As mentioned in the article, there really is no benefit to upgrading from Windows 7.
Sure there is. They're only going to be doing security maintenance on Windows 7 from now on
Perfect! That means they won't be able to fsck it up any more with "features" and "enhancements" ("I know, let's send all your private data to Microsoft!"), you'll just get the standard Windows that works as it should and be left in peace to run the apps you need in the way you want them.
Just read the WP, it points out an ancient APIC compatibility hack that allows you to escalate from Ring 0 to Ring -1 (SMM). So in other words if you're already running at Ring 0 to start with, you can get into SMM. Sounds like an example of what Raymond Chen calls an "other side of the airtight hatchway" attack, you already have to have complete system privs in order to carry out a privileged attack.
SMM, a.k.a. Ring -1, has been present for a long time, and does what the name says, it allows for things like emergency power-shutdown handling ("you have 50ms to sync system state before we can't guarantee power quality any more"). Yes, it's Ring -1, and you have to be careful how you misuse it, but the fact that it works as documented is hardly a new security flaw, this was documented as a security concern at least 15 years ago.
Non-FIPS-140 compliance is a feature, not a bug. FIPS 140 compliance means you've hacked your code to meet a long checklist of somewhat arbitrarily-chosen requirements, of which the majority don't make things any better (unless you had a really crappy product to start with), or even any sense in some cases, and some which make things a lot worse (e.g. mandated removal of fork-protection for the CSPRNG).
So if you want a secure alternative to OpenSSL, use LibreSSL. If you want braindead checkbox compliance and FIPS-mandated security vulns, use OpenSSL.
What about Intel's GPUs? Why isn't this a triple-GPU battle, GTX 980 Ti SLI vs. Radeon R9 Fury X Crossfire vs. Intel SUX 5000 or whatever their current model is?
This reveals whether a device is vulnerable, and indicates whether an OS update is needed.
Of course you're never going to get an OS update because your vendor isn't ever going to release one, they're too busy introducing a new model that obsoletes your two-month-old phone and whose main differentiator is that the power button is moved 1/200" to the left. Buy the new model, the problem may be patched. If not, try buying the next model that's coming out in three weeks.
Been there, done that. Move to the server room until the noise drives you out, then move back in again when the heat in the rest of the office gets too much.
Having said that, there was one gcc compiler bug that got me a trip to Europe. A client had spent about three months trying to track down an impossible data corruption bug on their NIOS II embedded device, and eventually flew me over to try and sort it out. Our code is paranoid enough to run checksums on internal memory blocks, and that was reporting a memory-corruption problem. After about a week of work (with half-hour turnaround times on the prototype hardware whenever we made a change) we found that gcc was adjusting some memory offset by 32 bits. Everything looked fine at a high level, e.g. in a debugger, but if you took a cycle-by-cycle memory snapshot then at some stage writes started being out by four bytes. It was only the memory-checksumming code that caught it initially, it knew there was a fault but you couldn't see it using any normal debugging tools. We fixed it by detecting when the memory block had "moved" due to the alignment bug and memcpy'ing it 32 bits over so it was where gcc thought it was.
I'd also be interested in where this data comes from. I've noticed that, in general, air-conditioning in the US is done for coolness and in Europe for heat. In the US/Australia when you step into a building, train, or aeroplane, you feel chilled air (70F/21C). In Europe when you step into the same environment you feel warm air (24-26C or even warmer, don't know what that is in F).
It's most noticeable when you're flying around the world and transfer from a US/Australian to a non-US airline, you go from (what I find) reasonably cool air to sitting in a sweatbox. I also find working in offices in Europe during the summer quite unpleasant, it can often be warmer inside the air-conditioned office than outside on an already-warm day (when one air-conditioned office hit 26-28C I relocated to the basement, which wasn't actually that much cooler).
So here's a simpler solution: If you feel too hot in an air-conditioned environment, move to the US (I won't say move to Australia because you'll make up for the heat once you step outside). If you feel too cold, move to Europe.
Some of the bugs I've beat my head against the wall over the most are compiler bugs.
Ah yes, the gift that keeps on giving. Every new version of gcc that gets deployed has new optimizer bugs, to the point that, several years ago, we stopped using O3 and above since the small loss in performance (if there even was any) was easier than handling a long tail of compiler bugs across dozens of different CPU types with every new release ("dozens" may be an under-estimate depending on how you want to count families of ARM, MIPS, Power, and other embedded CPUs).
A large-scale medical records system, a multibillion-dollar IT project, and companies like Accenture doing it, it's like combining herpes, syphillis, and gonorrhea and hoping you'll get a cure for cancer. Any of of those in isolation is pretty much pre-ordained to fail, and they're combing them all into one massive clusterfsck... why don't they just declare failure in advance and save the years of effort (and money).
Is this memory based on silicon, or something else, like GaAs or Germanium or Graphene or something else?
Given that they've released close to zero technical details on how it works, but stated that it's nonvolatile, has 1000x the endurance of NAND flash while being 1000x faster, is cheaper than DRAM, and will be available in 128GBit capacities any minute now, my guess is that it's based on magic.
These people are complaining that their BETA software broke their drivers. Yes. Because it's BETA SOFTWARE.
Read TFM, what's out there now is RTM (so BYOG and FOAD).
In any case complaining about brain-dead behaviour in new Windows releases needs to start years in advance, with significant press coverage, for Microsoft to do anything. Look at their handling of WiFi connection administration, which was removed in Win8 nearly three years ago and still hasn't been reinstated. The WiFi issue seems a bit like the "we'll update your drivers for your automatically and you'll sit there and like it even if it bricks your system" in TFA, in the case of WiFi it was "we'll administer your connections for you even though we actually won't, and you'll have to resort to arcane command-line calisthenics to sort it out" (that link is to Microsoft's own advice on the topic, where they tell your seventy-year-old Auntie May how to drop to the CLI and enter netsh commands to do what used to be a mouse-click in pre-Win8 versions).
By taking on six big Hollywood names, the commission risks raising hackles in Washington, where there is already suspicion about EU trade regulation.
I'm pretty sure that Hollywood, through it's wholly-owned subsidiary the United States Congress, will soon put pressure on the EU to withdraw or water down the complaint. Slap on the wrist for the studios and then it's back to business as usual.
I'm by now means an expert, but I was of the understanding NZ already had some pretty draconian legislation with regards to model aircraft flying, to the extent that it's effectively restricted to LoS, by licensed amateurs (or those under the supervision of) at designated airfields.
It's not draconian, and the new drone rules are just existing model-aircraft rules modified a bit for drones. Basically, you can fly from/over private property without any problems (e.g. your own house, your farm, etc). If you want to launch your model aircraft, and now drone, from somewhere like a public park you need to check that it's OK (so you don't fly your whatsit into the middle of a bunch of kids playing, but in any case many places have blanket OK's for flying, not just parks but school playing fields on weekends or with a teacher present to supervise, that sort of thing). You can't fly into controlled airspace (around airports), outside LoS (formulated for model aircraft, before you had onboard live video feeds), or above a certain height.
The Slashdot submission is a nice piece of sensationalism, but really all the rule is doing is formally extending the generally sensible rules for model aircraft to cover drones as well.
On a related note, show the CPU use of scripting, and allow temporary enabling of scripting on a per tab basis (but block third party and hidden https calls in the scripting like the gew-gal code)
An even better one would be to simply allow disabling of animations and sound and whatnot on non-visible tabs. This is one of the major CPU-sucks in Firefox (at least in my experience), the fact that it insists on animating a dozen GIFs and who-knows what else in non-visible, background tabs, with the CPU on my laptop pegged at 80% and the fan screaming away trying to keep the system from melting.
Firefox developers, an inactive tab is, you know, inactive, not "sucking up 80% of the CPU in the system doing nothing useful". As the OP pointed out, this is, finally, an almost-useful feature added in a new release of Firefox. Not actually that useful, but almost. Just keep plugging away there, eventually a new release will finally contain something worthwhile.
(I mean it has to, eventually, doesn't it? You can't just keep throwing random features at a browser without eventually hitting a useful one, can you? Can you?).
I've got Foscams (just make sure you're getting the real thing, not one of the infinite number of fakes, so buy direct from Foscam or via their Amazon store) and found that, with the newer models, I didn't actually need external software since the camera itself already does most of what I want (motion-triggered video, ability to mask out zones of non-interest, take hi-res still images when motion is sensed and email them to me, etc). If you really need a lot of extra functionality, consider Xeoma (supported on Windows, OS X, Linux,and Android), which at $15 (for Xeoma lite) is a small price to pay to avoid the pain that is ZoneMinder.
My only complaint with the Foscam's isn't software but hardware, they're supposed to have interchangeable lenses but no-one (including their support techs) seem to know what to do to swap out a lens on their newer (9800/9900) series cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
As mentioned in the article, there really is no benefit to upgrading from Windows 7.
Sure there is. They're only going to be doing security maintenance on Windows 7 from now on
Perfect! That means they won't be able to fsck it up any more with "features" and "enhancements" ("I know, let's send all your private data to Microsoft!"), you'll just get the standard Windows that works as it should and be left in peace to run the apps you need in the way you want them.
From TFA:
Windows 8 era Start Menu replacement apps like ClassicShell and Start8 seem to retained perfect compatibility with Windows 10
With all this need to install third-party addons to undo the crap that the vendor has put in, it's almost like using Firefox.
From TFA:
the new film from Adam Sandler, was a complete flop
Mod -1 Redundant.
Just read the WP, it points out an ancient APIC compatibility hack that allows you to escalate from Ring 0 to Ring -1 (SMM). So in other words if you're already running at Ring 0 to start with, you can get into SMM. Sounds like an example of what Raymond Chen calls an "other side of the airtight hatchway" attack, you already have to have complete system privs in order to carry out a privileged attack.
SMM, a.k.a. Ring -1, has been present for a long time, and does what the name says, it allows for things like emergency power-shutdown handling ("you have 50ms to sync system state before we can't guarantee power quality any more"). Yes, it's Ring -1, and you have to be careful how you misuse it, but the fact that it works as documented is hardly a new security flaw, this was documented as a security concern at least 15 years ago.
Non-FIPS-140 compliance is a feature, not a bug. FIPS 140 compliance means you've hacked your code to meet a long checklist of somewhat arbitrarily-chosen requirements, of which the majority don't make things any better (unless you had a really crappy product to start with), or even any sense in some cases, and some which make things a lot worse (e.g. mandated removal of fork-protection for the CSPRNG).
So if you want a secure alternative to OpenSSL, use LibreSSL. If you want braindead checkbox compliance and FIPS-mandated security vulns, use OpenSSL.
What about Intel's GPUs? Why isn't this a triple-GPU battle, GTX 980 Ti SLI vs. Radeon R9 Fury X Crossfire vs. Intel SUX 5000 or whatever their current model is?
This reveals whether a device is vulnerable, and indicates whether an OS update is needed.
Of course you're never going to get an OS update because your vendor isn't ever going to release one, they're too busy introducing a new model that obsoletes your two-month-old phone and whose main differentiator is that the power button is moved 1/200" to the left. Buy the new model, the problem may be patched. If not, try buying the next model that's coming out in three weeks.
Palpatine uses TECO. vim is for wookies.
Been there, done that. Move to the server room until the noise drives you out, then move back in again when the heat in the rest of the office gets too much.
Having said that, there was one gcc compiler bug that got me a trip to Europe. A client had spent about three months trying to track down an impossible data corruption bug on their NIOS II embedded device, and eventually flew me over to try and sort it out. Our code is paranoid enough to run checksums on internal memory blocks, and that was reporting a memory-corruption problem. After about a week of work (with half-hour turnaround times on the prototype hardware whenever we made a change) we found that gcc was adjusting some memory offset by 32 bits. Everything looked fine at a high level, e.g. in a debugger, but if you took a cycle-by-cycle memory snapshot then at some stage writes started being out by four bytes. It was only the memory-checksumming code that caught it initially, it knew there was a fault but you couldn't see it using any normal debugging tools. We fixed it by detecting when the memory block had "moved" due to the alignment bug and memcpy'ing it 32 bits over so it was where gcc thought it was.
but check out the assembly and see some weird optimization it was doing.
That's how, and why, I learned RS6000 assembly language, to figure out an Aches compiler bug...
I'd also be interested in where this data comes from. I've noticed that, in general, air-conditioning in the US is done for coolness and in Europe for heat. In the US/Australia when you step into a building, train, or aeroplane, you feel chilled air (70F/21C). In Europe when you step into the same environment you feel warm air (24-26C or even warmer, don't know what that is in F).
It's most noticeable when you're flying around the world and transfer from a US/Australian to a non-US airline, you go from (what I find) reasonably cool air to sitting in a sweatbox. I also find working in offices in Europe during the summer quite unpleasant, it can often be warmer inside the air-conditioned office than outside on an already-warm day (when one air-conditioned office hit 26-28C I relocated to the basement, which wasn't actually that much cooler).
So here's a simpler solution: If you feel too hot in an air-conditioned environment, move to the US (I won't say move to Australia because you'll make up for the heat once you step outside). If you feel too cold, move to Europe.
Some of the bugs I've beat my head against the wall over the most are compiler bugs.
Ah yes, the gift that keeps on giving. Every new version of gcc that gets deployed has new optimizer bugs, to the point that, several years ago, we stopped using O3 and above since the small loss in performance (if there even was any) was easier than handling a long tail of compiler bugs across dozens of different CPU types with every new release ("dozens" may be an under-estimate depending on how you want to count families of ARM, MIPS, Power, and other embedded CPUs).
E W !!
Couldn't have put it better myself.
A large-scale medical records system, a multibillion-dollar IT project, and companies like Accenture doing it, it's like combining herpes, syphillis, and gonorrhea and hoping you'll get a cure for cancer. Any of of those in isolation is pretty much pre-ordained to fail, and they're combing them all into one massive clusterfsck... why don't they just declare failure in advance and save the years of effort (and money).
Is this memory based on silicon, or something else, like GaAs or Germanium or Graphene or something else?
Given that they've released close to zero technical details on how it works, but stated that it's nonvolatile, has 1000x the endurance of NAND flash while being 1000x faster, is cheaper than DRAM, and will be available in 128GBit capacities any minute now, my guess is that it's based on magic.
It only lasted for a picosecond...
They couldn't risk cooking the shark it was attached to.
These people are complaining that their BETA software broke their drivers. Yes. Because it's BETA SOFTWARE.
Read TFM, what's out there now is RTM (so BYOG and FOAD).
In any case complaining about brain-dead behaviour in new Windows releases needs to start years in advance, with significant press coverage, for Microsoft to do anything. Look at their handling of WiFi connection administration, which was removed in Win8 nearly three years ago and still hasn't been reinstated. The WiFi issue seems a bit like the "we'll update your drivers for your automatically and you'll sit there and like it even if it bricks your system" in TFA, in the case of WiFi it was "we'll administer your connections for you even though we actually won't, and you'll have to resort to arcane command-line calisthenics to sort it out" (that link is to Microsoft's own advice on the topic, where they tell your seventy-year-old Auntie May how to drop to the CLI and enter netsh commands to do what used to be a mouse-click in pre-Win8 versions).
From TFA:
By taking on six big Hollywood names, the commission risks raising hackles in Washington, where there is already suspicion about EU trade regulation.
I'm pretty sure that Hollywood, through it's wholly-owned subsidiary the United States Congress, will soon put pressure on the EU to withdraw or water down the complaint. Slap on the wrist for the studios and then it's back to business as usual.
"How Do You Store a Half-Petabyte of Data? (And Back It Up?)"
don't. use amazon.
I keep half my petabyte on Xhamster, the other half on Xnxx. Problem solved.
I'm by now means an expert, but I was of the understanding NZ already had some pretty draconian legislation with regards to model aircraft flying, to the extent that it's effectively restricted to LoS, by licensed amateurs (or those under the supervision of) at designated airfields.
It's not draconian, and the new drone rules are just existing model-aircraft rules modified a bit for drones. Basically, you can fly from/over private property without any problems (e.g. your own house, your farm, etc). If you want to launch your model aircraft, and now drone, from somewhere like a public park you need to check that it's OK (so you don't fly your whatsit into the middle of a bunch of kids playing, but in any case many places have blanket OK's for flying, not just parks but school playing fields on weekends or with a teacher present to supervise, that sort of thing). You can't fly into controlled airspace (around airports), outside LoS (formulated for model aircraft, before you had onboard live video feeds), or above a certain height.
The Slashdot submission is a nice piece of sensationalism, but really all the rule is doing is formally extending the generally sensible rules for model aircraft to cover drones as well.
Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!
On a related note, show the CPU use of scripting, and allow temporary enabling of scripting on a per tab basis (but block third party and hidden https calls in the scripting like the gew-gal code)
An even better one would be to simply allow disabling of animations and sound and whatnot on non-visible tabs. This is one of the major CPU-sucks in Firefox (at least in my experience), the fact that it insists on animating a dozen GIFs and who-knows what else in non-visible, background tabs, with the CPU on my laptop pegged at 80% and the fan screaming away trying to keep the system from melting.
Firefox developers, an inactive tab is, you know, inactive, not "sucking up 80% of the CPU in the system doing nothing useful". As the OP pointed out, this is, finally, an almost-useful feature added in a new release of Firefox. Not actually that useful, but almost. Just keep plugging away there, eventually a new release will finally contain something worthwhile.
(I mean it has to, eventually, doesn't it? You can't just keep throwing random features at a browser without eventually hitting a useful one, can you? Can you?).
I've got Foscams (just make sure you're getting the real thing, not one of the infinite number of fakes, so buy direct from Foscam or via their Amazon store) and found that, with the newer models, I didn't actually need external software since the camera itself already does most of what I want (motion-triggered video, ability to mask out zones of non-interest, take hi-res still images when motion is sensed and email them to me, etc). If you really need a lot of extra functionality, consider Xeoma (supported on Windows, OS X, Linux,and Android), which at $15 (for Xeoma lite) is a small price to pay to avoid the pain that is ZoneMinder.
My only complaint with the Foscam's isn't software but hardware, they're supposed to have interchangeable lenses but no-one (including their support techs) seem to know what to do to swap out a lens on their newer (9800/9900) series cameras.
Our motivation for termination revolves around ethics, politics, and our primary business focus.
I am shocked, shocked to discover that our hacking exploits were being sold to totalitarian governments!