Way back in 1981, I almost took a job operating a tool affectionately known as "IMMA" for a largish electronics company in Dallas. There were only 12 of these machines ever made (6 of em were in Japan) and they were for "failure analysis".
You could pry the lid off a chip, mount it in this machine, peel off the atoms one layer at a time and it would tell you what the impurities were in each little patch of silicon. The output was a 3D plot of the part in dopants. You could determine process failures or derive the design.
That was almost 20 years ago -- they must have better stuff by now.
After a little more thought, I've realized that this is the greatest advantage of open source, and does not require me to personally review every line of source. The Debian site has a ready list of security alerts, and whenever someone finds so much as a _weakness_ in the system, a patch is usually ready within a few days.
Actually, if Mr. Garfinkel is so worried about virions, howcome he doesn't 'show us the source'?
That being said, I do think that Linux is destined to be used by a lot more naive users, and stupid things like malicious scripts will make their way around. Whether you think of a macro virus (read 'script') as a virus or minor annoyance is mostly a matter of your skill level, and the unwashed masses are going to use the term 'virus'.
At one time, I thought the notion of a macro virus in Word was silly. After all, you can just delete the macro, right? Which I've actually done with some of the macro virii. However, a lot of Word users are not aware of the macro system at all, and for them, the macro virus would run unnoticed.
If Linux picks up a lot of just-average users, malicious code could actually be written in source form, distributed with packages and compiled in. Frankly, I don't think I've looked at as much as.01% of the source on my Linux box, there's just so much of it.
Heh, come to think of it, some software vendors might think of all Linux as malicious code! Bwuhahahahahaha...
"You sold me this thing and said it would play DVDs on my computer. It does not do that..."
The suit would have to be directed against the hardware vendors, not the MPAA of course. However, the hardware vendors undoubtedly have some clout with MPAA. Seems like there ought to be enough Linux users to amount to a class.
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Of course there's been an environmentally friendly technology for moving things on water for, oh, 5,000 years or more already.
(telecom slump, dot-com bubble pop)
Way back in 1981, I almost took a job operating a tool affectionately known as "IMMA" for a largish electronics company in Dallas. There were only 12 of these machines ever made (6 of em were in Japan) and they were for "failure analysis".
You could pry the lid off a chip, mount it in this machine, peel off the atoms one layer at a time and it would tell you what the impurities were in each little patch of silicon. The output was a 3D plot of the part in dopants. You could determine process failures or derive the design.
That was almost 20 years ago -- they must have better stuff by now.
After a little more thought, I've realized that this is the greatest advantage of open source, and does not require me to personally review every line of source. The Debian site has a ready list of security alerts, and whenever someone finds so much as a _weakness_ in the system, a patch is usually ready within a few days.
Actually, if Mr. Garfinkel is so worried about virions, howcome he doesn't 'show us the source'?
That being said, I do think that Linux is destined to be used by a lot more naive users, and stupid things like malicious scripts will make their way around. Whether you think of a macro virus (read 'script') as a virus or minor annoyance is mostly a matter of your skill level, and the unwashed masses are going to use the term 'virus'.
As will hucksters like Garfinkel.
At one time, I thought the notion of a macro virus in Word was silly. After all, you can just delete the macro, right? Which I've actually done with some of the macro virii. However, a lot of Word users are not aware of the macro system at all, and for them, the macro virus would run unnoticed.
.01% of the source on my Linux box, there's just so much of it.
If Linux picks up a lot of just-average users, malicious code could actually be written in source form, distributed with packages and compiled in. Frankly, I don't think I've looked at as much as
Heh, come to think of it, some software vendors might think of all Linux as malicious code! Bwuhahahahahaha...
"You sold me this thing and said it would play DVDs on my computer. It does not do that..."
The suit would have to be directed against the hardware vendors, not the MPAA of course. However, the hardware vendors undoubtedly have some clout with MPAA. Seems like there ought to be enough Linux users to amount to a class.
Then, you shoot all the lawyers...
Inasmuch as Linux DVD users amount to a class. That's the ticket -- sue the bastards!