Everyone's eyes have different sesitivities to different light wavelengths. Since cleartype uses different colors with the layout of the colored pixels of your monitor, it should be configured for each monitor and user to provide the best results.
Thousands of Linux and Mac users get along just dandy with restricted user privileges apart from the occasional annoyance of having to either log in as root or in the case of OS.X feed a nag window the root password so that the occasional installation program can touch sensitive parts of the OS.
I would say that this comes under uneducated users again. You can do exactly as you said in windows. I run as a limited user, and everything works fine. Sure, sometimes I need to login as admin to install something. Or a game's copy protection wont allow it to run except as admin. But then you just change the shortcut to runas admin, and everything keeps going just fine. I dont really see how this is any different than having to login as root or feed a nag window.
I think Microsoft is to blame for limited user not being the default. But once you have it setup running as a limited user, its not any harder than running as admin and most of Window's spyware, and virus problems dont affect you.
First off, if anyone bothered to actually read the whole article you would see that they updated the article when they realised that they can set their privacy settings to now tell anyone what they are doing on their xbox, or to just tell people on their friends list. So if you are concerned about this, just turn it off.
Secondly, who really cares if people know that you are watching a movie, or looking at pictures. For one thing, you do not even know if the user is actually at the system, of if the xbox is just idling. And do you actually care if people know you are watching a movie? Its not like its announcing to the world that you are watching the latest chick flick, or flipping though your porn collection. It just says watching a movie, or viewing pictures. Its like your neighbors seeing you leave the house. Oh my god!, they know I'm leaving the house -- my privacy!!
I know you probably just didn't know. But its not like you don't have the same choice with windows too. You can certainly log into XP and win2k3 using a smart card if you have a reader, and attach the smart card credentials to user accounts. It probably works for win2k too, but I haven't used that since I've had a reader so I'm not sure. And I'm sure the windows logon can work with other forms of two-factor authentication too. I know a co-worker who uses a fingerprint scanner to log in.
And of course the whole logon system has a public API so that any company/person can write their own authentication system using as simple or as complicated multifactor authentication systems as they want.
now if i can just get tivo to let me store as wm10 content i can watch 24 on my phone as well
If you get a Microsoft Media Center, you can just go into windows media player 10, and it'll detect the phone, find your tv shows, and then you just tell it to copy them to the phone and it'll do all the transcoding for you.
It's all pretty cool when it just all works together. Of course it does require you to have a very MS centric setup.
Most FOSS programs are the result of someone who really wants to write something good. Rarely have I seen someone being forced to write FOSS code to meet a release date schedule or to remain competitive.
I'm sorry but I think that that is a little naive. An FOSS programmer still likely has desires that someone actually use their product and so they force themselves to work faster to keep up with the market. You are also discounting the fact that a large portion of open source work is done by large companies such as IBM and Sun to combat Microsoft. And you can bet that those programmers have deadlines and release schedules.
Does voice chat over AIM / MSN messanger need to be tappable yet? How long till they go after this.
Is it illegal to write a small voice chat application with some encryption without a backdoor for the feds?
I'm sorry but there is no way to stop people from comunicating privately over the internet if they want to. Its a losing battle, thats costing companies that do fine work, such as VoIP far too much money.
As many people have pointed out having versioning on the config of a system is hardly a new idea. If you think about what might happen if you try to make this idea simple and easy to use it might end up being something like System Restore for Windows, which stores versions before updates, and if you're smart you make a check point before installing any questionable software or drivers. And then allows you to roll back if something goes wrong and the uninstall doesn't fix it.
"It's worth noting, though, that Kazaa traffic is highly seasonal, as a lot of high-schoolers and college students are simply on vacation this time of year."
No there was another overflow problem that was in the screensaver module that as you say is inherently local. And incidently it was described in almost exactly the same way for that patch. But no, this one is a remotely exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows an attacker to obtain administrative privileges and execute commands as root.
That all very great sounding. But unfortunately sometimes its not that easy to find out exactly what an update does. Take this from Apple's website on a security update:
Security Update 2004-05-03 for Mac OS X 10.3.3 "Panther" and Mac OS X 10.3.3 Server
AppleFileServer: Fixes CAN-2004-0430 to improve the handling of long passwords. Credit to Dave G. from @stake for reporting this issue.
[http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61 798]
Improved the handling of long passwords huh? Doesn't sound that big of a deal, I dont have a terribly long password. Maybe I'll skip it. Oh what? I just left a buffer overflow remotely explotable bug unpatched! Sometimes its not all that easy to find out exactly what a patch does. And companies try to hard to sound like they have no real issues, sometimes making important updates not sound as important as they really are.
Its easy to see how come everyone thinks Mac OSX is so secure if this is how serious security issues are presented.
"Here is only some of what they are now collecting: computer make and model, version information for the operating system, browser, and any other Microsoft software for which updates might be available, Plug and Play ID numbers of hardware devices, and IP address (though only for aggregate statistics so they claim)."
Other than the IP address, I would assume that they would have to know all of that information in order to be able to provide you with all the updates you may need. The hardware information is needed in order to provide updated drivers. I'm going to assume that by browser they mean information about IE, since we all know that that needs fequent updates. The only iffy things I see here is the IP address, and every web page you visit gets that, so I dont think its something to be overly concerned about.
And then there is the version information for other Microsoft software. Personally I love this. I hate having to go to OfficeUpdate to seperately check for updates to office. It would be nice if all my software could get updated thought windowsupdate. But I dont see Microsoft opening it up for other companies to use - so I will settle for just all microsoft software.
Maybe I'm missing something. But for me to play IPX games, I just install the IPX protocol in the network settings and all is happy. I never had to touch any VPN stuff. Either I just dont know what it going on underneath it all when I install IPX, or you were doing something way over the top.
Start --> Right click properties on My Network Places --> Right click properties on whatever connection you wish to use IPX over --> Install --> Protocol --> Pick the one with IPX in the name.
"On the other hand, if a user is innocently visiting a web site and a dialog box all of a sudden appears prompting the user to accept that *an application* be run, I think it's pretty clear that this handles the issue."
Yes just like a windows user knows to say no to those ActiveX dialogs. I'm sorry but this does NOT solve the problem. Research shows that when a user is exposed to such a dialog they get confused and pick a random option.
This is a fix for semi-intelligent computer users. It does not help the average user. If this really worked then no-one would still be installing Gator.
It sounds to me that Apple is begining to have the problems that Windows suffers from. The impossible task of making an OS user friendly enough for an average user, while maintaining security. The integration of the URI stuff is needed for usabilty reasons, but it does present a huge problem from a security angle. Usabilty research on windows has shown that in most cases these dialogs do not help the average user. The average Joe does not understand the dialog, and when they dont understand it, you know what they do? They hit a random option.
I welcome Apple to the problems of making an OS for people other than the tech savy.
Absolutely. And the same thing would happen with any other OS that was setup and used by anyone not in the computer elite. There will always be holes in the OS. But given careful administration, most are not too much of a problem. This is true for OS X, Windows, and *nix.
I just hope, as you say that it will shut the Mac fans up about their "immune OS that will never suffer from security holes as windows does". Guess what, it will - and has.
Isn't it the server that they are talking about? I very much doubt that the server makes use of 3dfx or DirectX.
Maybe the reason they are not going to maintain has much more to do with the numbers. If there were as many people using the Mac version as the Windows one, I'm sure it would be being maintained.
I think its pretty safe to say, that if you are serious about playing games, you are better off with a PC than a Mac.
Actually Pro gaming has already taken off in Korea. This story isn't really news, as AMD, Nvidia and Intel have been supporting Counter-Strike (and various other games) clans for years now. These events are huge in Korea. On the other hand it is slowly gaining momentum here in the US and in Europe which I think is a great thing. I'd much rather watch a game of Warcraft 3, than a game of Football. Personally I think it makes a much better spectator sport. I can't wait for pro gaming to make it to ESPN, maybe then it'll be worth getting all those 100s of sports channels.
I'm not so sure about this. Although I guess now that you've posted here you had better speak up. But if it was me, I'd have just kept my mouth closed. I know someone who reported a security flaw in my highschool's network and was promptly banned from using any school computers except under supervision and suspended from school for a week.
I'm not anything like an expert. But correct me if I'm wrong. Does Samba allow you to control individual file and directory permissions per user as NTFS does? If not then that would be something that you can do with a share hosted on a windows box that you can't do with samba.
But like I said, I'm no expert, or even a newbie. So please inform me.
You can download the.NET framework SDK, with compiler for free from microsoft. And msdn.microsoft.com provides a great set of documentation. Plus microsoft provides open developer communities such as gotdotnet.net
I think that this says something about how usable OS X really is. If such a large percentage of the users are developers than maybe it is only usable by developers and other tech savy people?
Admitadly I am not an Apple person. I've dropped by the Apply store and tried messing around with the computers in the store but not much else. But I found the systems not much better than the popular linux distributions.
Slashdot Mirror
Media Center, and I'm sure the linux htpcs too, have been able to this for ages. And we dont have to pay a monthly fee.
Yes, but ClearType can still help some. Obviously it is not as good, but for some people it is better than having it off.m spx
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypeFAQ.
Everyone's eyes have different sesitivities to different light wavelengths. Since cleartype uses different colors with the layout of the colored pixels of your monitor, it should be configured for each monitor and user to provide the best results.
e r/Step1.aspx
Link to online cleartype calibration site:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tun
http://channel9.msdn.com/3 878 43
And the videos about sparkle:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=157
Thousands of Linux and Mac users get along just dandy with restricted user privileges apart from the occasional annoyance of having to either log in as root or in the case of OS.X feed a nag window the root password so that the occasional installation program can touch sensitive parts of the OS.
I would say that this comes under uneducated users again. You can do exactly as you said in windows. I run as a limited user, and everything works fine. Sure, sometimes I need to login as admin to install something. Or a game's copy protection wont allow it to run except as admin. But then you just change the shortcut to runas admin, and everything keeps going just fine. I dont really see how this is any different than having to login as root or feed a nag window.
I think Microsoft is to blame for limited user not being the default. But once you have it setup running as a limited user, its not any harder than running as admin and most of Window's spyware, and virus problems dont affect you.
First off, if anyone bothered to actually read the whole article you would see that they updated the article when they realised that they can set their privacy settings to now tell anyone what they are doing on their xbox, or to just tell people on their friends list. So if you are concerned about this, just turn it off.
Secondly, who really cares if people know that you are watching a movie, or looking at pictures. For one thing, you do not even know if the user is actually at the system, of if the xbox is just idling. And do you actually care if people know you are watching a movie? Its not like its announcing to the world that you are watching the latest chick flick, or flipping though your porn collection. It just says watching a movie, or viewing pictures. Its like your neighbors seeing you leave the house. Oh my god!, they know I'm leaving the house -- my privacy!!
I know you probably just didn't know. But its not like you don't have the same choice with windows too. You can certainly log into XP and win2k3 using a smart card if you have a reader, and attach the smart card credentials to user accounts. It probably works for win2k too, but I haven't used that since I've had a reader so I'm not sure. And I'm sure the windows logon can work with other forms of two-factor authentication too. I know a co-worker who uses a fingerprint scanner to log in.
And of course the whole logon system has a public API so that any company/person can write their own authentication system using as simple or as complicated multifactor authentication systems as they want.
now if i can just get tivo to let me store as wm10 content i can watch 24 on my phone as well
If you get a Microsoft Media Center, you can just go into windows media player 10, and it'll detect the phone, find your tv shows, and then you just tell it to copy them to the phone and it'll do all the transcoding for you.
It's all pretty cool when it just all works together. Of course it does require you to have a very MS centric setup.
Most FOSS programs are the result of someone who really wants to write something good. Rarely have I seen someone being forced to write FOSS code to meet a release date schedule or to remain competitive.
I'm sorry but I think that that is a little naive. An FOSS programmer still likely has desires that someone actually use their product and so they force themselves to work faster to keep up with the market. You are also discounting the fact that a large portion of open source work is done by large companies such as IBM and Sun to combat Microsoft. And you can bet that those programmers have deadlines and release schedules.
Does voice chat over AIM / MSN messanger need to be tappable yet? How long till they go after this.
Is it illegal to write a small voice chat application with some encryption without a backdoor for the feds?
I'm sorry but there is no way to stop people from comunicating privately over the internet if they want to. Its a losing battle, thats costing companies that do fine work, such as VoIP far too much money.
As many people have pointed out having versioning on the config of a system is hardly a new idea. If you think about what might happen if you try to make this idea simple and easy to use it might end up being something like System Restore for Windows, which stores versions before updates, and if you're smart you make a check point before installing any questionable software or drivers. And then allows you to roll back if something goes wrong and the uninstall doesn't fix it.
"It's worth noting, though, that Kazaa traffic is highly seasonal, as a lot of high-schoolers and college students are simply on vacation this time of year."
And BitTorrent traffic isn't seasonal?
No there was another overflow problem that was in the screensaver module that as you say is inherently local. And incidently it was described in almost exactly the same way for that patch. But no, this one is a remotely exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows an attacker to obtain administrative privileges and execute commands as root.
0 50304-1.txt
http://www.atstake.com/research/advisories/2004/a
That all very great sounding. But unfortunately sometimes its not that easy to find out exactly what an update does. Take this from Apple's website on a security update:
1 798]
Security Update 2004-05-03 for Mac OS X 10.3.3 "Panther" and Mac OS X 10.3.3 Server AppleFileServer: Fixes CAN-2004-0430 to improve the handling of long passwords. Credit to Dave G. from @stake for reporting this issue.
[http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=6
Improved the handling of long passwords huh? Doesn't sound that big of a deal, I dont have a terribly long password. Maybe I'll skip it. Oh what? I just left a buffer overflow remotely explotable bug unpatched! Sometimes its not all that easy to find out exactly what a patch does. And companies try to hard to sound like they have no real issues, sometimes making important updates not sound as important as they really are.
Its easy to see how come everyone thinks Mac OSX is so secure if this is how serious security issues are presented.
"Here is only some of what they are now collecting: computer make and model, version information for the operating system, browser, and any other Microsoft software for which updates might be available, Plug and Play ID numbers of hardware devices, and IP address (though only for aggregate statistics so they claim)."
Other than the IP address, I would assume that they would have to know all of that information in order to be able to provide you with all the updates you may need. The hardware information is needed in order to provide updated drivers. I'm going to assume that by browser they mean information about IE, since we all know that that needs fequent updates. The only iffy things I see here is the IP address, and every web page you visit gets that, so I dont think its something to be overly concerned about.
And then there is the version information for other Microsoft software. Personally I love this. I hate having to go to OfficeUpdate to seperately check for updates to office. It would be nice if all my software could get updated thought windowsupdate. But I dont see Microsoft opening it up for other companies to use - so I will settle for just all microsoft software.
Maybe I'm missing something. But for me to play IPX games, I just install the IPX protocol in the network settings and all is happy. I never had to touch any VPN stuff. Either I just dont know what it going on underneath it all when I install IPX, or you were doing something way over the top.
Start --> Right click properties on My Network Places --> Right click properties on whatever connection you wish to use IPX over --> Install --> Protocol --> Pick the one with IPX in the name.
"On the other hand, if a user is innocently visiting a web site and a dialog box all of a sudden appears prompting the user to accept that *an application* be run, I think it's pretty clear that this handles the issue."
Yes just like a windows user knows to say no to those ActiveX dialogs. I'm sorry but this does NOT solve the problem. Research shows that when a user is exposed to such a dialog they get confused and pick a random option.
This is a fix for semi-intelligent computer users. It does not help the average user. If this really worked then no-one would still be installing Gator.
It sounds to me that Apple is begining to have the problems that Windows suffers from. The impossible task of making an OS user friendly enough for an average user, while maintaining security. The integration of the URI stuff is needed for usabilty reasons, but it does present a huge problem from a security angle. Usabilty research on windows has shown that in most cases these dialogs do not help the average user. The average Joe does not understand the dialog, and when they dont understand it, you know what they do? They hit a random option.
I welcome Apple to the problems of making an OS for people other than the tech savy.
Absolutely. And the same thing would happen with any other OS that was setup and used by anyone not in the computer elite. There will always be holes in the OS. But given careful administration, most are not too much of a problem. This is true for OS X, Windows, and *nix.
I just hope, as you say that it will shut the Mac fans up about their "immune OS that will never suffer from security holes as windows does". Guess what, it will - and has.
Isn't it the server that they are talking about? I very much doubt that the server makes use of 3dfx or DirectX.
Maybe the reason they are not going to maintain has much more to do with the numbers. If there were as many people using the Mac version as the Windows one, I'm sure it would be being maintained.
I think its pretty safe to say, that if you are serious about playing games, you are better off with a PC than a Mac.
Actually Pro gaming has already taken off in Korea. This story isn't really news, as AMD, Nvidia and Intel have been supporting Counter-Strike (and various other games) clans for years now. These events are huge in Korea. On the other hand it is slowly gaining momentum here in the US and in Europe which I think is a great thing. I'd much rather watch a game of Warcraft 3, than a game of Football. Personally I think it makes a much better spectator sport. I can't wait for pro gaming to make it to ESPN, maybe then it'll be worth getting all those 100s of sports channels.
I'm not so sure about this. Although I guess now that you've posted here you had better speak up. But if it was me, I'd have just kept my mouth closed. I know someone who reported a security flaw in my highschool's network and was promptly banned from using any school computers except under supervision and suspended from school for a week.
I'm not anything like an expert. But correct me if I'm wrong. Does Samba allow you to control individual file and directory permissions per user as NTFS does? If not then that would be something that you can do with a share hosted on a windows box that you can't do with samba.
But like I said, I'm no expert, or even a newbie. So please inform me.
You can download the .NET framework SDK, with compiler for free from microsoft. And msdn.microsoft.com provides a great set of documentation. Plus microsoft provides open developer communities such as gotdotnet.net
I think that this says something about how usable OS X really is. If such a large percentage of the users are developers than maybe it is only usable by developers and other tech savy people?
Admitadly I am not an Apple person. I've dropped by the Apply store and tried messing around with the computers in the store but not much else. But I found the systems not much better than the popular linux distributions.