No, you only need to get as far as the kernel. If you can be sure that is untampered-with, the antimalware programs can depend on it to return correct information they can use to spot malware.
It'll be the OEMs, or more likely the BIOS vendors. They are obviously going to sign Windows, but may or may not think linux worth the effort - and even if they do, they couldn't possibly sign every kernel for every distro, or even every version of GRUB. Not that they will sign GRUB at all, because it could then go on to load untrusted malware.
This is funnier for me, as right now I am pondering a laptop in front of me and the BIOS option 'boot booster.' What does it do? Havn't the faintest. Setup screen doesn't say. Manual doesn't say. I do know that after I wipe the drive and install XP (For our network management software won't support anything newer) it start putting up a message in POST complaining that boot booster failed.
The open source community is still a pathetic joke in the desktop world. Servers, yes, open source matters - linux is installed on more servers than Windows. But the desktop? Influence, negligable. And it's going to stay that way, no matter how good linux gets, because Microsoft has the advantage of dominance - they make the OS every hardware manufacturer writes and tests drivers for, every popular PC game is written to run on, and that just about every piece of software will run on. Just being on top gives them the advantage that lets them stay on top.
Apple has been going down this route for a long time, leading the charge for strict manufacturer control of general-purpose hardware. There used to be a time when they were the champion of geeks, the only company capable of challenging Microsoft's dominance (And with a Unix deriv, even better!). But then they changed. They stopped being a computer company, and turned into more of a media and lifestyle company, and with that business model comes a need to exercise strict control. This is how we ended up with the iPad, a general-purpose computing device which is locked down tight to make sure it's incapable of doing anything that Apple hasn't explicitly deemed permissible.
The Apple fanboys are to blame because they go on to buy the iPad and iPhone, seeing them only as shiny new hardware without admitting that the manufacturer-controls-everything model behind them is a threat to all technology enthusiasts. An effort to turn computers from something users can play with as they wish into a means of getting them new videos and games to pay for.
The human sense of disgust is half-instinctive, half-cultural, and sometimes surprising. There's an old experiment often performed on TV, involving preparing delicious chocolate treats in the shape of dog turds just to see who can stand to eat them. Everyone knows that it's just chocolate - it's perfectly safe, and has never passed through a dog. And yet many people just really struggle to do it.
Probably not so much notebooks as tablets. Similar reasons as with mobile phones. Lockdown OS means lower support costs and the options of disabling features at the behest of the networks or bundling spyware or adware that the user can't remove.
That's what it does right now, in the demo hardware. If you want to run anything other than Windows 8, you just have to go untick an option in the setup screen. The big fear of slashdotters is that once this is supported in hardware, it would be so, so easy for an OEM to remove that option, and they may well do so under pressure either from Microsoft or possibly as part of a data-collection/adware/network-locking subsidy deal similar to that already frequently seen in the mobile phone sector, where firmware-locking is the norm. Think Windows tablets more than desktops.
Except that one of the requirements would probably be that the bootloader itsself be incapable of running an unsigned kernal. Otherwise, the system would be trivial to bypass by simply having a signed GRUB load your malware image, and then have the malware image run the real OS. Much like how, for example, console makers will not sign keys for any game designed to be able to load and execute arbitary code, as a signed program with that ability would defeat the point of signing.
When I was at school the bans were pogs, conkers, yoyos, card games (First individually - pokemon, digimon, yugioh - and then just a blanket ban to have keeping track of them) and chess. The latter due to a series of games turning violent in accusations of cheating.
I'm employed at one of those schools that confiscates mobile phones on sight. We have to, because those things are incredibly distracting. Which do you think students would rather pay attention to: The teacher lecturing them about the history of world war one, or Angry Birds on the phone under the table? Then you get the gossiping, the potential bullying, etc. That's why we ban phones. But it's not an unreasonable ban: The students are still permitted to bring phones for the journey to and from school, so long as the phones stay turned off and out of sight in pocket or bag once they are on school property.
Other unavoidable delays:
- Memory test. Well, you could avoid it, but you shouldn't.
- Hard drive spin-up. You can detect the drives before this, but you can't read the partition table.
- USB device detection. You need this for keyboards and bootable USB devices. And with the increasing use of tablet form factors, possibly in future for touchscreens.
- Storage peripherals. A lot of storage controllers, espicially those of a RAIDy or networky nature (hardware-supported iSCSI, fibre channel) will need their own time to ready themselves and check connectivity and device integrity.
Add all those together, and you're up to about what it takes for the BIOS today to run POST and hand over to the bootloader.
I'm in the reverse situation. I like some of Apple's hardware (The build quality on the mac pro is fantastic, and the specs very impressive) but can't stand their dumbed-down everything-must-be-shiny operating system. My mac runs windows or linux, depending what I want to do with it.
Reminds me of my old HP tc4400 laptop. One day I decided that I needed to upgrade the network card to 11n (I wanted the 5GHz band, and more speed than a). So I ordered the new card, put it in, and... no boot. The BIOS would only show me a message saying that it had detected an unrecognised PCI device ID, and refused to even go into setup. No options to disable it. No, the tc4400 just will not accept anything in that mini-PCI slot other than the exact model of wireless card it's made to use. The only way around it is to hack a BIOS image and reflash. Why would HP put such a feature into their laptops? I can only imagine it's to prevent people fixing their own laptops, and thus encourage upgrades or the use of extended warranty programs.
Well, I did find one way around... you could boot it with the slot empty, put it into sleep mode, remove the keyboard, install the card, wake it up and run hardware detection again. Then it works. But you have to do that every time you reboot, which is hardly practical.
The only reason you should need to be in the BIOS setup is to configure basic, low-level system options. You don't *need* a mouse. BIOS isn't supposed to be user-friendly, all pretty pictures and clickable things. It's not a place you go to get work done - it's a place you go to make things work.
Photoshopping is a genericised trademark.
As Scuba said. Point the camera at the edges of the group. Or find small protest groups seperate from the main body to focus on. Or small groups on their way to/from the protest. Or lie about the time - take your photos right at the start before everyone arrives or right at the end after everyone has left.
Family concerns. Drugs leave a nice clean corpse. If you're putting the family through a suicide, it'll only make things harder if they have to grieve over a corpse with half the face blown off.
Oxygen deprivation is hardly something new. Mountaineers have long known to recognise the signs. There is a period of euphoria before the passing out. Tends to be rather short though. I've also read of people getting high from huffing empty aerosol cans that use nitrogen as a propellant.
Also easily obtained. Most large department stores sell it, for purposes of party balloons.
Just make sure you get real helium. It's very expensive, so a lot of those tanks contain 'balloon gas' - helium diluted with air, to make it cheaper. Just about enough helium to float. I don't know if it's enough oxygen to sustain life or not, but it'd be very humiliating if the suicide attempt ended with only brain damage.
This works in a sort-of-similar way. It doesn't actually extract files - it has no decompression code at all. Rather, it breaks a zip up. Each file within the zip goes into it's own newly-created zip file, with the appropriate header recreated. It's made to handle truncated zips - a form of damage most zip software can't handle, because zip places a vital structure right at the end of the file. Zipfilerecover doesn't need it.
It's not really fair to judge the scale of event by video or photos alone. It's trivial or someone with a little camera skill and some good editing to make ten thousand people look like fifty, or fifty look like ten thousand. That's without even resorting to photoshopping.
Not saying that's what happened here (It wouldn't be the first time an internet horde has decided to skip an event after realising it'd involve actual travel), but it's a common enough thing to be weary of.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you only need to get as far as the kernel. If you can be sure that is untampered-with, the antimalware programs can depend on it to return correct information they can use to spot malware.
It'll be the OEMs, or more likely the BIOS vendors. They are obviously going to sign Windows, but may or may not think linux worth the effort - and even if they do, they couldn't possibly sign every kernel for every distro, or even every version of GRUB. Not that they will sign GRUB at all, because it could then go on to load untrusted malware.
This is funnier for me, as right now I am pondering a laptop in front of me and the BIOS option 'boot booster.' What does it do? Havn't the faintest. Setup screen doesn't say. Manual doesn't say. I do know that after I wipe the drive and install XP (For our network management software won't support anything newer) it start putting up a message in POST complaining that boot booster failed.
"as long as your OEM isn't a dick"
That's a very significent conditional.
The open source community is still a pathetic joke in the desktop world. Servers, yes, open source matters - linux is installed on more servers than Windows. But the desktop? Influence, negligable. And it's going to stay that way, no matter how good linux gets, because Microsoft has the advantage of dominance - they make the OS every hardware manufacturer writes and tests drivers for, every popular PC game is written to run on, and that just about every piece of software will run on. Just being on top gives them the advantage that lets them stay on top.
Apple has been going down this route for a long time, leading the charge for strict manufacturer control of general-purpose hardware. There used to be a time when they were the champion of geeks, the only company capable of challenging Microsoft's dominance (And with a Unix deriv, even better!). But then they changed. They stopped being a computer company, and turned into more of a media and lifestyle company, and with that business model comes a need to exercise strict control. This is how we ended up with the iPad, a general-purpose computing device which is locked down tight to make sure it's incapable of doing anything that Apple hasn't explicitly deemed permissible.
The Apple fanboys are to blame because they go on to buy the iPad and iPhone, seeing them only as shiny new hardware without admitting that the manufacturer-controls-everything model behind them is a threat to all technology enthusiasts. An effort to turn computers from something users can play with as they wish into a means of getting them new videos and games to pay for.
Sit quietly. The more orderly the end of the lesson, the shorter it need be - and that means more time for learning.
The human sense of disgust is half-instinctive, half-cultural, and sometimes surprising. There's an old experiment often performed on TV, involving preparing delicious chocolate treats in the shape of dog turds just to see who can stand to eat them. Everyone knows that it's just chocolate - it's perfectly safe, and has never passed through a dog. And yet many people just really struggle to do it.
It's not a true milk, but it serves an identical function: It's a liquid produced by the parent to feed the young. Milky enough.
Probably not so much notebooks as tablets. Similar reasons as with mobile phones. Lockdown OS means lower support costs and the options of disabling features at the behest of the networks or bundling spyware or adware that the user can't remove.
That's what it does right now, in the demo hardware. If you want to run anything other than Windows 8, you just have to go untick an option in the setup screen. The big fear of slashdotters is that once this is supported in hardware, it would be so, so easy for an OEM to remove that option, and they may well do so under pressure either from Microsoft or possibly as part of a data-collection/adware/network-locking subsidy deal similar to that already frequently seen in the mobile phone sector, where firmware-locking is the norm. Think Windows tablets more than desktops.
Except that one of the requirements would probably be that the bootloader itsself be incapable of running an unsigned kernal. Otherwise, the system would be trivial to bypass by simply having a signed GRUB load your malware image, and then have the malware image run the real OS. Much like how, for example, console makers will not sign keys for any game designed to be able to load and execute arbitary code, as a signed program with that ability would defeat the point of signing.
When I was at school the bans were pogs, conkers, yoyos, card games (First individually - pokemon, digimon, yugioh - and then just a blanket ban to have keeping track of them) and chess. The latter due to a series of games turning violent in accusations of cheating.
I'm employed at one of those schools that confiscates mobile phones on sight. We have to, because those things are incredibly distracting. Which do you think students would rather pay attention to: The teacher lecturing them about the history of world war one, or Angry Birds on the phone under the table? Then you get the gossiping, the potential bullying, etc. That's why we ban phones. But it's not an unreasonable ban: The students are still permitted to bring phones for the journey to and from school, so long as the phones stay turned off and out of sight in pocket or bag once they are on school property.
Other unavoidable delays:
- Memory test. Well, you could avoid it, but you shouldn't.
- Hard drive spin-up. You can detect the drives before this, but you can't read the partition table.
- USB device detection. You need this for keyboards and bootable USB devices. And with the increasing use of tablet form factors, possibly in future for touchscreens.
- Storage peripherals. A lot of storage controllers, espicially those of a RAIDy or networky nature (hardware-supported iSCSI, fibre channel) will need their own time to ready themselves and check connectivity and device integrity.
Add all those together, and you're up to about what it takes for the BIOS today to run POST and hand over to the bootloader.
I'm in the reverse situation. I like some of Apple's hardware (The build quality on the mac pro is fantastic, and the specs very impressive) but can't stand their dumbed-down everything-must-be-shiny operating system. My mac runs windows or linux, depending what I want to do with it.
Reminds me of my old HP tc4400 laptop. One day I decided that I needed to upgrade the network card to 11n (I wanted the 5GHz band, and more speed than a). So I ordered the new card, put it in, and... no boot. The BIOS would only show me a message saying that it had detected an unrecognised PCI device ID, and refused to even go into setup. No options to disable it. No, the tc4400 just will not accept anything in that mini-PCI slot other than the exact model of wireless card it's made to use. The only way around it is to hack a BIOS image and reflash. Why would HP put such a feature into their laptops? I can only imagine it's to prevent people fixing their own laptops, and thus encourage upgrades or the use of extended warranty programs.
Well, I did find one way around... you could boot it with the slot empty, put it into sleep mode, remove the keyboard, install the card, wake it up and run hardware detection again. Then it works. But you have to do that every time you reboot, which is hardly practical.
That 45-second delay on servers is for storage controller initialisation... and BIOS or UEFI, it's still got to be done.
The only reason you should need to be in the BIOS setup is to configure basic, low-level system options. You don't *need* a mouse. BIOS isn't supposed to be user-friendly, all pretty pictures and clickable things. It's not a place you go to get work done - it's a place you go to make things work.
Photoshopping is a genericised trademark. As Scuba said. Point the camera at the edges of the group. Or find small protest groups seperate from the main body to focus on. Or small groups on their way to/from the protest. Or lie about the time - take your photos right at the start before everyone arrives or right at the end after everyone has left.
Family concerns. Drugs leave a nice clean corpse. If you're putting the family through a suicide, it'll only make things harder if they have to grieve over a corpse with half the face blown off.
Oxygen deprivation is hardly something new. Mountaineers have long known to recognise the signs. There is a period of euphoria before the passing out. Tends to be rather short though. I've also read of people getting high from huffing empty aerosol cans that use nitrogen as a propellant.
Also easily obtained. Most large department stores sell it, for purposes of party balloons.
Just make sure you get real helium. It's very expensive, so a lot of those tanks contain 'balloon gas' - helium diluted with air, to make it cheaper. Just about enough helium to float. I don't know if it's enough oxygen to sustain life or not, but it'd be very humiliating if the suicide attempt ended with only brain damage.
This works in a sort-of-similar way. It doesn't actually extract files - it has no decompression code at all. Rather, it breaks a zip up. Each file within the zip goes into it's own newly-created zip file, with the appropriate header recreated. It's made to handle truncated zips - a form of damage most zip software can't handle, because zip places a vital structure right at the end of the file. Zipfilerecover doesn't need it.
It's not really fair to judge the scale of event by video or photos alone. It's trivial or someone with a little camera skill and some good editing to make ten thousand people look like fifty, or fifty look like ten thousand. That's without even resorting to photoshopping.
Not saying that's what happened here (It wouldn't be the first time an internet horde has decided to skip an event after realising it'd involve actual travel), but it's a common enough thing to be weary of.