The majority of successful viruses and worms out there attack this bit of code in Microsoft's HTML control and other Microsoft applications and components:
if [ "${zone}" = "secure" ] ; then
Load Active Component
Launch Virus fi
That if [ "${trust_me}" ] bit is just too attractive a point of attack.
Think about it, none of its products are exactly know for their openeness. Apple is NOT one of the nice companies out there. In a world were all of the old grumpy giants are turning out GPL software left right and center Apple remains a bastion of closed software.
This has nothing to do with Apple being "nice" or not, this has to do with Jobs being stupid or not. Jobs probably doesn't care a lot about open source, but that doesn't matter. The only reason for Jobs to "love DRM" would be if he was stupid enough to believe that DRM could work. Disney is irrelevant: DRM is just as much of a mickey mouse idea for Mickey Mouse as for Metallica.
And Jobs isn't stupid, and he doesn't think DRM can work. He's been saying that DRM is a dumb idea right from the start. He said DRM was a dumb idea shortly after he opened the iTunes Music Store, in an interview with Rolling Stone. This is important because it means this isn't him "appearing to give up on an unsuccessful strategy". He was already telling us the strategy was doomed right from the start.
The simple question remains, why did Apple bother with opening an online music store.
You already answered that one: "Did any of the other MP3 players out there NOT sell because there wasn't a online music store for them? Is the iPod a success because of the iTunes music store?"
Gven that the iPod is pretty much the only real success story in the MP3 player market, I guess it's really possible that the answer to your rhetorical questions there is 'yes, and yes'. Oh, I'm not saying that this is the only reason the other players failed, or that the iPod won. And I'm not saying that it's as simple as "an MP3 player needs a store", but what would have happened if Apple hadn't come up with the iTunes Music Store and it's honor-system-quality DRM? What other players were there in the game?
Well... how successful would the iPod have been if APple had licensed Janus from Microsoft, and all of a sudden you couldn't load protected music onto the iPod from a Mac, unless Apple was prepared to put a strong DRM module controlled by Microsoft into the Mac OS kernel?
Because that's the other option Jobs was faced with. There was really no alternative, and Jobs wasn't stupid enough to miss that.
From the article: "Because iTunes happily converts protected AAC songs into standard, unprotected AAIF CD files when burning a CD, there isn't much point for a user trying to attack the system or steal its keys. The main reason for trying to defeat FairPlay is to exploit the system for the benefit of third parties."
Garbage.
Rubbish, folderol, pure and unadulterated balderdash.
Unless there's some way of re-encoding that file to AAC at the original quality level such that the resulting file is identical to the original unencrypted but compressed file, then the user still has a reason to want to unencrypt it.
And from the point of view of someone wanting to "exploit the system for the benefit of third parties" the slight but real loss of quality from re-encoding is less important than it is for the person who purchased the original music.
Now I don't personally care about the minor cost of re-encoding for iTunes, since anything I buy on iTunes is already lower quality than it would be if I bought it on CD so I just don't buy classical music that way... I stick to stuff that's written for car radios and bars rather than concert halls and headphones. But enough people have bought into the idea that re-encoding is unacceptable to make this paragraph obvious nonsense.
So why is it in there?
* The author has bought into enough of the DRM myth that he actually believes it. Given the rest of the article I find that hard to believe.
* The author has thrown it in in an attempt to keep the DRM camp-followers from whining at him about being pro-piracy. Maybe.
* The author is confused about how people think, or hasn't bothered to think things through. This is possible, but he doesn't seem intellectually lazy and nobody who's familiar enough with the topic could have easily missed the whining about the "unacceptable" loss in quality from re-encoding.
* The author wanted to slam Jon Johansen for finally throwing in the towel on the whole open-source thing after Apple blocked his third try at letting people bypass it for free. Come on, mate, if he wanted to be a "DRM Profiteer" why did he give away the first three shots?
Open-source DRM bypassing doesn't work for the same reason open-source DRM doesn't work. To ship a product to bypass DRM, you have to keep the guy who put the DRM in from being able to see how you're doing it, and from being able to change their product to adapt to you. This was possible with DeCSS, because there's no way for the movie industry to reach out and change the encryption on disks they already shipped or to change the keys in players people had already bought. It's not possible with Fairtunes/Playfair/Pymusique and the rest. All open source does is make it a bit easier for Apple to see how to break the software in the next version of iTunes.
The fact that it took Jon three tries to give up the fight makes him one of the more reluctant "profiteers" around. My guess is that he was suffering from the same confusion in the mind that makes people think Jobs is thick enough not to realise that DRM's a stupid idea, despite Jobs repeatedly pointing out himself that it's a stupid idea. It's a common confusion among technically smart people who haven't blunted their horns on society enough to realise that just because something's true doesn't mean it matters.
As to the nonsense I quoted... I don't know what excuse the author of the article has, but those are my guesses.
I was thinking of switching from Sprint because of the stupid restrictions on my Nokia phone imposed by Sprint. I had assumed T-Mobile was more likely to be open, because they're using a more open protocol (GSM). I guess not.
So let me just ask, how exactly DO you want to interact with your music player and cellphone?
I want to interact with them by feel.
If you can't dial a number, skip a track, or change volume without looking at the device that's so completely obviously broken I'm still amazed anyone puts up with it. The iPod makes things even worse, because the touch-wheel is SO sensitive you have to "lock" it, adding another step in the process of using it.
The majority of people buy the iPod for the same reason the majority of people buy Windows. Because there's more stuff that works with the iPod than anything else. Because APple seems to be the only company who makes MP3 players who has figured out that people want to get stuff for them and *keep* the stuff they get. If you get any other MP3 player, six months after you buy it when you go to get a replacement car charger or something... it's gone.
Oh, people will TELL you they really prefer the click wheel, or Windows. That's basic psychology.
Why would I want to copy a screenshot of a streaming video to a quicktime movie?
Here's some legitimate reasons for making a copy against the wishes of the person or organization providing the streaming version:
* It's a public record provided by a government agency in a format that is not copiable. In many places it's actually illegal for the government to restrict copying this way.
* It's a copy made for the purposes of review and/or criticism.
* The person or organization that applied the copy restrictions is not the copyright owner.
* It's a copy made for evidentiary purposes, for example: you are the copyright owner and are collecting evidence for a lawsuit.
* The software that is being used for the playback is what you're interested in.
* All the non-infringing uses brought up in the Betamax case.
Mixing up the article and the summary.
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 1
It's a shame this part of the article was quoted, because it's really his weakest point.
It's not his point at all. He didn't say "DRM causes piracy", he said "DRM causes MORE piracy".
DRM doesn't CAUSE piracy, but it sure PROMOTES it.
My first act of software "piracy"...
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 1
... was in the early '80s. I bought a copy of the game "Wizardry" for the Apple II, and the "copy protection" was so extreme that only way I was able to get a copy that worked reliably was to find one of the local "pirates" and get him to give me a cracked copy. Which he was only too happy to do: he was tickled pink to be asked to write a cracked game *on top of the original diskette*.
Yep, I got my cracked copy on my original foil-labelled serial-numbered floppy. Why not? It wasn't doing me any good any other way.
DRM is just the latest spin on copy protection, and it's just as counterproductive.
well if precedent is anything to go by then I give you the iPod and Newton interfaces.
I had both devices, and I still have my Newton.
The Newton's handwriting recognition was so bad that mine would have been unusable without Graffiti, and I've stuck with Palm ever since. The Newton "scroll" is a pretty cool interface, but I have no idea what you mean by it being similar to Mac OS "Classic".. if anything, Palm OS has more in common with my older Macs than the Newton did.
The big problem with the Newton, and the reason the scroll didn't get emulated elsewhere is that the Newton was a market failure. When I visited Redmond in 2000 and tried to take advantage of the visit to push the idea to the Pocket PC team they made that point to me... no matter how good it was, it was poison.
I'm really glad the iPod interface hasn't caught on. Again, I don't see many similarities between the iPod and iTunes, other than the most superficial ones that are shared by pretty much any device. In particular, the non-hierarchical interface that's iTunes biggest strength is completely missing from the iPod. I disliked the iPod enough that I gave mine to my daughter and "upgraded" to an iPod Shuffle which, thank god, doesn't have Apple's horrid click wheel and is much more like your typical flash MP3 player. I happily set aside the extra capacity in exchange for not having to fumble the device out of my pocket and actually *look* at it to reliably hit the controls.
Whichm, by the way, is the same problem the Pocket PC had and the iPhone will have... devices that use low force controls (touch screens or the click wheel) are completely inappropriate for devices like music players and cellphones that aren't primarily interacted with visually.
I don't think that's possible given the iPhone's PDA-style interface short of a miracle that changes the laws of physics.
Touch screens suck so much for phones that even a Graffiti fanatic like myself can't honestly say the Treo would be better without the keypad. I've done the touch screen thing, and it's, well, not pleasant.
On the other hand, *if* Apple has come up with some miracle, you'll get effective clones of it for Pocket PC and Palm based phones within a month, from at least two different independant software vendors.
First of all, the appearance of the dialog is irrelevant to what it's being used for.
I don't know if the one on the Linux example is an authentication or an approval dialog, but if you have to enter this dialog more than once for any given operation requested by a user it's being used as an approval dialog... not an authentication one. That is, it's telling you "this program wants to do something that might be dangerous" and asking if you want to allow it. Not telling you "you have requested an operation you don't have permissions for" and asking you to demonstrate that you have those permissions.
Preventing either badly-written or rouge programs from affecting things they shouldn't is a more common modern use for them.
When they're used that way, they're approval dialogs.
permissions were not invented purely as a method to, err, protect against "someone who has walked up to your keyboard while you're getting a cup of coffee".
Are you familiar with the use of metaphor and examples in human speech?
The fact that someone who has more extensive unattended physical access to your computer than the casual access example I used can bypass more layers of security doesn't mean that security is pointless.
* You're ignoring the remote access case. I didn't use that in my example because Windows remote access support is poor. It's common for UNIX systems such as Linux though.
* You're ignoring kiosks and office environments where the user does not have physical access or unattended access to the computer.
* You're ignoring non-privileged accounts.
The casual use of authentication dialogs is itself a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the late nineties or early this century the only authentication dialog I can recall seeing anyehwre was one produces as the result of an explicit request by the user for greater privileges (logging in, running "su", using "enable" in IOS, and so on).
The use of authentication dialogs as a way of making approval dialogs harder to accept by reflex is an even newer phenomenon, and one that reduces overall security because (a) it trains people to type in their password in response to a dialog, and (b) it makes it harder to tell what operations are actually being performed with elevated privileges.
The (a) case is particularly interesting, because one of the things that Microsoft did in NT[1] that was a really good idea was the use of the secure attention sequence. In normal use, in NT, if you are using domains for network authentication, you should NEVER be presented with a request for your password except after entering control-alt-delete[2].
This dialog basically undoes that and opens up all kinds of opportunities for password fishing attacks even on networks that take full advantage of the security tools Microsoft provides[3].
[1] Before anyone gets on my case about it, I realise that this wasn't Microsoft's idea, and that other systems had done similar things back to the '70s at least, but the way they applied it is admirable.
[2] Yes, it was a poor choice of sequence, but that shouldn't be an issue now so few people are using pre-NT WIndows and MS-DOS where it had another meaning.
[3] Yes, there ARE some very good security components in NT and in Windows Networking.
Well, the deal killer is really the inability to run third-party software.
No, downloading whatever Apple and AT&T approve of doesn't count - if it's got no native SDK any Pocket PC phone is a MUCH better product, and given my opinion of the Pocket PC that's pretty dire.
I don't really get people who say that this approach is "not security" and then advocate Linux instead: I have Ubuntu Dapper, and it's 'graphical sudo' approach is almost identical to Vista's
That's an authentication dialog. It's making sure you're you and not someone who has walked up to your keyboard while you're getting a cup of coffee.
It's the approval dialogs in Windows that are insane.
What on earth are you talking about? The only thing on OS X vaguely like Vista's "sidebar" is the dock, which comes from NeXTSTEP, and was in NeXTSTEP back when Microsoft and IBM were still fighting over OS/2.
Those docking stations are all unacceptably fragile and none of them provide power on Macbook Pro.
Also a REAL docking station can also let the computer know unambiguously when to sleep or hibernate, instead of making it a race condition between which connectors are detected plugging/unplugging first.
Yeah, I think the only real innovation here is describing the gates by Boolean concepts. His other accomplishment is no moving parts - except, of course, the fluid, I was expecting check balls and things;
The Scientific American article on fluidic computers had all that when I read it as a kid... after visiting an old WWII era submarine that used a fluidic computer. That was back in the '70s, and HMAS Ovens was of course decades old back then.:)
When I was a kid I had the opportunity to visit an old WWII-era submarine, HMAS Ovens, and since I was already a geeky kind of kid my cousin took particular pleasure in pointing out that it used a fluidic computer.
The fact is OSX is still more secure as there are less users and is therefore much less of a target.
OSX has four main areas where its security is better than Windows:
* Web browsers are not integrated with the desktop. * Daemons (services) are bound to interfaces by default, so firewalls are optional. * It uses a uniform system call interface, so there are fewer opportunities for "crashme" type attacks. * Applications from UNIX do not require a low security level to run.
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of successful viruses and worms out there attack this bit of code in Microsoft's HTML control and other Microsoft applications and components:
if [ "${zone}" = "secure" ] ; then
Load Active Component
Launch Virus
fi
That if [ "${trust_me}" ] bit is just too attractive a point of attack.
By the way, apart from this one spot of nonsense the article is otherwise totally spot-on.
Corrected comment:
Marlin is no more "open" than the standard DRM embedding in the OPEN MP4 standard from DRM that Apple is using for Fairplay.
All "open DRM" means is "here's a way to shove your closed DRM into the music format in an open way".
Bah, humbug, and I did hit preview, and missed that.
Marlin is no more "open" than the standard DRM embedding in the OPEN MP4 standard from DRM that APple is using from Fairplay.
All "open DRM" means is "here's a way to shove your closed DRM into the music format in an open way".
Think about it, none of its products are exactly know for their openeness. Apple is NOT one of the nice companies out there. In a world were all of the old grumpy giants are turning out GPL software left right and center Apple remains a bastion of closed software.
This has nothing to do with Apple being "nice" or not, this has to do with Jobs being stupid or not. Jobs probably doesn't care a lot about open source, but that doesn't matter. The only reason for Jobs to "love DRM" would be if he was stupid enough to believe that DRM could work. Disney is irrelevant: DRM is just as much of a mickey mouse idea for Mickey Mouse as for Metallica.
And Jobs isn't stupid, and he doesn't think DRM can work. He's been saying that DRM is a dumb idea right from the start. He said DRM was a dumb idea shortly after he opened the iTunes Music Store, in an interview with Rolling Stone. This is important because it means this isn't him "appearing to give up on an unsuccessful strategy". He was already telling us the strategy was doomed right from the start.
The simple question remains, why did Apple bother with opening an online music store.
You already answered that one: "Did any of the other MP3 players out there NOT sell because there wasn't a online music store for them? Is the iPod a success because of the iTunes music store?"
Gven that the iPod is pretty much the only real success story in the MP3 player market, I guess it's really possible that the answer to your rhetorical questions there is 'yes, and yes'. Oh, I'm not saying that this is the only reason the other players failed, or that the iPod won. And I'm not saying that it's as simple as "an MP3 player needs a store", but what would have happened if Apple hadn't come up with the iTunes Music Store and it's honor-system-quality DRM? What other players were there in the game?
Well... how successful would the iPod have been if APple had licensed Janus from Microsoft, and all of a sudden you couldn't load protected music onto the iPod from a Mac, unless Apple was prepared to put a strong DRM module controlled by Microsoft into the Mac OS kernel?
Because that's the other option Jobs was faced with. There was really no alternative, and Jobs wasn't stupid enough to miss that.
From the article: "Because iTunes happily converts protected AAC songs into standard, unprotected AAIF CD files when burning a CD, there isn't much point for a user trying to attack the system or steal its keys. The main reason for trying to defeat FairPlay is to exploit the system for the benefit of third parties."
Garbage.
Rubbish, folderol, pure and unadulterated balderdash.
Unless there's some way of re-encoding that file to AAC at the original quality level such that the resulting file is identical to the original unencrypted but compressed file, then the user still has a reason to want to unencrypt it.
And from the point of view of someone wanting to "exploit the system for the benefit of third parties" the slight but real loss of quality from re-encoding is less important than it is for the person who purchased the original music.
Now I don't personally care about the minor cost of re-encoding for iTunes, since anything I buy on iTunes is already lower quality than it would be if I bought it on CD so I just don't buy classical music that way... I stick to stuff that's written for car radios and bars rather than concert halls and headphones. But enough people have bought into the idea that re-encoding is unacceptable to make this paragraph obvious nonsense.
So why is it in there?
* The author has bought into enough of the DRM myth that he actually believes it. Given the rest of the article I find that hard to believe.
* The author has thrown it in in an attempt to keep the DRM camp-followers from whining at him about being pro-piracy. Maybe.
* The author is confused about how people think, or hasn't bothered to think things through. This is possible, but he doesn't seem intellectually lazy and nobody who's familiar enough with the topic could have easily missed the whining about the "unacceptable" loss in quality from re-encoding.
* The author wanted to slam Jon Johansen for finally throwing in the towel on the whole open-source thing after Apple blocked his third try at letting people bypass it for free. Come on, mate, if he wanted to be a "DRM Profiteer" why did he give away the first three shots?
Open-source DRM bypassing doesn't work for the same reason open-source DRM doesn't work. To ship a product to bypass DRM, you have to keep the guy who put the DRM in from being able to see how you're doing it, and from being able to change their product to adapt to you. This was possible with DeCSS, because there's no way for the movie industry to reach out and change the encryption on disks they already shipped or to change the keys in players people had already bought. It's not possible with Fairtunes/Playfair/Pymusique and the rest. All open source does is make it a bit easier for Apple to see how to break the software in the next version of iTunes.
The fact that it took Jon three tries to give up the fight makes him one of the more reluctant "profiteers" around. My guess is that he was suffering from the same confusion in the mind that makes people think Jobs is thick enough not to realise that DRM's a stupid idea, despite Jobs repeatedly pointing out himself that it's a stupid idea. It's a common confusion among technically smart people who haven't blunted their horns on society enough to realise that just because something's true doesn't mean it matters.
As to the nonsense I quoted... I don't know what excuse the author of the article has, but those are my guesses.
I was thinking of switching from Sprint because of the stupid restrictions on my Nokia phone imposed by Sprint. I had assumed T-Mobile was more likely to be open, because they're using a more open protocol (GSM). I guess not.
So let me just ask, how exactly DO you want to interact with your music player and cellphone?
I want to interact with them by feel.
If you can't dial a number, skip a track, or change volume without looking at the device that's so completely obviously broken I'm still amazed anyone puts up with it. The iPod makes things even worse, because the touch-wheel is SO sensitive you have to "lock" it, adding another step in the process of using it.
The majority of people buy the iPod for the same reason the majority of people buy Windows. Because there's more stuff that works with the iPod than anything else. Because APple seems to be the only company who makes MP3 players who has figured out that people want to get stuff for them and *keep* the stuff they get. If you get any other MP3 player, six months after you buy it when you go to get a replacement car charger or something... it's gone.
Oh, people will TELL you they really prefer the click wheel, or Windows. That's basic psychology.
Why would I want to copy a screenshot of a streaming video to a quicktime movie?
Here's some legitimate reasons for making a copy against the wishes of the person or organization providing the streaming version:
* It's a public record provided by a government agency in a format that is not copiable. In many places it's actually illegal for the government to restrict copying this way.
* It's a copy made for the purposes of review and/or criticism.
* The person or organization that applied the copy restrictions is not the copyright owner.
* It's a copy made for evidentiary purposes, for example: you are the copyright owner and are collecting evidence for a lawsuit.
* The software that is being used for the playback is what you're interested in.
* All the non-infringing uses brought up in the Betamax case.
It's a shame this part of the article was quoted, because it's really his weakest point.
It's not his point at all. He didn't say "DRM causes piracy", he said "DRM causes MORE piracy".
DRM doesn't CAUSE piracy, but it sure PROMOTES it.
... was in the early '80s. I bought a copy of the game "Wizardry" for the Apple II, and the "copy protection" was so extreme that only way I was able to get a copy that worked reliably was to find one of the local "pirates" and get him to give me a cracked copy. Which he was only too happy to do: he was tickled pink to be asked to write a cracked game *on top of the original diskette*.
Yep, I got my cracked copy on my original foil-labelled serial-numbered floppy. Why not? It wasn't doing me any good any other way.
DRM is just the latest spin on copy protection, and it's just as counterproductive.
well if precedent is anything to go by then I give you the iPod and Newton interfaces.
.. if anything, Palm OS has more in common with my older Macs than the Newton did.
I had both devices, and I still have my Newton.
The Newton's handwriting recognition was so bad that mine would have been unusable without Graffiti, and I've stuck with Palm ever since. The Newton "scroll" is a pretty cool interface, but I have no idea what you mean by it being similar to Mac OS "Classic"
The big problem with the Newton, and the reason the scroll didn't get emulated elsewhere is that the Newton was a market failure. When I visited Redmond in 2000 and tried to take advantage of the visit to push the idea to the Pocket PC team they made that point to me... no matter how good it was, it was poison.
I'm really glad the iPod interface hasn't caught on. Again, I don't see many similarities between the iPod and iTunes, other than the most superficial ones that are shared by pretty much any device. In particular, the non-hierarchical interface that's iTunes biggest strength is completely missing from the iPod. I disliked the iPod enough that I gave mine to my daughter and "upgraded" to an iPod Shuffle which, thank god, doesn't have Apple's horrid click wheel and is much more like your typical flash MP3 player. I happily set aside the extra capacity in exchange for not having to fumble the device out of my pocket and actually *look* at it to reliably hit the controls.
Whichm, by the way, is the same problem the Pocket PC had and the iPhone will have... devices that use low force controls (touch screens or the click wheel) are completely inappropriate for devices like music players and cellphones that aren't primarily interacted with visually.
if Apple can provide a simple elegent interface
I don't think that's possible given the iPhone's PDA-style interface short of a miracle that changes the laws of physics.
Touch screens suck so much for phones that even a Graffiti fanatic like myself can't honestly say the Treo would be better without the keypad. I've done the touch screen thing, and it's, well, not pleasant.
On the other hand, *if* Apple has come up with some miracle, you'll get effective clones of it for Pocket PC and Palm based phones within a month, from at least two different independant software vendors.
WTF are you on about?
First of all, the appearance of the dialog is irrelevant to what it's being used for.
I don't know if the one on the Linux example is an authentication or an approval dialog, but if you have to enter this dialog more than once for any given operation requested by a user it's being used as an approval dialog... not an authentication one. That is, it's telling you "this program wants to do something that might be dangerous" and asking if you want to allow it. Not telling you "you have requested an operation you don't have permissions for" and asking you to demonstrate that you have those permissions.
Preventing either badly-written or rouge programs from affecting things they shouldn't is a more common modern use for them.
When they're used that way, they're approval dialogs.
permissions were not invented purely as a method to, err, protect against "someone who has walked up to your keyboard while you're getting a cup of coffee".
Are you familiar with the use of metaphor and examples in human speech?
The fact that someone who has more extensive unattended physical access to your computer than the casual access example I used can bypass more layers of security doesn't mean that security is pointless.
* You're ignoring the remote access case. I didn't use that in my example because Windows remote access support is poor. It's common for UNIX systems such as Linux though.
* You're ignoring kiosks and office environments where the user does not have physical access or unattended access to the computer.
* You're ignoring non-privileged accounts.
The casual use of authentication dialogs is itself a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the late nineties or early this century the only authentication dialog I can recall seeing anyehwre was one produces as the result of an explicit request by the user for greater privileges (logging in, running "su", using "enable" in IOS, and so on).
The use of authentication dialogs as a way of making approval dialogs harder to accept by reflex is an even newer phenomenon, and one that reduces overall security because (a) it trains people to type in their password in response to a dialog, and (b) it makes it harder to tell what operations are actually being performed with elevated privileges.
The (a) case is particularly interesting, because one of the things that Microsoft did in NT[1] that was a really good idea was the use of the secure attention sequence. In normal use, in NT, if you are using domains for network authentication, you should NEVER be presented with a request for your password except after entering control-alt-delete[2].
This dialog basically undoes that and opens up all kinds of opportunities for password fishing attacks even on networks that take full advantage of the security tools Microsoft provides[3].
[1] Before anyone gets on my case about it, I realise that this wasn't Microsoft's idea, and that other systems had done similar things back to the '70s at least, but the way they applied it is admirable.
[2] Yes, it was a poor choice of sequence, but that shouldn't be an issue now so few people are using pre-NT WIndows and MS-DOS where it had another meaning.
[3] Yes, there ARE some very good security components in NT and in Windows Networking.
PS: it's "rogue".
Well, the deal killer is really the inability to run third-party software.
No, downloading whatever Apple and AT&T approve of doesn't count - if it's got no native SDK any Pocket PC phone is a MUCH better product, and given my opinion of the Pocket PC that's pretty dire.
I don't really get people who say that this approach is "not security" and then advocate Linux instead: I have Ubuntu Dapper, and it's 'graphical sudo' approach is almost identical to Vista's
That's an authentication dialog. It's making sure you're you and not someone who has walked up to your keyboard while you're getting a cup of coffee.
It's the approval dialogs in Windows that are insane.
Usability of higher end features are the criteria for judging whether an iPhone will "sell".
Pity that it doesn't have any of the higher end PDA features that would justify the premium price.
What on earth are you talking about? The only thing on OS X vaguely like Vista's "sidebar" is the dock, which comes from NeXTSTEP, and was in NeXTSTEP back when Microsoft and IBM were still fighting over OS/2.
Not my cup of Chaucer, but whatever flyps your swytches.
I agree, the trademark issue is a sideshow. Some of the other things Apple's doing are a lot more interesting. Some in a not-so-good way, alas.
Those docking stations are all unacceptably fragile and none of them provide power on Macbook Pro.
Also a REAL docking station can also let the computer know unambiguously when to sleep or hibernate, instead of making it a race condition between which connectors are detected plugging/unplugging first.
Yeah, I think the only real innovation here is describing the gates by Boolean concepts. His other accomplishment is no moving parts - except, of course, the fluid, I was expecting check balls and things;
:)
The Scientific American article on fluidic computers had all that when I read it as a kid... after visiting an old WWII era submarine that used a fluidic computer. That was back in the '70s, and HMAS Ovens was of course decades old back then.
When I was a kid I had the opportunity to visit an old WWII-era submarine, HMAS Ovens, and since I was already a geeky kind of kid my cousin took particular pleasure in pointing out that it used a fluidic computer.
Hard links *used to* work with directory targets. My opinion is that any tree walker that breaks on directory loops deserves to lose.
The fact is OSX is still more secure as there are less users and is therefore much less of a target.
OSX has four main areas where its security is better than Windows:
* Web browsers are not integrated with the desktop.
* Daemons (services) are bound to interfaces by default, so firewalls are optional.
* It uses a uniform system call interface, so there are fewer opportunities for "crashme" type attacks.
* Applications from UNIX do not require a low security level to run.