True. Except that it can be used to bypass secure boot:
1. Boot secure OS.
Easy, assuming Microsoft operating systems are defined as a "secure OS", which they are for purposes of secure boot, despite all evidence to the contrary.
2. Hack it, get root.
Easy, assuming a Microsoft OS again...
3. Write hibernate image to the drive containing your hacked kernel, which includes disabling of the code to delete the image after use.
No need to disable such. Once you're at the stage of "waking" into a hacked kernel to boot, you can just write a new image each reboot, becoming how you always boot from then on. In any case, the only real trick here, regardless of which way you decide to handle reboots, is writing a hibernate image and hacking the on-disk kernel in the image. Is this really any more difficult than hacking a kernel in memory? Indeed, isn't it easier?
4. Trigger reboot.
Yup... trivial... once you get past step 3, the machine is pwnt...
It'd take some very impressive skill to do that - it isn't something you could just make a script-kiddie toolbox for.
Anything that you can do, you can make a script-kiddie toolbox for. The person who makes the toolbox obviously has more impressive skills than a script-kiddie, but that's pretty much always the case. This is not the easiest hack in the world, but I would say calling this "near-impossible" is extreme hyperbole.
How can anyone be suprised by this - let alone/. readers/submitters?
Because a lie repeated often enough gains the ring of truth. You hear it said quite frequently in gaming fora that there's no point in sticking a top end graphics card in an old machine, the CPU won't be able to keep up with the demands of the game, so the whiz-bang GPU is just going to waste when it's the CPU that's holding you back, like putting big speakers on a small stereo that doesn't have the power to drive them. It's poppycock, yes, but not everyone is expert enough in what really is going on in a video game to know that...
They left out the part that it's not the Earth alone somehow capturing and releasing these objects, it's the interaction between Earth's gravity and the moon's gravity that can result in a temporary capture.
And the gravity of the Sun, Jupiter, Mars, and your neighbor's Honda Civic... and that's just the tip of the iceburg. Pick a flower, and you move the furthest star. However, listing everything that plays a role in this (which is, literally, everything) is rather cumbersome, so it's fair to simply list the one object that has the greatest influence and leave out the 10^80 other objects involved.
If that's all it was, this wouldn't have major political implications, nor would there be questions about her resigning her post. If something gets you your current job, it's a lot more than a status symbol...
I clicked that article and there is a image with the word scrogrammer. If that's the alternative, I suggest we just stop using words to describe things.
Indeed. I used to ridicule GUIs (as an old-time CLI jockey) as "point and grunt" interfaces. Now, this style of communication is starting to appear to be a superior alternative. Give people words, and you see what they do with them.../sigh
That's like saying that Nate Silver or Andrew Tanenbaum spoiled the presidential election... Just because they looked at the signs and figured out how others were going to vote doesn't mean that they spoiled anything.
Actually, it does.
Let's talk about this again if statisticians end up actually influencing the vote through their data analysis. Otherwise, let it go.
What would influencing the vote have to do with it? I think you're misreading what it meant by "spoil" in this context: to reveal the ending early, which is exactly what they did.
Normally I'm a big fan of giving developers enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot, but not when this has the potential to hurt a lot of other people besides themselves...
Larry Niven kept telling people "time travel isn't sci-fi, it's fantasy" over and over until it finally hit him, "Hey, time travel is fantasy!" and he wrote some stories about people going back in time to recover extinct species and coming back with dangerous magical/mythical creatures. Was cute...
Alex, calling people idiots doesn't really help your credibility. Try not being a name calling jackass. 3 digit ID doesn't give you the right to be a prick.
Normally I would agree, but when the person you're responding to was being a douche to begin with, the response is warranted.
I remember suggesting this at a customer's office years ago. As an example, I used a password made from the first letters of the words in the sentence, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain." They seemed to like the idea in principle, but thought it would work better with a famous and easy to remember quote rather than a weird, random sentence. To my utter shock and horror, not a single person there had heard that sentence before.
The only reason to blow up the asteroid while it's heading away would be if it were coming back. But if it's coming back, blowing it up "as it goes away from us" is really just blowing it up on the way in, just further ahead of time. It's still a bad idea for exactly the same reasons, you're just executing the breakup so the shrapnel with a total mass identical to the original asteroid shotgun-blasts into the planet on the next pass rather than on this pass. If you're trying to make it not head in our direction, it's actually a lot easier to do that if you don't break it up.
I imagine in your head you're picturing some kind of massive explosion that sends the mass of the asteroid flying in all directions, rather than just cracks the rock up into smaller asteroids in the same orbit. That would work, if we had something powerful enough to do that. A nuclear bomb wouldn't, however. Might as well suggest we use a stick of dynamite. At the time it was invented, in the popular imagination you could do anything with it, but really, it's just dynamite. Nowadays, since nuclear bombs are the most powerful explosive devices ever invented, again in the popular imagination you can do anything with them. But really, no. An asteroid large enough to really worry about is too large to be much affected by a nuclear bomb.
...I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off.
None of these options were possible at the time.
When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia.
That would be exactly the situation here. The only options were to either euthanize him, or leave him there in pain to die alone. He asked for the former, and got it.
Usually whenever/. posts a story about harnessing energy from some source, the pseudo-physicists come out in force to complain about the energy being stolen, e.g. a story about harvesting energy from the motion of cars over a road attracts comments about stealing gas from the motorists (it must increase fuel usage, or the laws of thermodynamics are being violated, yada yada). Knowing/., I was expecting complaints about how this must increase food usage of the people in the subway. Kinda like how putting solar panels on your roof causes the sun to burn out more quickly, right? That energy you're getting has to come from somewhere...
So disappointing,/. You've lost your outrageous outrage. Or you've grasped the concepts of efficiency and otherwise wasted energy... (not holding my breath on that one -- we'll see what happens the next time an article is run on harvesting energy from something other than the sun or body heat or other examples where the fallacy is obvious.)
Any reasonable definition is going to include terrorists primarily targeting civilians or using civilians for shields. The founders didn't do that.
This "reasonable definition" is rarely used in practice, which makes the definition suspect. Most people use the word to refer to enemies using unconventional tactics, even when they target legitimate military targets. I first learned about "terrorism" as a kid when a lot of kids of my generation did, when a suicide bomber attacking a Marine base in Beirut. Apparently marines are civilians now. The apparent justification for considering this terrorism regardless is that the marines were off-duty. If attacking soldiers while they're off-duty is terrorism, you're completely wrong about "the founders didn't do that". Few wars are won by those who wait at the battlefield patiently for their enemies to show up on their own schedule, and we've bombed plenty of military bases ourselves, barracks and all...
Which article are you talking about? The one linked in the summary doesn't say anything of the things you said it did (it doesn't claim Marvell makes hard drives, doesn't claim they made a billion off of that, and doesn't even mention Seagate).
On a more serious note, when are you guys going to wake up and see that this is just an old fashioned ponzi scam...
Using "ponzi" to describe something that's not a ponzi scheme, even if it is a financial scam of some sort, just makes you look like an idiot who can't tell the difference between ponzi schemes and other kinds of scams.
Runaway greenhouse effect. Basically the fate Earth will end up in.
No. There's been times in the past when the CO2 levels in our atmosphere were twenty times higher than they are today. The rise since the Industrial Revolution is nothing compared to back then. Of course, back then we had "tropical" climes north of the Arctic Circle, but it didn't lead to a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. No, the true horror will be men wearing Speedos on the beach in Point Barrow...
I should note that by "forever" I of course mean for the rest of my life, which has the same meaning as "until the end of time" for practical purposes.
" (I trust online storage more than optical discs that may or may not last another twenty years)" Seriously? those discs will be around far longer than those online storage companies.
Irrelevant. The data I currently store will outlive the media it's stored on, and probably the companies that made or hosted it. The discs will be around only as long as the disc lives. The data will be around forever, assuming I'm not stupid enough to leave it on the disc. Well managed data outlives the media it's on, and is more likely to do so based not on the durability of the media but on its convenience to copy.
what? the grandparent has a point.. pressed cds theoretically could last centuries if reasonably cared for.
Anything on my hard drive is far more likely to outlive anything on pressed CD. It has nothing to do with the lifespan of the media, but the lifespan of the data. When a pressed CD dies, that's the end of its data. Some of the data on my hard drive, on the other hand, has been with me across half a dozen hard drives. It's more than convenience, it's the security that comes from a medium that is convenient to backup regularly. Anything not on my hard drive is far more likely to be lost to me, regardless of how durable the medium it's on. Nothing on my hard drive can be lost short of a fairly cataclysmic event that would simultaneous destroy all copies in existence, and frankly I'd probably be dead then too, so what would I care?
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
No point keeping the CDs once the data is ripped. Even if the copies on my HD-stored music library are lost, pulling them from one of my backups is going to be far quicker than reripping the CDs. They're not even a good backup medium, really, despite the durability...
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Well, yes. UEFI can only make guidelines. Microsoft can impose rules...
True. Except that it can be used to bypass secure boot:
1. Boot secure OS.
Easy, assuming Microsoft operating systems are defined as a "secure OS", which they are for purposes of secure boot, despite all evidence to the contrary.
2. Hack it, get root.
Easy, assuming a Microsoft OS again...
3. Write hibernate image to the drive containing your hacked kernel, which includes disabling of the code to delete the image after use.
No need to disable such. Once you're at the stage of "waking" into a hacked kernel to boot, you can just write a new image each reboot, becoming how you always boot from then on. In any case, the only real trick here, regardless of which way you decide to handle reboots, is writing a hibernate image and hacking the on-disk kernel in the image. Is this really any more difficult than hacking a kernel in memory? Indeed, isn't it easier?
4. Trigger reboot.
Yup... trivial... once you get past step 3, the machine is pwnt...
It'd take some very impressive skill to do that - it isn't something you could just make a script-kiddie toolbox for.
Anything that you can do, you can make a script-kiddie toolbox for. The person who makes the toolbox obviously has more impressive skills than a script-kiddie, but that's pretty much always the case. This is not the easiest hack in the world, but I would say calling this "near-impossible" is extreme hyperbole.
How can anyone be suprised by this - let alone /. readers/submitters?
Because a lie repeated often enough gains the ring of truth. You hear it said quite frequently in gaming fora that there's no point in sticking a top end graphics card in an old machine, the CPU won't be able to keep up with the demands of the game, so the whiz-bang GPU is just going to waste when it's the CPU that's holding you back, like putting big speakers on a small stereo that doesn't have the power to drive them. It's poppycock, yes, but not everyone is expert enough in what really is going on in a video game to know that...
They left out the part that it's not the Earth alone somehow capturing and releasing these objects, it's the interaction between Earth's gravity and the moon's gravity that can result in a temporary capture.
And the gravity of the Sun, Jupiter, Mars, and your neighbor's Honda Civic... and that's just the tip of the iceburg. Pick a flower, and you move the furthest star. However, listing everything that plays a role in this (which is, literally, everything) is rather cumbersome, so it's fair to simply list the one object that has the greatest influence and leave out the 10^80 other objects involved.
If that's all it was, this wouldn't have major political implications, nor would there be questions about her resigning her post. If something gets you your current job, it's a lot more than a status symbol...
I clicked that article and there is a image with the word scrogrammer. If that's the alternative, I suggest we just stop using words to describe things.
Indeed. I used to ridicule GUIs (as an old-time CLI jockey) as "point and grunt" interfaces. Now, this style of communication is starting to appear to be a superior alternative. Give people words, and you see what they do with them... /sigh
That's like saying that Nate Silver or Andrew Tanenbaum spoiled the presidential election... Just because they looked at the signs and figured out how others were going to vote doesn't mean that they spoiled anything.
Actually, it does.
Let's talk about this again if statisticians end up actually influencing the vote through their data analysis. Otherwise, let it go.
What would influencing the vote have to do with it? I think you're misreading what it meant by "spoil" in this context: to reveal the ending early, which is exactly what they did.
Everybody is stupid. But not equally so -- the extremely stupid believe the previous statement is false, and that they are among the exceptions.
Normally I'm a big fan of giving developers enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot, but not when this has the potential to hurt a lot of other people besides themselves...
Larry Niven kept telling people "time travel isn't sci-fi, it's fantasy" over and over until it finally hit him, "Hey, time travel is fantasy!" and he wrote some stories about people going back in time to recover extinct species and coming back with dangerous magical/mythical creatures. Was cute...
Alex, calling people idiots doesn't really help your credibility. Try not being a name calling jackass. 3 digit ID doesn't give you the right to be a prick.
Normally I would agree, but when the person you're responding to was being a douche to begin with, the response is warranted.
If IE can't handle standard code, its somebody else's problem.
Spoken like a man without clients/customers...
If nerds have to do a bunch of tricks just to give themselves a little faith in their passwords, what hope does everyone else have?
Why would we care? ;)
I remember suggesting this at a customer's office years ago. As an example, I used a password made from the first letters of the words in the sentence, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain." They seemed to like the idea in principle, but thought it would work better with a famous and easy to remember quote rather than a weird, random sentence. To my utter shock and horror, not a single person there had heard that sentence before.
The only reason to blow up the asteroid while it's heading away would be if it were coming back. But if it's coming back, blowing it up "as it goes away from us" is really just blowing it up on the way in, just further ahead of time. It's still a bad idea for exactly the same reasons, you're just executing the breakup so the shrapnel with a total mass identical to the original asteroid shotgun-blasts into the planet on the next pass rather than on this pass. If you're trying to make it not head in our direction, it's actually a lot easier to do that if you don't break it up.
I imagine in your head you're picturing some kind of massive explosion that sends the mass of the asteroid flying in all directions, rather than just cracks the rock up into smaller asteroids in the same orbit. That would work, if we had something powerful enough to do that. A nuclear bomb wouldn't, however. Might as well suggest we use a stick of dynamite. At the time it was invented, in the popular imagination you could do anything with it, but really, it's just dynamite. Nowadays, since nuclear bombs are the most powerful explosive devices ever invented, again in the popular imagination you can do anything with them. But really, no. An asteroid large enough to really worry about is too large to be much affected by a nuclear bomb.
...I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off.
None of these options were possible at the time.
When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia.
That would be exactly the situation here. The only options were to either euthanize him, or leave him there in pain to die alone. He asked for the former, and got it.
The real speed will arrive with 802.11xxx - specially designed for broadcasting 3D porn ;-)
Are you implying there are network protocols designed for other uses primarily?
Usually whenever /. posts a story about harnessing energy from some source, the pseudo-physicists come out in force to complain about the energy being stolen, e.g. a story about harvesting energy from the motion of cars over a road attracts comments about stealing gas from the motorists (it must increase fuel usage, or the laws of thermodynamics are being violated, yada yada). Knowing /., I was expecting complaints about how this must increase food usage of the people in the subway. Kinda like how putting solar panels on your roof causes the sun to burn out more quickly, right? That energy you're getting has to come from somewhere...
So disappointing, /. You've lost your outrageous outrage. Or you've grasped the concepts of efficiency and otherwise wasted energy... (not holding my breath on that one -- we'll see what happens the next time an article is run on harvesting energy from something other than the sun or body heat or other examples where the fallacy is obvious.)
Any reasonable definition is going to include terrorists primarily targeting civilians or using civilians for shields. The founders didn't do that.
This "reasonable definition" is rarely used in practice, which makes the definition suspect. Most people use the word to refer to enemies using unconventional tactics, even when they target legitimate military targets. I first learned about "terrorism" as a kid when a lot of kids of my generation did, when a suicide bomber attacking a Marine base in Beirut. Apparently marines are civilians now. The apparent justification for considering this terrorism regardless is that the marines were off-duty. If attacking soldiers while they're off-duty is terrorism, you're completely wrong about "the founders didn't do that". Few wars are won by those who wait at the battlefield patiently for their enemies to show up on their own schedule, and we've bombed plenty of military bases ourselves, barracks and all...
Which article are you talking about? The one linked in the summary doesn't say anything of the things you said it did (it doesn't claim Marvell makes hard drives, doesn't claim they made a billion off of that, and doesn't even mention Seagate).
On a more serious note, when are you guys going to wake up and see that this is just an old fashioned ponzi scam...
Using "ponzi" to describe something that's not a ponzi scheme, even if it is a financial scam of some sort, just makes you look like an idiot who can't tell the difference between ponzi schemes and other kinds of scams.
Runaway greenhouse effect. Basically the fate Earth will end up in.
No. There's been times in the past when the CO2 levels in our atmosphere were twenty times higher than they are today. The rise since the Industrial Revolution is nothing compared to back then. Of course, back then we had "tropical" climes north of the Arctic Circle, but it didn't lead to a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. No, the true horror will be men wearing Speedos on the beach in Point Barrow...
I should note that by "forever" I of course mean for the rest of my life, which has the same meaning as "until the end of time" for practical purposes.
" (I trust online storage more than optical discs that may or may not last another twenty years)" Seriously? those discs will be around far longer than those online storage companies.
Irrelevant. The data I currently store will outlive the media it's stored on, and probably the companies that made or hosted it. The discs will be around only as long as the disc lives. The data will be around forever, assuming I'm not stupid enough to leave it on the disc. Well managed data outlives the media it's on, and is more likely to do so based not on the durability of the media but on its convenience to copy.
what? the grandparent has a point.. pressed cds theoretically could last centuries if reasonably cared for.
Anything on my hard drive is far more likely to outlive anything on pressed CD. It has nothing to do with the lifespan of the media, but the lifespan of the data. When a pressed CD dies, that's the end of its data. Some of the data on my hard drive, on the other hand, has been with me across half a dozen hard drives. It's more than convenience, it's the security that comes from a medium that is convenient to backup regularly. Anything not on my hard drive is far more likely to be lost to me, regardless of how durable the medium it's on. Nothing on my hard drive can be lost short of a fairly cataclysmic event that would simultaneous destroy all copies in existence, and frankly I'd probably be dead then too, so what would I care?
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
No point keeping the CDs once the data is ripped. Even if the copies on my HD-stored music library are lost, pulling them from one of my backups is going to be far quicker than reripping the CDs. They're not even a good backup medium, really, despite the durability...