of treason charges) for national security reasons because the plans might allow enemies to penetrate carrier groups. If you want to author such a story, feel free to take this idea and flesh it out. Post it to /.. I think we would all enjoy it.
RTFF
That's too bad. If they declared war on Britain and America, they might actually have a chance. I guess they will just have to suffer with their current government.
The operative word here is wants to hack on. Sure, there are lots of people who want to use it, but how many are there with the time, the ability, and the desire to maintain it?
Cygnus, BTW, is now a division of RedHat.
From now on, perhaps I should put a disclaimer on all my stuff that says:
The following article contains U.S. bits. Be sure to check with your local government(s) before importing the remaining bits. By agreeing to do this, you are assuming liability for compliance with local laws. This agreement also applies to the bits in this agreement, so if you already read the agreement and it is not in compliance with local law, you are SOL not me.
In all seriousness, this could work because the Zimbabwe ISPs would have to check to make sure that the bits were legal for import before importing them, since I can always disclaim that the bits are not intended for export. Faced with such a daunting task, their ISPs would soon shut down.
This seems only fair, since nobody forced them to start an ISP in Zimbabwe anyway.
People are starving for inexpensive, easy to setup, wireless. Some day we'll be able to just slap a $20 antenna on any suburban rooftop and log onto a network. Until then, there are a lot of people looking for "solutions". Move fast if this excites you. Entrepreneurs are already moving on it.
If this doesn't turn you on, exploit fears of terrorism. That could include surveillance, security, privacy issues, encryption... anything spook-related.
Of course, you'll be lucky to get something you actually like in this economy.
on a Soviet computer
Windows has detected a burned-out tube. Please turn off the computer, replace the tube, check to make sure there is adequate fuel in your diesel generator, and reboot.
Yeah, and something tells me they aren't planning any grade-crossings at 500 km/h. A lot of this is probably cultural too. How many drunk rednecks are there in Russia who try to race trains at grade crossings? Until recently, Russia's equivalent of the redneck couldn't afford a pickup. Maybe these stats will change over time.
Well, we could translate it into Encyclopedia Brittanicas, but then nobody would tell you how much it costs.
(don't moderate this comment unless you've had an encounter with an EB salesman in pre-internet times. Something tells me their sales strategy is much more customer friendly now for obvious reasons).
1. The steady transition of Linux from a "geeks only" OS to a corporate mainstay. This will make Linux a more appealing target.
2. The arrogance of those who think that Linux isn't vulnerable.
...anybody clicked on a gopher link?
If there isn't a patch yet, or if MSFT says you gotta have IE6 or something, easiest thing to do is just block gopher. What is the gopher port anyway?
Bah! An efficient workplace requires people who know how to work with eachother, relationships, context, the right ammount of routine balanced against variety.
The mass-produced interchangeable part paradigm works very well with machines. Since the dawn of the assembly-line, corporate wonks have been trying to do it with people, and with miserable results.
Yeah, sure, incentivize your interchangeable drones to come to work earlier and enter a FIFO queue of interchageable work terminals. Looks great on paper.
I can see several things happening. First, the obvious worst-case scenario is where people feel (justifiably so) that they are being treated like robots, and a sense of disatisfaction, isolation, and anger sets in. You'll never know if you're sitting next to the guy who's gonna go postal today.
Second (and far more likely) the traditional type of social organization will start to impose itself on the system. People won't regard this arrangement in the nice, neat, theoretical way that management would like. People will exchange the possibility of a "better" cube for the *same* cube each day to provide continuity. There will be people who "save" cubes like people save seats in bars and churches (Theoreticly anybody could sit at Norm's seat at Cheers, but in practice, nobody does).
Unless they are shift-workers, people will "mark their territory" and after a while people will start saying stuff like "oh, that's Jane's cube" if some other person tries to sit there.
If management tries to deter this by enforcing a policy of cleaning cubes at the end of the day, the anger thing might happen, or people might bring "personality packs" that they set up and tear down at the end of the day.
Then, management might have start forcing employees to log in at a different terminal each day, thus wiping away the last vestige of this territorial pack mentality.
What of these packs? Well, there will be tribes of course. Over there in the corner, that's the JVM tribe, there's the sales tribe, the object modeling tribe, etc. Why would a salesman want to sit next to an object modeler? How do you know where to point the nerf gun if the territory keeps shifting? It would be like Afghanistan. Friendly nerf fire casualties could skyrocket until the system works itself out.
Once the territories are established, leaders will emerge, hierarchies will form, etc. It's inevitable.
The system they are describing, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. It could in fact, be a much better framework in which to establish cliques and hierarchies than simply *assigning* places to people.
However, if it's coupled with an attempt by management to overturn the normal social order, they are just wasting their time and actually making things worse. Nevermind all this network stuff. Face-time still matters. Your online friends and co-workers just aren't the same as people you actually have lunch with and throw things at.
Have you ever even tried to build a working distro completely from sources without even a pre-existing binary image for a minimal OS to work from?
So, if you can't "make all" with this thing, then it's just a useless bunch of code. What's the harm in distributing useless code, except to the guys who waste the time distributing it?
It's a shocking business mistake, but that is not the grounds on which to reject it, but rather the sheer contempt for the community from whose work they seek to profit
If it's really such a shocking business mistake, the market will "take care" of them. When I first read this article, I thought the poster had carelessly typed binary instead of source. After all, Free Software people are always griping about the source, not the binary. If there's any reason to reject this, it's because it won't build cleanly on your box, not because of some overzealous misguided interpretation of what "the community" expects.
I don't think even RMS would have problems with a source-only distro. After all, if it comes with source and makefiles, it's... well... source! How do they say... "if it isn't source, it's not software"? So what's the problem? Granted, it's really foolish not to include even a minimal kernel and binary build tools to compile everything else, but there is nothing in the GPL that says you aren't allowed to be a fool.
Yeah... the offender might get punished and the lawyer gets his fees. The creator is lucky to get anything. That's hardly a defense.
I could also see why they might label it as the worst kind of theft because...
...the victim is totally defenseless. A shopkeeper might shoot you. Even an old lady might struggle for her purse, but a creator whose social contract is broken has no defense. So in this regard the pirate is worse than someone who snatches a purse from an old lady.
He's already done that. OK... since he's an atheist he doesn't denounce things as "mortal sins" but he says proprietary software is immoral, which is about as close as you are going to get from an atheist.
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
Yeah! Last thing we need is fresh grads who actually know how stuff works. Give 'em to me thinking everything is a black box. Why, best thing is if they view the computer, the company, the government, the whole world and everything in it as a mysterious black box. That way Mr. Scorpio and I can fill their heads with our Mantra of Death(TM) while they lounge in their business hamocks. I sure hope this works better than our last endeavor.
No, that's not Slashdot. Waiting a month to post the article, and tossing in a link to some guy who has a modified version of the distro hosted on a server with a 500 gig hard transfer limit. That's Slashdot. :)
When I was a kid, one of the older boys... 13-ish, 14-ish, actually made a ring of fire with gasoline around some people and set it ablaze. They had been spending the day firing illegal fireworks and stuff, and that was one of the straws the broke the camels back. The cops were called. I didn't witness the alleged ring-of-fire incident; it may have been just a tale told by the older kids, but the cops *were* called (as confirmed by adults talking about it) and I did see something I had never seen before--a model rocket (no doubt they were planning to fire it at an angle less than that recommended by the Estes junior rocketeer's guidelines). At any rate, maybe Johnny Cash had something to do with it... Ring of Fire was Cash, right? or was that Elvis?
A while later, this kid was playing army with b-b guns, and he got shot in the neck. He was lucky it didn't hit anything important. Maybe he thought he would "be all that he could be" if he decided to engage in live fire exercises instead of just playing football or something...
Then again, I can't think of what might have inspired this guy I knew to blow a log 6 feet into the air with home-made explosives, or for me to start a fire with methanol on a concrete driveway and extinguish it mere seconds before my friend's mother turned the corner, or to play with bottle-rockets, matches and stuff. It seemed like there was that age... like... 13 to 14, where fire and explosions were the thing to do. Most of us grew out of it. The ones who had all of their fingers left and didn't grow out of it must have joined the army or something.
The US is a social/capitalist democracy, and very often we are living in the No Man's Land between the two sides.
The US is a republic with a mixed socialist/capitalist economy. Actually, most countries have mixed socialist/capitalist economies, even the Soviet Union had some capitalism. I agree with the second part of your statement. It is a strange brew indeed sometimes...
Social security, some utilities, transportation, education: usually socialist. You can't opt out of social security. Opting out of utilities is usually impractical for technical reasons. You can't opt out of transportation subsidies. You can opt out of socialized education in the US, but you still have to pay for it. The arts are partially socialized (PBS, NEA) but most art is produced by the free market. Actually, finding an industry that is not to some extent socialized in the US is rather difficult! Just look at the recent farm subsidy. Radical hippy music festivals aren't subsidized... rather ironic considering the leftist leanings of people you often find at such events. Let's see... talk radio isn't subsidized. I'd like to see Rush Limbaugh apply for an NEA grant, just for the humor value.
Actually, in economic terms Russia is probably now more capitalist than the USA. In terms of free speech though, they have shut down some media outlets in ways that would never happen here. The only way a media outlet could get shut down here is to go bankrupt, broadcast porn/filth in the wrong way, or steal somebody else's content. It's fair enough for me.
Get the guys from Junkyard Wars (aka Scrapheap Challenge for those in the UK) to "bodge" together a motorcycle engine, a propellor, 100kg of C4, a GPS receiver and some control circuitry. Brand new and in quantity these could probably go for about $10,000.
Let's see... for the price of one of these drones (assume $20 million for the drone), we could launch 2000 of our expendable smart bombs.
Now, now, I know theirs will probably be supersonic, but let's face it: most of the enemies can't hit the broad side of a barn, and if we send 5 or 6 of these things on target at least one will get through.
That's the big problem with the US military: too much money spent on big showpiece weapons. They've forgotten what won WWII. It was massive industrial output. We no longer have the ability to flood the battlefield with thousands of cheap weapons. God forbid somebody gets lucky and shoots down a B-2. That's what... a billion dollars? Yikes!
Yeah, I know, we're doing great now, but when it comes to military stuff "now" is yesterday. The future won't look all that bright if we keep buying our weapons from Gucci.
Bzzzt! The GPL does *not* benefit the taxpayers. If GPL software dominates the market, there will be few players in the market. It will have all the characteristics of a monopoly, except there won't be any company to break up. BSD OTOH, allows your so-called "parasites" to step in and compete to remedy such situations.
It would be really ironic if Russia, with its simple flat tax, became more capitalistic than America whose software industry will be effectively socialized if GPL'd software dominates.