I wonder when it'll be possible to moblog from a WiFi-enabled iPod. Even if the text entry interface sucks, the sheer trendiness of the combined buzzwords will carry it through.
Unfortunately, Allan Fels announced a while ago that he will not be seeking another term at the end of this year (it is a rather demanding job). The Liberal (i.e., pro-corporate Reaganite/Thatcherite, "what's good for big business is good for Australia") government announced its candidate for his replacement, a former leader of a business organisation. It remains to be seen just how much the new tory ACCC will champion the little guy, or whether it will adopt a more "laissez-faire" approach.
If they provide XML-based forms and allow open-source software to interoperate, they take away profits from the sellers of proprietary tax software which people would otherwise need to use. Given that the government governs for corporations, why would they do a thing like that?
The diamond industry is controlled by a global monopoly (DeBeers, who make Microsoft look like boy scouts); they have been known to use violence and intimidation against independent producers/sellers, with machete-wielding militias cutting off the hands of those who don't comply. In southern Africa, the diamond industry exploits miners in atrocious conditions. Those precious stones you may be thinking of buying for your girlfriend/wife/partner fund bloodshed.
The association of diamonds with romance is recent and wholly artificial. It was engineered in the 20th century by DeBeers' marketing people. They did their job excpetionally well; in America (and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the West), many women are so conditioned to associate diamonds with romance that failing to pay the DeBeers Romance Tax can mean the end of a relationship.
If you're a Linux user, you have said no to the Microsoft monopoly. Why not extend this noble principle to an even more pernicious and murderous multinational corporation? Say no to diamonds, and tell your partner why.
Or, if you just can't stand the saccharine schmaltzfest that is Valentine's Day, stay home and listen to your Smiths records. Add some Leonard Cohen and some Joy Division to the mix as needed.
Face it: Valentine's Day is a crock of shite.
Things like this make me ashamed to be Australian. Australia is rapidly becoming the South Africa of the 21st century, a rough redneck cowboy state. Australians have acquired a reputation for bigotry and violence which is (for most of them) not deserved; if an Australian in London or New York makes a racist statement (as throwaway pop star Dannii Minogue did some months ago), people excuse them because, well, they're Australian. If you're Australian, people expect you to be a bigoted redneck arsehole, and probably spit on the floor as well; all thanks to our cowboy Prime Minister, who's still overjoyed at the nice shiny deputy's badge George W. Bush gave him.
One idea may be to use distributed hash tables, where there is no central server but one or more machines have stewardship of each area of space in a hash table; when machines drop out, their hashes are reassigned.
One system which works like this is The Circle; though it doesn't split files into chunks or encrypt files. It's intended as a file-sharing/messaging system rather than a secure redundant backup system. Though something like this could be built on top of it.
I suspect that the C-1 will not be 100% C64 compatible; for example, software which uses "undocumented instructions" (opcodes which rely on 6510-specific quirks to do things) may fail if the 65C816 doesn't have these opcodes (which I suspect it won't).
The 6510 was basically a 6502 only the first 2 memory locations were inside the chip and controlled which memory banks were switched into the 64K address space. I'd guess that there'd be a FPGA on the memory bus looking for writes to these locations and switching the appropriate lines. Could that cause any differences in operation between this and the 6510?
Are there any other places where the C-1's behaviour would differ from a C64's?
Compress it, encrypt it, split it into 1K chunks, and interleave it among backup servers indexed by hash value. Cracking the encryption and getting anything useful out of it will depend on knowing where each chunk belongs. The low-entropy compressed plaintext will also help to make cryptanalysis difficult.
What the system needs is the concept of a heartbeat-based contract; i.e., a line in the partner data file which says that both machines will attempt to ping each other so often (every hour perhaps, or more often if they're both always online) and that if you don't hear from each other for a certain period (say, 48 hours, a week, a month, depending on circumstances and urgency), you can assume that they're gone and nuke their data (and vice versa).
Ideally, the ping mechanism should have some sort of cryptographic handshaking so that the other party can't falsely claim that you were offline if they prematurely delete your data. (If the data is lost, there should be a mechanism for signalling this back to the data's owner so it can be replaced or the contract ended. Perhaps a reputation-based mechanism for dealing with cheats could also be useful.)
Or if your anonymous backup partner turns out to be the target of a long-running international paedophile investigation, and your machine is seized as evidence. Even if you can claim you had no way of decrypting the data, the FBI still have your hard disk.
Anything short of physically destroying the platters with thermite or acid would not suffice. The FBI has the capabilities to recover data overwritten any number of times by using an automated scanning tunneling microscope to analyse residual magnetic patterns. This has been used to put away paedophiles who thought they deleted everything; there's no reason it cannot be used on MP3 d00dz.
"These type of people do not go to jail. Only scummy drug users and low income people go to jail. Don't worry about it guys."
Don't be so sure.
The prison labour sector is the fastest growing sector of the US economy, and the only one which can compete with third-world manufacturers. Until recently, prison labour was limited to unskilled jobs they can get drug users/wife beaters/gangbangers to do.
Now imagine if they had a virtually limitless source of highly skilled, computer-savvy labour, such as a law which targeted people who had computers and knew how to use them. They could put that labour to use in ways that conventional prison labour is unsuitable for.
What are "the system calls needed by xmms"? Do you have an enumerated list, allowing you to identify illegitimate or suspicious system calls and deny them/kill the application before the damage is done? Probably not.
In theory you can watch logs of system calls and if you notice anything suspicious you can nuke your system and reinstall from scratch.In practice it isn't quite as easy. What qualifies as suspicious? Do you jump at shadows and nuke the system if anything out of the ordinary appears, or do you rationalise it away and risk being negligent? (If a well-written kernel rootkit is installed, you won't see any other suspicious signs.)
1) There have been bugs in Linux kernel versions before which could be exploited to get root privilege. I recall a (apparently poorly written and unsuccessful) proof-of-concept worm which used one such hole (in a kernel version shipped with a release of RedHat or somesuch) to get root. It's not inconceivable that Gobbles would know of a few such holes.
2) Once the rootkit is installed (before the user twigs that anything could be amiss), it could modify parts of the kernel adding backchannels to system calls (i.e., extra arguments on the stack/in registers passed to sleep(2) cause other syscalls to be invisibly called). The rootkit could also identify systrace and interfere with its operation, filtering what it sees for example. If the kernel has been compromised, anything is theoretically possible.
I believe that was a Dutch company, not an Asian company. The machine looked like a C64, but ran Windows 3.1, and good luck plugging your Datasette into it.
The thing about Chinese/Mexican C64s I heard about some years earlier.
Since Tripwire relies on system calls to read files and print its output, a well-designed kernel-module rootkit could, in theory, detect it and replace its warning messages with an "all-clear" message.
In the world of buffer overflows, all data is potentially executable content. (In an older version of Microsoft Outlook, even the subject line of an unopened email could infect your computer.)
If it's a RIAA operation, it's probably psychological warfare rather than a technical operation. If the RIAA can make people afraid of file-sharing networks (or of being arrested for possession of illegal MP3s; and possession of more than a certain number may automatically count as trafficking/piracy under US law), they can make people log off, or even better, delete their MP3s. Then they sell you back your MP3s in DRM-locked pay-per-play format and laugh all the way to the bank, and the apparatchik who thought up the scheme gets a hefty promotion.
If this is followed up with carefully spun news stories of SWAT teams raiding MP3 pirates, arranged just so that the sufficiently paranoid can put two and two together, then it is more than likely that this is part of a disinformation campaign.
If a worm can get root privilege, it can install a rootkit as a kernel module. This module can be invisible within the kernel, can hide processes/connections from system calls (i.e., from anything that runs on the machine), send/receive information through backchannels and so on. Because the rootkit is god, it is impossible to tell whether or not one is running unless you know exactly what to look for.
There exist several well-known kernel module rootkits out in the open; if the Gobbles/RIAA worm or anything like it existed, chances are it would use a similar technology. There Systrace would not detect it.
Slashdot Mirror
Greg Egan wrote a very good short story based on this very premise, only using neural implants as market-research devices.
:-)
It also has some of the best non-Smiths Smiths lyrics ever seen in print.
I wonder when it'll be possible to moblog from a WiFi-enabled iPod. Even if the text entry interface sucks, the sheer trendiness of the combined buzzwords will carry it through.
Unfortunately, Allan Fels announced a while ago that he will not be seeking another term at the end of this year (it is a rather demanding job). The Liberal (i.e., pro-corporate Reaganite/Thatcherite, "what's good for big business is good for Australia") government announced its candidate for his replacement, a former leader of a business organisation. It remains to be seen just how much the new tory ACCC will champion the little guy, or whether it will adopt a more "laissez-faire" approach.
If they provide XML-based forms and allow open-source software to interoperate, they take away profits from the sellers of proprietary tax software which people would otherwise need to use. Given that the government governs for corporations, why would they do a thing like that?
"Life is unfair. Kill yourself or get over it."
you do not talk about Fast Seduction.
The diamond industry is controlled by a global monopoly (DeBeers, who make Microsoft look like boy scouts); they have been known to use violence and intimidation against independent producers/sellers, with machete-wielding militias cutting off the hands of those who don't comply. In southern Africa, the diamond industry exploits miners in atrocious conditions. Those precious stones you may be thinking of buying for your girlfriend/wife/partner fund bloodshed.
The association of diamonds with romance is recent and wholly artificial. It was
engineered in the 20th century by DeBeers' marketing people. They did their job excpetionally well; in America (and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the West), many women are so conditioned to associate diamonds with romance that failing to pay the DeBeers Romance Tax can mean the end of a relationship.
If you're a Linux user, you have said no to the Microsoft monopoly. Why not extend this noble principle to an even more pernicious and murderous multinational corporation? Say no to diamonds, and tell your partner why.
Or, if you just can't stand the saccharine schmaltzfest that is Valentine's Day, stay home and listen to your Smiths records. Add some Leonard Cohen and some Joy Division to the mix as needed. Face it: Valentine's Day is a crock of shite.
Things like this make me ashamed to be Australian. Australia is rapidly becoming the South Africa of the 21st century, a rough redneck cowboy state. Australians have acquired a reputation for bigotry and violence which is (for most of them) not deserved; if an Australian in London or New York makes a racist statement (as throwaway pop star Dannii Minogue did some months ago), people excuse them because, well, they're Australian. If you're Australian, people expect you to be a bigoted redneck arsehole, and probably spit on the floor as well; all thanks to our cowboy Prime Minister, who's still overjoyed at the nice shiny deputy's badge George W. Bush gave him.
One idea may be to use distributed hash tables, where there is no central server but one or more machines have stewardship of each area of space in a hash table; when machines drop out, their hashes are reassigned.
One system which works like this is The Circle; though it doesn't split files into chunks or encrypt files. It's intended as a file-sharing/messaging system rather than a secure redundant backup system. Though something like this could be built on top of it.
I suspect that the C-1 will not be 100% C64 compatible; for example, software which uses "undocumented instructions" (opcodes which rely on 6510-specific quirks to do things) may fail if the 65C816 doesn't have these opcodes (which I suspect it won't).
The 6510 was basically a 6502 only the first 2 memory locations were inside the chip and controlled which memory banks were switched into the 64K address space. I'd guess that there'd be a FPGA on the memory bus looking for writes to these locations and switching the appropriate lines. Could that cause any differences in operation between this and the 6510?
Are there any other places where the C-1's behaviour would differ from a C64's?
Compress it, encrypt it, split it into 1K chunks, and interleave it among backup servers indexed by hash value. Cracking the encryption and getting anything useful out of it will depend on knowing where each chunk belongs. The low-entropy compressed plaintext will also help to make cryptanalysis difficult.
What the system needs is the concept of a heartbeat-based contract; i.e., a line in the partner data file which says that both machines will attempt to ping each other so often (every hour perhaps, or more often if they're both always online) and that if you don't hear from each other for a certain period (say, 48 hours, a week, a month, depending on circumstances and urgency), you can assume that they're gone and nuke their data (and vice versa).
Ideally, the ping mechanism should have some sort of cryptographic handshaking so that the other party can't falsely claim that you were offline if they prematurely delete your data. (If the data is lost, there should be a mechanism for signalling this back to the data's owner so it can be replaced or the contract ended. Perhaps a reputation-based mechanism for dealing with cheats could also be useful.)
Or if your anonymous backup partner turns out to be the target of a long-running international paedophile investigation, and your machine is seized as evidence. Even if you can claim you had no way of decrypting the data, the FBI still have your hard disk.
I'm sure they could toss some burnt-out crackheads out into the street to make room for IT-skilled labour in the prison workshops.
Anything short of physically destroying the platters with thermite or acid would not suffice.
The FBI has the capabilities to recover data overwritten any number of times by using an automated scanning tunneling microscope to analyse residual magnetic patterns. This has been used to put away paedophiles who thought they deleted everything; there's no reason it cannot be used on MP3 d00dz.
"These type of people do not go to jail. Only scummy drug users and low income people go to jail. Don't worry about it guys."
Don't be so sure.
The prison labour sector is the fastest growing sector of the US economy, and the only one which can compete with third-world manufacturers. Until recently, prison labour was limited to unskilled jobs they can get drug users/wife beaters/gangbangers to do.
Now imagine if they had a virtually limitless source of highly skilled, computer-savvy labour, such as a law which targeted people who had computers and knew how to use them. They could put that labour to use in ways that conventional prison labour is unsuitable for.
The owners of the copyright whose losses you theoretically caused are in the US. Therefore you are under US jurisdiction.
What are "the system calls needed by xmms"? Do you have an enumerated list, allowing you to identify illegitimate or suspicious system calls and deny them/kill the application before the damage is done?
Probably not.
In theory you can watch logs of system calls and if you notice anything suspicious you can nuke your system and reinstall from scratch.In practice it isn't quite as easy. What qualifies as suspicious? Do you jump at shadows and nuke the system if anything out of the ordinary appears, or do you rationalise it away and risk being negligent? (If a well-written kernel rootkit is installed, you won't see any other suspicious signs.)
1) There have been bugs in Linux kernel versions before which could be exploited to get root privilege. I recall a (apparently poorly written and unsuccessful) proof-of-concept worm which used one such hole (in a kernel version shipped with a release of RedHat or somesuch) to get root. It's not inconceivable that Gobbles would know of a few such holes.
2) Once the rootkit is installed (before the user twigs that anything could be amiss), it could modify parts of the kernel adding backchannels to system calls (i.e., extra arguments on the stack/in registers passed to sleep(2) cause other syscalls to be invisibly called). The rootkit could also identify systrace and interfere with its operation, filtering what it sees for example. If the kernel has been compromised, anything is theoretically possible.
I believe that was a Dutch company, not an Asian company. The machine looked like a C64, but ran Windows 3.1, and good luck plugging your Datasette into it.
The thing about Chinese/Mexican C64s I heard about some years earlier.
Since Tripwire relies on system calls to read files and print its output, a well-designed kernel-module rootkit could, in theory, detect it and replace its warning messages with an "all-clear" message.
In the world of buffer overflows, all data is potentially executable content. (In an older version of Microsoft Outlook, even the subject line of an unopened email could infect your computer.)
If it's a RIAA operation, it's probably psychological warfare rather than a technical operation. If the RIAA can make people afraid of file-sharing networks (or of being arrested for possession of illegal MP3s; and possession of more than a certain number may automatically count as trafficking/piracy under US law), they can make people log off, or even better, delete their MP3s. Then they sell you back your MP3s in DRM-locked pay-per-play format and laugh all the way to the bank, and the apparatchik who thought up the scheme gets a hefty promotion.
If this is followed up with carefully spun news stories of SWAT teams raiding MP3 pirates, arranged just so that the sufficiently paranoid can put two and two together, then it is more than likely that this is part of a disinformation campaign.
If a worm can get root privilege, it can install a rootkit as a kernel module. This module can be invisible within the kernel, can hide processes/connections from system calls (i.e., from anything that runs on the machine), send/receive information through backchannels and so on. Because the rootkit is god, it is impossible to tell whether or not one is running unless you know exactly what to look for.
There exist several well-known kernel module rootkits out in the open; if the Gobbles/RIAA worm or anything like it existed, chances are it would use a similar technology. There Systrace would not detect it.