Second, humans aren't going to notice the effects at the doses they receive, otherwise we would have seen it in factory workers that produce triclosan already.
And to think the factories simply assumed they had the laziest, pathetic, most lethargic bunch of employees around.
This would be trivial to defend against. Simply add an empty directory (starting with a non-latin-alphabet character) to Program Files, or to the PATH variable. However, if this targets the control computers of industrial machines (as it most certainly does) then all of that is probably static and locked down.
I'm slightly surprised that the signature involves non-latin directory names for programs. Stuxnet targeted Siemens equipment, and it is very, very likely that the directory names their control software resides in are in English, even if the software is localized for some other language. So this seems to be targeting home grown software / hardware this time around.
The next question is how did the author know *exactly* what the PATH and program files folders are configured on the target machine. That's the work of spies and moles. Someone probably stuck a USB drive into a target machine, which did a quick scan to grab the necessary info. That could be done in just a few seconds.
This configuration this software targets could be so extremely specific that there may only be a handful of computers in the world running the specific industrial control software the payload is designed to destroy.
Their site is down. Is this purely from a slashdot effect? Wonder if someone from Anonymous picked up on this? It seems their site is more of a corporate type site than an end-user site, so this probably doesn't effect them much one way or another.
1) I thought the exact same thing at the exact same point. He was reading telemetry (one of which is that the horizontal motion at touchdown was less than a tenth of a meter per second!) and was about to tell how far off target the landing was when they cut to something else. 2) You were watching the wrong feed. The "clean" feed did not have a host / TV show kind of format.
The difficulty lies in the algorithms required to solve the puzzle. Difficult puzzles have "choke points" that you cannot go past (not counting guessing) unless you can identify a pattern that fits an algorithm. That is hard for two reasons. One, you have to know the algorithms, and the advanced ones are not intuitive (like X-Wing, Swordfish, etc). Second, you have to spend a lot of time staring at numbers trying to recognize a pattern that you can use the algorithm on.
So when it comes to "hard" puzzles, the difficulty depends on which specific algorithms must be used to solve the puzzle, and other less obvious factors, such as how difficult it is to identify the pattern. For example, if you must use an advanced algorithm early on, before many numbers have been solved, then there are more penciled in numbers to analyze, thus the puzzle is more difficult and will take longer to solve.
Back in 8th grade (1985) I was introduced to the TRS-80 CoCo II. Our school had a lab full of them (two students per computer), and we were taught keyboarding and some basic programming. Now, up to that point, my computer experience was already pretty extensive. I owned a TI-99/4A, and the highlight of each month was receiving the next edition of Compute! so I could type in the BASIC / Extended BASIC programs. I had already written thousands of lines of BASIC code from scratch (from the time I was 10). I had a lot of experience on the Apple II and the C-64 as well.
Now, 30 years later, I can't remember enough specifics to state the technical reasons, but as a 12 year old, I absolutely hated the CoCo II. I was not a TI-99 fanatic (I had great appreciation for the C-64, for example), so I didn't dislike the TRS-80 because of some external factor- I didn't like it simply because of what it was.
Odds and ends I remember is that the performance was laggy and sluggish (even in the day, compared to the machines I mentioned already). BASIC syntax had some convoluted stuff going on (probably related to graphics and sound) and code editing was a chore. The hardware felt cheap.
To compare to the other machines I was familiar with, the TI-99/4A felt very professional and refined throughout. Both the hardware, and the software. It felt more engineered and like something a scientist would use or something. lol As a 10 year old, I felt I was using a machine intended for real adults to use. It was serious and real. It had a certain rigidity that was authoritative. The CoCo felt like a toy or a gimmick in some way.
The Apple II was similar. The hardware felt very high quality, and the OS was refined and consistent.
The C-64 gave the impression there was always something deeper and lower-level, just waiting to be exploited. It was complicated (just loading a program off of the disc required these weird, non-intuitive parameters that neither I nor my 10 year old friends understood, like "why do you have to put,8 after the filename?"). Compute! listings had all these pokes and peeks, directly manipulating memory. You could change the color of text using these weird keyboard combos - no other computer of the day had nearly the flexibility or flashy pizazz of the C-64.
So as a 12 year old, there simply weren't any redeeming factors to the TRS-80. I knew that other computers of the era did various things better and were more fun to program and use than the TRS-80, and I complained often to my classmates, lamenting that we couldn't have TIs or C64s because they were better computers.
It's not that simple at all. PCs, regardless of the manufacturer, all ran the same software. What you saw onscreen (besides maybe an OEM desktop picture) was EXACTLY the same. Only the hardware was different, and that was usually just a matter of case style. iPad has massive, thriving, 3rd party development going on, and it is directly coupled to the iPhone ecosystem. The two reinforce each other in a major way. So comparing the battle between PC OEMs to tablet manufacturers against iPad is not a valid comparison.
The real question the article should be asking is "could the iPad be the success it is today without the iPhone having existed first?" Instead they ask "But if price is such an important metric, why is the iPad — with its premium price tag — so popular?" and then answer it dead wrong "Simple, it was the first tablet to go mass market, and cumulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers."
WHY did it go "mass market"? THAT is the real question. What they discuss is like asking "Why does the iPad have so many sales?" and then answering "because Apple sells a lot of them".
This is exactly why I prefer writing games that sell for 99 cents on iTunes over writing either financial or healthcare (which I did for years) software. Much more fun, and more importantly, greatly reduced ramifications if something does go wrong.
The amount of heat generated by power consumption is small compared to the energy received from the sun and emitted back into space. The earth receives around 175 PW of power from the sun, and the amount emitted back into space is around the same providing an equilibrium. The global power consumption by everyone on the planet is around 15 TW. So that's a ratio of 175 PW to.015 PW, which means we consume around.008% of the amount of power we receive from the sun / radiate into space.
A lot of our energy comes from fossil fuels, so basically that is releasing energy that was solar originally, so technically we aren't adding energy to the earth. Solar, geothermal and hydro is just converting / moving energy around from place to place within the existing system, so that doesn't add energy either. Nuclear would be the only way we'd be changing the amount of energy in the system, as we're directly converting it from mass. So it would matter what power source we use from that standpoint, and if your argument has merit, then nuclear would be the issue from an entropy standpoint.
Great. Now we'll see the same fragmentation Windows CE had all those years. Most games use the NDK and contain binary compiled specifically for ARM. Obviously those apps will not run on the MIPS processor. Microsoft eventually learned this was not a good thing and finally forced all OEMs to use ARM to qualify for Pocket PC branding.
Now all we need is Android running on SH3 and we'll have gone full circle.
Well in that case the only question is if that "DNA" contains some other message or meaning. Each of the 6,000 DNA "bytes" can be one of 4 values. Thus each "byte" can store 2 bits of information. That's 12,000 bits of data. Assuming uppercase letters only, it takes 5 bits per letter minimum to encode text (without any compression). That only allows for 2,400 characters, which is 1/4th of the poem text.
Looking at it another way, the poem contains 1649 words. That allows for 3.6 DNA "bytes" per word (6000 / 1649), which is 6 bits of data per word. I'll round it up to 7 bits per word to be generous. That's still only 128 unique values per word, which isn't enough to encode all the unique words in the poem.
I just don't see any way to encode a 9,000 word poem into 12,000 bits of data. If the "DNA" does have meaning then it would have to be an excerpt of the poem, or additional verses that aren't in the plaintext version.
The latter has my vote. If the author really is clever, then he came up with an algorithm that takes the original poem text and converts it into "DNA" looking data, which can further be decoded into text that contains additional readable text that completes the poem. If he pulled that off then he earns some major respect.
According to the diff of the disc image before and after the program runs (http://www.crackingagrippa.net/files/agrippa_diffs.txt) it's perfectly clear that the text is not being encrypted. The listing on the left is after the modification, and the listing on the right is the original disc image. A large portion of the disc (exactly 8,000 contiguous bytes) has been rewritten with only four different bytes: 0x41, 0x43, 0x47, 0x54.
Thus a very significant portion of the original information is lost during the "encryption". It sure looks to me like the program merely overwrites the poem portion of the data with one of four randomly selected bytes. The poem, as listed in HTML on the web page, is 9190 characters, which correlates pretty close with the amount of bytes being modified on the disc image.
I also thought that the poem itself was written in some sort of scripting language, and that it literally contained the algorithm that encrypted itself. At first glance the frequency of numbers (years) in the poem also gave the impression that the poem was actually a program of sorts. It seems I was also mislead by the summary, as the poem is arbitrary text and the real challenge is the display program that modified the floppy disc to encrypt the poem text.
This is the perfect opportunity for me to rant on HTC's slide to unlock implementation. Their phones use a custom (non-stock android) lock screen that must have been designed be a total idiot. Instead of sliding to the side, you slide straight up and down. Further, the slider bar is the width of the entire screen, so it is huge. Now, this is stupid beyond belief because millions of people carry their phone in their pocket, so of course as the phone is pulled in and out of the pocket.... it unlocks.
Worse, when a call is coming in, sliding up ignores the call, sliding down answers the call. I have answered or ignored literally DOZENS of phone calls by accident because of this garbage. I actually have to put my phone in my pocket either upside down or right side up in anticipation of which way the slider will go if I take my phone out to answer a call.
Their locking implementation really has to go down in the annals of GUI design as one of the worst designs ever.
Monticello is really worth a visit. I thought the clock at the main entrance to the building was fascinating. It uses weights that look like cannon balls to power the mechanism. However, there wasn't enough room for the weights to descend downward to allow the clock to run for a full week at a time. Jefferson's solution? Cut holes in the floor and allow the weights to travel down into the cellar / basement area. He decided to leave the weights exposed because boxing them in would have blocked some of the windows. However, by leaving them exposed he was able to make additional use of them - he marked the days of the week on the wall, so that the position of the weight showed the day of the week.
It's also interesting that the clock has two faces - one on the interior of the house, and the other above the main entrance on the exterior. Jefferson decided that the exterior face should only have an hour hand. Now, the reasoning given by the tour guides is that the slaves and farm hands didn't need to know the minute, only the hour - precision to the minute wasn't necessary for them. However, the more I've thought about it, I think Jefferson had a more practical reason in mind. With two hands, and from a far distance, it's difficult to make out which is the hour and which is the minute. With just an hour hand it would be easier to tell the time from a very far distance. That fits in more with his sense of invention and practicality.
There's a lot of evidence that Jefferson had a long term relationship with a female slave - Sally Hemings, and fathered 6 children by her. Jefferson gave all 6 children their freedom when the came "of age".
I live in the Appalachian mountain area of Virginia. It is developed here and we have a few towns in our county, but it is still quite rural. You could buy an entire European nation for what it would cost to bury all the power lines in this region of the USA. When digging a hole for a post, if they hit bedrock or a large boulder, they can scoot over 10 or 15 feet and try again. If that doesn't work they can bring in more equipment and drill into the rock, and use some explosives if necessary. It would require orders of magnitude more time, expense, equipment, etc, to actually dig a continuous ditch. Really, it would be a project of epic proportions, easily rivaling the construction of the interstate system. We're not talking about a handful of linear roads here, but 2D grids covering a significant area of the country.
C offers control. If you can't handle having that much control (over memory, how the CPU acts on that memory, etc) then your software will have many problems and you will hate C.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, humans aren't going to notice the effects at the doses they receive, otherwise we would have seen it in factory workers that produce triclosan already.
And to think the factories simply assumed they had the laziest, pathetic, most lethargic bunch of employees around.
This would be trivial to defend against. Simply add an empty directory (starting with a non-latin-alphabet character) to Program Files, or to the PATH variable. However, if this targets the control computers of industrial machines (as it most certainly does) then all of that is probably static and locked down.
I'm slightly surprised that the signature involves non-latin directory names for programs. Stuxnet targeted Siemens equipment, and it is very, very likely that the directory names their control software resides in are in English, even if the software is localized for some other language. So this seems to be targeting home grown software / hardware this time around.
The next question is how did the author know *exactly* what the PATH and program files folders are configured on the target machine. That's the work of spies and moles. Someone probably stuck a USB drive into a target machine, which did a quick scan to grab the necessary info. That could be done in just a few seconds.
This configuration this software targets could be so extremely specific that there may only be a handful of computers in the world running the specific industrial control software the payload is designed to destroy.
Their site is down. Is this purely from a slashdot effect? Wonder if someone from Anonymous picked up on this? It seems their site is more of a corporate type site than an end-user site, so this probably doesn't effect them much one way or another.
1) I thought the exact same thing at the exact same point. He was reading telemetry (one of which is that the horizontal motion at touchdown was less than a tenth of a meter per second!) and was about to tell how far off target the landing was when they cut to something else.
2) You were watching the wrong feed. The "clean" feed did not have a host / TV show kind of format.
The difficulty lies in the algorithms required to solve the puzzle. Difficult puzzles have "choke points" that you cannot go past (not counting guessing) unless you can identify a pattern that fits an algorithm. That is hard for two reasons. One, you have to know the algorithms, and the advanced ones are not intuitive (like X-Wing, Swordfish, etc). Second, you have to spend a lot of time staring at numbers trying to recognize a pattern that you can use the algorithm on.
So when it comes to "hard" puzzles, the difficulty depends on which specific algorithms must be used to solve the puzzle, and other less obvious factors, such as how difficult it is to identify the pattern. For example, if you must use an advanced algorithm early on, before many numbers have been solved, then there are more penciled in numbers to analyze, thus the puzzle is more difficult and will take longer to solve.
Back in 8th grade (1985) I was introduced to the TRS-80 CoCo II. Our school had a lab full of them (two students per computer), and we were taught keyboarding and some basic programming. Now, up to that point, my computer experience was already pretty extensive. I owned a TI-99/4A, and the highlight of each month was receiving the next edition of Compute! so I could type in the BASIC / Extended BASIC programs. I had already written thousands of lines of BASIC code from scratch (from the time I was 10). I had a lot of experience on the Apple II and the C-64 as well.
Now, 30 years later, I can't remember enough specifics to state the technical reasons, but as a 12 year old, I absolutely hated the CoCo II. I was not a TI-99 fanatic (I had great appreciation for the C-64, for example), so I didn't dislike the TRS-80 because of some external factor- I didn't like it simply because of what it was.
Odds and ends I remember is that the performance was laggy and sluggish (even in the day, compared to the machines I mentioned already). BASIC syntax had some convoluted stuff going on (probably related to graphics and sound) and code editing was a chore. The hardware felt cheap.
To compare to the other machines I was familiar with, the TI-99/4A felt very professional and refined throughout. Both the hardware, and the software. It felt more engineered and like something a scientist would use or something. lol As a 10 year old, I felt I was using a machine intended for real adults to use. It was serious and real. It had a certain rigidity that was authoritative. The CoCo felt like a toy or a gimmick in some way.
The Apple II was similar. The hardware felt very high quality, and the OS was refined and consistent.
The C-64 gave the impression there was always something deeper and lower-level, just waiting to be exploited. It was complicated (just loading a program off of the disc required these weird, non-intuitive parameters that neither I nor my 10 year old friends understood, like "why do you have to put ,8 after the filename?"). Compute! listings had all these pokes and peeks, directly manipulating memory. You could change the color of text using these weird keyboard combos - no other computer of the day had nearly the flexibility or flashy pizazz of the C-64.
So as a 12 year old, there simply weren't any redeeming factors to the TRS-80. I knew that other computers of the era did various things better and were more fun to program and use than the TRS-80, and I complained often to my classmates, lamenting that we couldn't have TIs or C64s because they were better computers.
It's not that simple at all. PCs, regardless of the manufacturer, all ran the same software. What you saw onscreen (besides maybe an OEM desktop picture) was EXACTLY the same. Only the hardware was different, and that was usually just a matter of case style. iPad has massive, thriving, 3rd party development going on, and it is directly coupled to the iPhone ecosystem. The two reinforce each other in a major way. So comparing the battle between PC OEMs to tablet manufacturers against iPad is not a valid comparison.
The real question the article should be asking is "could the iPad be the success it is today without the iPhone having existed first?" Instead they ask "But if price is such an important metric, why is the iPad — with its premium price tag — so popular?" and then answer it dead wrong "Simple, it was the first tablet to go mass market, and cumulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers."
WHY did it go "mass market"? THAT is the real question. What they discuss is like asking "Why does the iPad have so many sales?" and then answering "because Apple sells a lot of them".
This is exactly why I prefer writing games that sell for 99 cents on iTunes over writing either financial or healthcare (which I did for years) software. Much more fun, and more importantly, greatly reduced ramifications if something does go wrong.
Everything in existence can have a biological effect. Thus everything is a drug. Thus the FDA can regulate everything.
The amount of heat generated by power consumption is small compared to the energy received from the sun and emitted back into space. The earth receives around 175 PW of power from the sun, and the amount emitted back into space is around the same providing an equilibrium. The global power consumption by everyone on the planet is around 15 TW. So that's a ratio of 175 PW to .015 PW, which means we consume around .008% of the amount of power we receive from the sun / radiate into space.
A lot of our energy comes from fossil fuels, so basically that is releasing energy that was solar originally, so technically we aren't adding energy to the earth. Solar, geothermal and hydro is just converting / moving energy around from place to place within the existing system, so that doesn't add energy either. Nuclear would be the only way we'd be changing the amount of energy in the system, as we're directly converting it from mass. So it would matter what power source we use from that standpoint, and if your argument has merit, then nuclear would be the issue from an entropy standpoint.
It's always interesting when an article provides precedence for something it labels unprecedented.
Great. Now we'll see the same fragmentation Windows CE had all those years. Most games use the NDK and contain binary compiled specifically for ARM. Obviously those apps will not run on the MIPS processor. Microsoft eventually learned this was not a good thing and finally forced all OEMs to use ARM to qualify for Pocket PC branding.
Now all we need is Android running on SH3 and we'll have gone full circle.
Don't you mean Treatwom?
Well in that case the only question is if that "DNA" contains some other message or meaning. Each of the 6,000 DNA "bytes" can be one of 4 values. Thus each "byte" can store 2 bits of information. That's 12,000 bits of data. Assuming uppercase letters only, it takes 5 bits per letter minimum to encode text (without any compression). That only allows for 2,400 characters, which is 1/4th of the poem text.
Looking at it another way, the poem contains 1649 words. That allows for 3.6 DNA "bytes" per word (6000 / 1649), which is 6 bits of data per word. I'll round it up to 7 bits per word to be generous. That's still only 128 unique values per word, which isn't enough to encode all the unique words in the poem.
I just don't see any way to encode a 9,000 word poem into 12,000 bits of data. If the "DNA" does have meaning then it would have to be an excerpt of the poem, or additional verses that aren't in the plaintext version.
The latter has my vote. If the author really is clever, then he came up with an algorithm that takes the original poem text and converts it into "DNA" looking data, which can further be decoded into text that contains additional readable text that completes the poem. If he pulled that off then he earns some major respect.
Correction. 6,000 contiguous bytes of data on the disc is modified, not 8,000.
According to the diff of the disc image before and after the program runs (http://www.crackingagrippa.net/files/agrippa_diffs.txt) it's perfectly clear that the text is not being encrypted. The listing on the left is after the modification, and the listing on the right is the original disc image. A large portion of the disc (exactly 8,000 contiguous bytes) has been rewritten with only four different bytes: 0x41, 0x43, 0x47, 0x54.
Thus a very significant portion of the original information is lost during the "encryption". It sure looks to me like the program merely overwrites the poem portion of the data with one of four randomly selected bytes. The poem, as listed in HTML on the web page, is 9190 characters, which correlates pretty close with the amount of bytes being modified on the disc image.
I also thought that the poem itself was written in some sort of scripting language, and that it literally contained the algorithm that encrypted itself. At first glance the frequency of numbers (years) in the poem also gave the impression that the poem was actually a program of sorts. It seems I was also mislead by the summary, as the poem is arbitrary text and the real challenge is the display program that modified the floppy disc to encrypt the poem text.
You must feel like you're caught in a landslide, with no escape from reality.
This is the perfect opportunity for me to rant on HTC's slide to unlock implementation. Their phones use a custom (non-stock android) lock screen that must have been designed be a total idiot. Instead of sliding to the side, you slide straight up and down. Further, the slider bar is the width of the entire screen, so it is huge. Now, this is stupid beyond belief because millions of people carry their phone in their pocket, so of course as the phone is pulled in and out of the pocket.... it unlocks.
Worse, when a call is coming in, sliding up ignores the call, sliding down answers the call. I have answered or ignored literally DOZENS of phone calls by accident because of this garbage. I actually have to put my phone in my pocket either upside down or right side up in anticipation of which way the slider will go if I take my phone out to answer a call.
Their locking implementation really has to go down in the annals of GUI design as one of the worst designs ever.
Monticello is really worth a visit. I thought the clock at the main entrance to the building was fascinating. It uses weights that look like cannon balls to power the mechanism. However, there wasn't enough room for the weights to descend downward to allow the clock to run for a full week at a time. Jefferson's solution? Cut holes in the floor and allow the weights to travel down into the cellar / basement area. He decided to leave the weights exposed because boxing them in would have blocked some of the windows. However, by leaving them exposed he was able to make additional use of them - he marked the days of the week on the wall, so that the position of the weight showed the day of the week.
It's also interesting that the clock has two faces - one on the interior of the house, and the other above the main entrance on the exterior. Jefferson decided that the exterior face should only have an hour hand. Now, the reasoning given by the tour guides is that the slaves and farm hands didn't need to know the minute, only the hour - precision to the minute wasn't necessary for them. However, the more I've thought about it, I think Jefferson had a more practical reason in mind. With two hands, and from a far distance, it's difficult to make out which is the hour and which is the minute. With just an hour hand it would be easier to tell the time from a very far distance. That fits in more with his sense of invention and practicality.
There's a lot of evidence that Jefferson had a long term relationship with a female slave - Sally Hemings, and fathered 6 children by her. Jefferson gave all 6 children their freedom when the came "of age".
I live in the Appalachian mountain area of Virginia. It is developed here and we have a few towns in our county, but it is still quite rural. You could buy an entire European nation for what it would cost to bury all the power lines in this region of the USA. When digging a hole for a post, if they hit bedrock or a large boulder, they can scoot over 10 or 15 feet and try again. If that doesn't work they can bring in more equipment and drill into the rock, and use some explosives if necessary. It would require orders of magnitude more time, expense, equipment, etc, to actually dig a continuous ditch. Really, it would be a project of epic proportions, easily rivaling the construction of the interstate system. We're not talking about a handful of linear roads here, but 2D grids covering a significant area of the country.
I don't know how far the transportation network extends, but the first sentence of the summary goes on, and on, and on...
C offers control. If you can't handle having that much control (over memory, how the CPU acts on that memory, etc) then your software will have many problems and you will hate C.
I have no idea what the hell SAP is, but it sounds really dangerous.