Sounds pretty reasonable. At least there's no mention of rootkits for now.
The whole box is a rootkit, who are you kidding...Proprietary firmware that can connect to the internet without your permission, update, and has full local LAN access, probably behind your firewall. Those glowing blue and green lights... luring you in, and then... when you least expect it...
What are the consequences of refusing this firmware update?
After awhile, it'll cease to have any networking support. Even the browser will turn off. Who knows -- it's proprietary. They might even have a logic bomb in there that after a year, it erases all your savegames, stomps on it's own dick, and declares war on Panama in your name, all while throwing the reds in with the whites and focusing microwave energies into your freezer to make your ice cream all melty.
If he left the job (willingly or otherwise) and then divulged the root password to someone who wasn't supposed to have it, he'd definitely be walking on thin ice.
Not really. It's only a crime to access a computer unlawfully, not tell someone how to. Unless, of course, you're inciting them to or advocating criminal activity. Case in point; it's perfectly lawful for you to own a gun or a chemistry set, but not shoot someone or detonate an explosive.
But he wasn't responsible for it after he was terminated.
Neither did he, upon being fired, have any remaining obligation to the company, which is rather the point of the case: Is it unlawful to withold passwords from the employer after termination? I mean, it's one thing to change the password to what they ask, it's another to give up your password, which might be usable on other things that don't belong to them (like your personal data). It's bad practice, sure, but a real one.
It is real simple: Whoever owns the systems, and their designated agents, have a right to have access.
Yeah, say that with a straight face to the guy demanding the root password because he read "it was important", and you got a call last week from him asking you to change his desktop wallpaper because "it got stuck". IT admins not going in for that kind of non-sense is a compelling reason why large sections of the internet don't slide off the side of the planet in a dribble-like fashion.
This guy was responsible for critical public infrastructure -- infrastructure that kept working for months after they fired him. They broke it repeatedly after gaining access, and it took hundreds, if not thousands, of billable hours to repair the damage that happened when those owners and their "designated agents" got their hands around the gooey core of the network.
Alas, there's way too litle fuel even for routes with lowest energy requirements:(
Wait, why did you send a link to an article that says there are an infinite number of routes that require no energy to transit then? I think you meant to say "there's too little fuel to do anything useful before the satellite dies."
Producing a chip still costs a fair amount. R&D is a substantial part of the cost as well, but fabbing a chip costs a lot more than stamping a CD. We could be talking hundreds of dollars per unit for a new process and a large enough chip.
Tooling the fab costs a lot of investment capital. So does designing and testing a chip. Actually producing and validating it costs very little by comparison.
[1] It would be highly unlikely to just disable a valid core, because if they were doing a fair amount of that, it would be better to make a new mask set that was JUST a 2 or 3 core processor.
You don't know much about the industry, do you? Actually producing chips costs next to nothing. It's all the costs in R&D that make them expensive... and yeah, as yields improve they don't want everyone paying less for their premium product, so they do rate higher-quality chips lower to keep their market-points intact. a Phenom Xyzzy core will still cost $x in six months, even if the yields suddenly go up. Wouldn't want those premium customers to feel cheated by fluxuations in the price, now wouldja?
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware. Remote or local access is hardly the problem... it's all those concurrent threads gulping down bandwidth that could be used to do actual processing, instead of memory copies.
modern hypervisors are quite fast. Most of the perceived slowdown is a result of using something like VNC to access the VM.
It's not about the damn hypervisor, it's about system overhead. Every thread you add means more shuffling in and out of the cpu stack. The more threads, the more accesses to (slower) main memory instead of level 2 or level 1 cache. It doesn't matter what operating system you use, or if it's virtualized or not -- modern systems can only handle so much concurrency gracefully. Exceed that limit and you incur performance penalties. And beyond a certain point, the system spends more of its time doing memory ops than actual processing.
You don't want to stuff a whole workstation, with perhaps fifty threads running, into a VM, and then multiply that by a few thousand... it won't matter what hardware you're running or how many cores it has, it's gonna choke on the I/O, either in memory overhead or at the network interface.
I'm both a user and an IT professional. I'm a strong proponent of using the tools I make, and spending some time actually doing the job they were meant for before handing it back. People who are conventionally-schooled have preconceptions about how things "should" be, and when they get into the field you get ideas like this -- remote desktop for one application is not what the article is about. The article was talking about wholesale virtualization of the entire workstation, not just a single application.
The reasons most companies do this is because it gives the illusion of control and less work: You only need to update one image on a server, not 10,000 workstations, and you can lock it down pretty hard. But it's an illusion that sacrifices functionality and speed in many implimentations.
I've used Citrix as a client. It's painful, even on a LAN, because the sessions can randomly timeout, disconnect, or the server becomes oversaturated by a few users running an intensive database query that sucks all the CPU cycles from everyone else's session -- which when the database is hosted on the same server can create a horrible bottleneck that won't show up in the lab.
The kinds of problems this kind of wholesale virtualization create are difficult to diagnose, and management is reluctant to upgrade or plan for scalability. It works okay for a few, maybe even a hundred, users accessing one server. But try having a thousand, or ten thousand, trying to access the same terminal server. The hardware could be made out of unobtanium, run at a million gigahertz, and have fifty terabytes of RAM, and it would count for exactly shit because the network card is only one gigabit and it spends so much time swapping due to time slicing that you lose most of your performance in overhead. The server starves itself to death by constantly going to main memory for every other CPU operation.
Don't centralize if you don't have to -- it creates a single chokepoint, a single point of failure.
Just on the interactivity alone, it's slow response, you spend extra seconds loading windows, menus, and after awhile those extra seconds add up to real productivity loss. Virtualization belongs on servers and in labs, where interactivity is less important than raw horsepower. For a workstation, don't virtualize. It's painful.
I have no problem with gays. I'm talking about the millions of voters who do.
Well they should know by now that republican gay senators get the job done just as well as their straight counterparts. You know, until they get busted in the bathroom. Then for some very strange reason, they become incompetent to hold public office. I wish someone would do a scientific study on the phenomenon -- it's a problem that potentially effects tens of millions of people. The reason for all this rampant stupidity in the country could be solved by simply posting signs saying "One occupant per stall"./tongue-in-cheek
You have got to be fucking kidding me. He just has to be bisexual! Now no matter what his politics and policies are, he'll never be able to accomplish much of anything.
Such bigotry demands a response, but as this is a geek website, I'll leave it as [ citation needed ].
Have you ever gone down to a government office and tried to get information on anything? A government clerk does the search.
Yes, actually. Unless it's a pending court case, I don't have to speak to anyone. But the docket listings for each week are routinely published online, so if you want to be completely thorough, there you go. In my state (Minnesota) every public record since 1973 is searchable by going to the courthouse in Minneapolis and using one of two computer terminals that are free to the public. Before that, records are stored on microfische(sp?) and date back to the mid-1800s. there is a small fee to pull the relevant records. Be aware... Searching for anything on those antiquidated systems takes hours. They only charge for copies made either by computer or MF. That same database is available for a fee to private investigators and other people who have a bona fide reason to access public records regularily, and those fees support its maintenance.
I'm sure our parent poster up there, if he were still alive today, would want to amend his post to point out that each flying car with a personal nuclear power station would naturally be equipped with a personal nuclear regulatory agency and a personal nuclear emergency containment vessel.
At the risk of defending the GP, I would like to point out there are alternative methods of achieving the necessary energy density in a non-nuclear capacity, though they would be no less dangerous. so-called "cold" plasma could fuel such a vehicle, although the technology doesn't exist yet.
We fund so-called 'sustainable energy' projects and other such things that aren't economically viable without government funding. Why not software too? And the return on investment is a lot better than a pile of wind mills, and no zoning laws or environmental impact studies to worry about.
Any ideas on who might want to take over the domains and carry on the work would be appreciated by the Internet community at large.
Turn it into a moderated wiki. Allow interested parties to post, and a queue of submissions from forwarded emails to be reviewed. Like the slashdot of the spam underworld.:|
But "the masses" aren't interested in hacking it, thus making said hackability essentially irrelevant to anyone who isn't in "geek circles" anyway.
They said the same thing about the internet, twenty years ago. And yet look what the hackers of the world built out of the refuse of wires and chips that the corporations of then said was useless and had no commercial value. Now they're fighting to tax it, control it, and some countries have declared it an inalienable human right to have it.
Maybe it has no value to them, but that's because they don't know the value of it yet. It's our job to find it and tell them. You just haven't been around long enough to realize the purpose of your own learning yet. Your individuality, your knowledge and talents, are not for your own gratification. The purpose of the democratic process, which the internet comes closest in form and function, is not to create a great country, or great works, but to create great people.
Hacking is therefore the highest form of the democratic process; Not because of what we do, but for what we share.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds pretty reasonable. At least there's no mention of rootkits for now.
The whole box is a rootkit, who are you kidding...Proprietary firmware that can connect to the internet without your permission, update, and has full local LAN access, probably behind your firewall. Those glowing blue and green lights... luring you in, and then... when you least expect it...
What are the consequences of refusing this firmware update?
After awhile, it'll cease to have any networking support. Even the browser will turn off. Who knows -- it's proprietary. They might even have a logic bomb in there that after a year, it erases all your savegames, stomps on it's own dick, and declares war on Panama in your name, all while throwing the reds in with the whites and focusing microwave energies into your freezer to make your ice cream all melty.
Just because it's possible doesn't make it legal.
With good enough lawyers, everything is legal.
If he left the job (willingly or otherwise) and then divulged the root password to someone who wasn't supposed to have it, he'd definitely be walking on thin ice.
Not really. It's only a crime to access a computer unlawfully, not tell someone how to. Unless, of course, you're inciting them to or advocating criminal activity. Case in point; it's perfectly lawful for you to own a gun or a chemistry set, but not shoot someone or detonate an explosive.
But he wasn't responsible for it after he was terminated.
Neither did he, upon being fired, have any remaining obligation to the company, which is rather the point of the case: Is it unlawful to withold passwords from the employer after termination? I mean, it's one thing to change the password to what they ask, it's another to give up your password, which might be usable on other things that don't belong to them (like your personal data). It's bad practice, sure, but a real one.
It is real simple: Whoever owns the systems, and their designated agents, have a right to have access.
Yeah, say that with a straight face to the guy demanding the root password because he read "it was important", and you got a call last week from him asking you to change his desktop wallpaper because "it got stuck". IT admins not going in for that kind of non-sense is a compelling reason why large sections of the internet don't slide off the side of the planet in a dribble-like fashion.
This guy was responsible for critical public infrastructure -- infrastructure that kept working for months after they fired him. They broke it repeatedly after gaining access, and it took hundreds, if not thousands, of billable hours to repair the damage that happened when those owners and their "designated agents" got their hands around the gooey core of the network.
Justice is about harmony, not law and order.
Alas, there's way too litle fuel even for routes with lowest energy requirements :(
Wait, why did you send a link to an article that says there are an infinite number of routes that require no energy to transit then? I think you meant to say "there's too little fuel to do anything useful before the satellite dies."
Producing a chip still costs a fair amount. R&D is a substantial part of the cost as well, but fabbing a chip costs a lot more than stamping a CD. We could be talking hundreds of dollars per unit for a new process and a large enough chip.
Tooling the fab costs a lot of investment capital. So does designing and testing a chip. Actually producing and validating it costs very little by comparison.
[1] It would be highly unlikely to just disable a valid core, because if they were doing a fair amount of that, it would be better to make a new mask set that was JUST a 2 or 3 core processor.
You don't know much about the industry, do you? Actually producing chips costs next to nothing. It's all the costs in R&D that make them expensive... and yeah, as yields improve they don't want everyone paying less for their premium product, so they do rate higher-quality chips lower to keep their market-points intact. a Phenom Xyzzy core will still cost $x in six months, even if the yields suddenly go up. Wouldn't want those premium customers to feel cheated by fluxuations in the price, now wouldja?
I mean, if you overlap a bunch of these invisibility carpets, what would you end up looking at?
A Picasso.
sed, awk, grep, strings, lots of pipes, and randomly useful scripts made from them stuffed into my ~/bin folder...
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware. Remote or local access is hardly the problem... it's all those concurrent threads gulping down bandwidth that could be used to do actual processing, instead of memory copies.
modern hypervisors are quite fast. Most of the perceived slowdown is a result of using something like VNC to access the VM.
It's not about the damn hypervisor, it's about system overhead. Every thread you add means more shuffling in and out of the cpu stack. The more threads, the more accesses to (slower) main memory instead of level 2 or level 1 cache. It doesn't matter what operating system you use, or if it's virtualized or not -- modern systems can only handle so much concurrency gracefully. Exceed that limit and you incur performance penalties. And beyond a certain point, the system spends more of its time doing memory ops than actual processing.
You don't want to stuff a whole workstation, with perhaps fifty threads running, into a VM, and then multiply that by a few thousand... it won't matter what hardware you're running or how many cores it has, it's gonna choke on the I/O, either in memory overhead or at the network interface.
Am I right?
I'm both a user and an IT professional. I'm a strong proponent of using the tools I make, and spending some time actually doing the job they were meant for before handing it back. People who are conventionally-schooled have preconceptions about how things "should" be, and when they get into the field you get ideas like this -- remote desktop for one application is not what the article is about. The article was talking about wholesale virtualization of the entire workstation, not just a single application.
The reasons most companies do this is because it gives the illusion of control and less work: You only need to update one image on a server, not 10,000 workstations, and you can lock it down pretty hard. But it's an illusion that sacrifices functionality and speed in many implimentations.
I've used Citrix as a client. It's painful, even on a LAN, because the sessions can randomly timeout, disconnect, or the server becomes oversaturated by a few users running an intensive database query that sucks all the CPU cycles from everyone else's session -- which when the database is hosted on the same server can create a horrible bottleneck that won't show up in the lab.
The kinds of problems this kind of wholesale virtualization create are difficult to diagnose, and management is reluctant to upgrade or plan for scalability. It works okay for a few, maybe even a hundred, users accessing one server. But try having a thousand, or ten thousand, trying to access the same terminal server. The hardware could be made out of unobtanium, run at a million gigahertz, and have fifty terabytes of RAM, and it would count for exactly shit because the network card is only one gigabit and it spends so much time swapping due to time slicing that you lose most of your performance in overhead. The server starves itself to death by constantly going to main memory for every other CPU operation.
Don't centralize if you don't have to -- it creates a single chokepoint, a single point of failure.
I do. The short answer: Don't.
Just on the interactivity alone, it's slow response, you spend extra seconds loading windows, menus, and after awhile those extra seconds add up to real productivity loss. Virtualization belongs on servers and in labs, where interactivity is less important than raw horsepower. For a workstation, don't virtualize. It's painful.
and if a few eggs get smashed along the way, they're quite fine with that.
Will their shareholders feel the same way when Ubisoft titles have the reputation of being flaky, hard to play, and prone to technical malfunction?
I have no problem with gays. I'm talking about the millions of voters who do.
Well they should know by now that republican gay senators get the job done just as well as their straight counterparts. You know, until they get busted in the bathroom. Then for some very strange reason, they become incompetent to hold public office. I wish someone would do a scientific study on the phenomenon -- it's a problem that potentially effects tens of millions of people. The reason for all this rampant stupidity in the country could be solved by simply posting signs saying "One occupant per stall". /tongue-in-cheek
You have got to be fucking kidding me. He just has to be bisexual! Now no matter what his politics and policies are, he'll never be able to accomplish much of anything.
Such bigotry demands a response, but as this is a geek website, I'll leave it as [ citation needed ].
Have you ever gone down to a government office and tried to get information on anything? A government clerk does the search.
Yes, actually. Unless it's a pending court case, I don't have to speak to anyone. But the docket listings for each week are routinely published online, so if you want to be completely thorough, there you go. In my state (Minnesota) every public record since 1973 is searchable by going to the courthouse in Minneapolis and using one of two computer terminals that are free to the public. Before that, records are stored on microfische(sp?) and date back to the mid-1800s. there is a small fee to pull the relevant records. Be aware... Searching for anything on those antiquidated systems takes hours. They only charge for copies made either by computer or MF. That same database is available for a fee to private investigators and other people who have a bona fide reason to access public records regularily, and those fees support its maintenance.
New York, frankly, is a bit behind the times.
I'm sure our parent poster up there, if he were still alive today, would want to amend his post to point out that each flying car with a personal nuclear power station would naturally be equipped with a personal nuclear regulatory agency and a personal nuclear emergency containment vessel.
At the risk of defending the GP, I would like to point out there are alternative methods of achieving the necessary energy density in a non-nuclear capacity, though they would be no less dangerous. so-called "cold" plasma could fuel such a vehicle, although the technology doesn't exist yet.
We fund so-called 'sustainable energy' projects and other such things that aren't economically viable without government funding. Why not software too? And the return on investment is a lot better than a pile of wind mills, and no zoning laws or environmental impact studies to worry about.
Any ideas on who might want to take over the domains and carry on the work would be appreciated by the Internet community at large.
Turn it into a moderated wiki. Allow interested parties to post, and a queue of submissions from forwarded emails to be reviewed. Like the slashdot of the spam underworld. :|
Where's the mod tool for marking an entire story -1, Troll?
So what is Comcast geting off so easy?
Laws are webs that catch little bugs and let the big ones slip through.
But "the masses" aren't interested in hacking it, thus making said hackability essentially irrelevant to anyone who isn't in "geek circles" anyway.
They said the same thing about the internet, twenty years ago. And yet look what the hackers of the world built out of the refuse of wires and chips that the corporations of then said was useless and had no commercial value. Now they're fighting to tax it, control it, and some countries have declared it an inalienable human right to have it.
Maybe it has no value to them, but that's because they don't know the value of it yet. It's our job to find it and tell them. You just haven't been around long enough to realize the purpose of your own learning yet. Your individuality, your knowledge and talents, are not for your own gratification. The purpose of the democratic process, which the internet comes closest in form and function, is not to create a great country, or great works, but to create great people.
Hacking is therefore the highest form of the democratic process; Not because of what we do, but for what we share.