And finally, the user himself can execute it. And, believe it or not, this is the most used and most successful way of infecting a machine. In other words, the main security problem is not in the machine. It's in front of it.
I hate this blame-the-user viewpoint. Executing code is what computers are there to do. We bemoan the abysmal program monoculture of I.E. and Outlook Express, yet we blame unknowing users who try programs they find online. Furthermore, the distinction between a.SWF file and an.EXE file may seem massive to you and me, but it's pretty academic to the average user for whom their computer is just a tool for getting stuff done.
A computer is a system to run code, whose utility lies in its ability to run a broad range of unexpected applications. What we need is not a culture that discourages experimentation and blames the user, but an OS with a clean separation between system and applications, protected memory, and protected disks outside of an application and user's home spaces. As the line between the desktop and the internet starts to fade, we need at an OS level some of the protections originally intended for untrusted space.
I forget where this example comes from, but here it is:
There is this little electrical current creature, wandering around inside of this crystal. When the electrical current creature reaches the edge of the crystal, he can't go any further. "Oh," says the creature "this is a solid wall of something." The little electrical current creature turns around and bumps into an imperfection in the crystal which he can't permeate through. "Oh," says the creature, "this is a rock."
The creature then happily sits on the rock, pondering the nature of the wall he just bumped into. It's not until years later when the creature gets some very, very strange results from fine measurements of his universe that he realizes that something is not quite right.
Quantum physics is very, very strange. We may be starting to see the fine consequences of the structure of the crystal, but without a major leap of comprehension we have no context to understand it.
And Intel should be sued for lowering the clockspeed on their chips and disabling certain functionality in order to illegally prop up their price structure.
And Microsoft should be sued for cutting features from Vista that are already there so that they can sell lower-cost cripplewear versions.
And Sony should be sued for only supporting Playstation encrypted titles on their console.
And the Zune people should be sued until they stop. Just stop already.
Consoles finally hit their strides. This was the best year for videogames in a very, very long time.
The iPhone was released. Even if this particular phone has issues, suddenly everyone is talking about phone interfaces and features that aren't mired in 1993.
VOIP is really taking off. Sure, people are shutting it down, but it is doing well.
Unfortunately, that rare person who would kill when pissed has a significant impact upon the lives of everyone else who is sane. If it's only one in a thousand people, you've still got a 50% chance of bumping into one on a full 747.
Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
With Firefox, the netscape skin, and extensions available for download, how much more do they need? Do extensions need to be compiled, or do they remain in script form?
What did Netscape do that Mozilla/Firefox did not?
Obviously they needed to be banned. Lithium batteries are much, much more dangerous than 3oz of water outside of a plastic baggie.
And for that matter, people bleed to death of papercuts all the time. Paper must be banned from airlines. Similarly, Cheeseburgers, umbrellas during lightning storms, and those shoes with little wheels in them must be stopped. On airplanes.
Other things that should never be brought on an airplane include: step ladders, Christmas lights, and Chuck Norris. Gambling is a very serious addiction, and as such fliers are hereby banned from setting foot inside of Las Vegas McCarron Airport.
Thank you for your attention, and thank you for flying with the TSA. The TSA: Drawing on our imagination to creatively protect America from imagined harm.
Similarly, this doesn't inpinge upon US sovereignty, in that it doesn't go to the US and extract value from US bank accounts. It simply allows this Caribbean country to exercise their own sovereignty within their borders in a way that they had given up when entering the WTO.
They had a valid complaint, the WTO ruled, the US willfully ignored that ruling for years. As damages, the WTO is sanctioning specific actions that this country may take within its own borders. Essentially, the WTO is restoring a degree of sovereignty to this little country. We're still free to invade, or impose our own sanctions, or what have you.
We have to live with the idea that if we do things other people don't like within our borders, they're going to do things that we don't like within theirs. The WTO is simply the mechanism that the world uses to validate and sanction certain complaints.
How do these people have anything other than bright futures ahead? The directors have all been high-profile people in the news for many, many years now. Daryl McBride probably has a slew of potential opportunities in front of him. He should have no problem getting tons of offer letters, considering how well known his name is and the unique experiences that he has had (like trying to sue every company in america).
I'm sure we'll see him as the CEO of Royal Crown soon, suing Coke and Pepsi for stealing his formula.
Weird Al Yankovic makes money by parodying other artists; but the key concept is he does it, by creating the parody himself with his own sick-warped genius; He doesn't steal other peoples parodies.
Weird Al also generally gets the permission of the subject of the parody, which covers up any grey areas.
you have to keep upgrading to the latest formats...
Really? We've got some pretty solid (though huge) lossless video formats out there, and some simple codec implementations. We're not talking about some magic mumbo-jumbo here. We're talking about simple ones and zeros representing colors that any first-level CS student could write a decoder for on a notebook. If storage space is no limit (and at 200 thousand dollars per day, it shouldn't be), then a straightforward lossless format should be fine.
If you paid some intern to do a HDD switch to two copies in four locations, for eight colo machines total, it should cost at most 10,000 dollars per year. If you're willing to host yourself and have your own IT department, this repeating cost (representing primarily colo fees), should be much less, and can be amortized across many titles.
There are some who think that children should be protected from movies with normal gay relationships. There are some who feel that games like "Left Behind" are detrimental. Others just want to ban driving games as they promote bad habits.
There are very few games that feature sadistically disemboweling small bunnies. Generally speaking, lots of things are banned for more controversial social violations... ones that should be in the hands of parents.
I've kept bumping into this with Hard Disk Drives and Windows over the years. Generally speaking, a windows system installer will support the largest HDD on the market when the installer was made, and THAT'S IT. Trying to re-install win 98 on a 40 GB drive was a nightmare, as was re-installing XP on a 160 GB drive.
I really have to wonder if the repeated inability to future-proof this stuff is intentional. If, for example, the 4 GB ram limit was intended to be satisfied by the massive quantities of 64 bit Vista flowing through the channel.
I worked somewhere that our network was rather violently infected by a new and nasty worm. Being an all windows-shop at the time, every computer that was tasked with figuring out the problem and fixing it was also infected. Thank goodness for Knoppix.
It doesn't even need to be feature creep. If things just don't "Gel," especially with the team, then no matter how many times you reset you still can get a mediocre game. They would have just made 5 or 6 mediocre games, and only released the last one.
Kojima or Miyamoto, I have full faith would put those 10 years to good use. Rotating teams at 3D Realms?...We'll see.
Sammy's primary market is pachinko and gambling machines. My guess is Sega really wanted some of that lucre, and Sammy wanted to leverage Sega's characters, and both of their arcade manufacturing operations are small enough to benefit from some consolidation.
If you even stop off in the Los Vegas airport, you'll find gambling machines created by Konami, Namco, and Sega, amongst others. My guess is that Sega just merged it's way into this obvious ancillary revenue stream.
Really? My limited understanding is that the default numberset isn't a seed so much as controlling the method of randomization. But that the result may be predictable if one knows the encrypted number which pairs with the default numberset. In other words, if you change the default numberset to ANYTHING else, even a static number, you've effectively thwarted anyone who may have a key pair.
It's not randomizing the data twice. It's simply changing the default numberset to a different numberset and thus thwarting the potential issue.
Slashdot Mirror
And finally, the user himself can execute it. And, believe it or not, this is the most used and most successful way of infecting a machine. In other words, the main security problem is not in the machine. It's in front of it.
.SWF file and an .EXE file may seem massive to you and me, but it's pretty academic to the average user for whom their computer is just a tool for getting stuff done.
I hate this blame-the-user viewpoint. Executing code is what computers are there to do. We bemoan the abysmal program monoculture of I.E. and Outlook Express, yet we blame unknowing users who try programs they find online. Furthermore, the distinction between a
A computer is a system to run code, whose utility lies in its ability to run a broad range of unexpected applications. What we need is not a culture that discourages experimentation and blames the user, but an OS with a clean separation between system and applications, protected memory, and protected disks outside of an application and user's home spaces. As the line between the desktop and the internet starts to fade, we need at an OS level some of the protections originally intended for untrusted space.
If these so-called invisible rootkits are so effective, why aren't we seeing them everywhere? Huh?
http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=080103
You cant prove anything from inside the box.
I forget where this example comes from, but here it is:
There is this little electrical current creature, wandering around inside of this crystal. When the electrical current creature reaches the edge of the crystal, he can't go any further. "Oh," says the creature "this is a solid wall of something." The little electrical current creature turns around and bumps into an imperfection in the crystal which he can't permeate through. "Oh," says the creature, "this is a rock."
The creature then happily sits on the rock, pondering the nature of the wall he just bumped into. It's not until years later when the creature gets some very, very strange results from fine measurements of his universe that he realizes that something is not quite right.
Quantum physics is very, very strange. We may be starting to see the fine consequences of the structure of the crystal, but without a major leap of comprehension we have no context to understand it.
And Intel should be sued for lowering the clockspeed on their chips and disabling certain functionality in order to illegally prop up their price structure.
And Microsoft should be sued for cutting features from Vista that are already there so that they can sell lower-cost cripplewear versions.
And Sony should be sued for only supporting Playstation encrypted titles on their console.
And the Zune people should be sued until they stop. Just stop already.
Great bits of technology this year:
Consoles finally hit their strides. This was the best year for videogames in a very, very long time.
The iPhone was released. Even if this particular phone has issues, suddenly everyone is talking about phone interfaces and features that aren't mired in 1993.
VOIP is really taking off. Sure, people are shutting it down, but it is doing well.
Amazon MP3 sales.
Unfortunately, that rare person who would kill when pissed has a significant impact upon the lives of everyone else who is sane. If it's only one in a thousand people, you've still got a 50% chance of bumping into one on a full 747.
Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
With Firefox, the netscape skin, and extensions available for download, how much more do they need? Do extensions need to be compiled, or do they remain in script form?
What did Netscape do that Mozilla/Firefox did not?
With delays from new TSA regulations, you'd need an 8 hour battery anyway.
Obviously they needed to be banned. Lithium batteries are much, much more dangerous than 3oz of water outside of a plastic baggie.
And for that matter, people bleed to death of papercuts all the time. Paper must be banned from airlines. Similarly, Cheeseburgers, umbrellas during lightning storms, and those shoes with little wheels in them must be stopped. On airplanes.
Other things that should never be brought on an airplane include: step ladders, Christmas lights, and Chuck Norris. Gambling is a very serious addiction, and as such fliers are hereby banned from setting foot inside of Las Vegas McCarron Airport.
Thank you for your attention, and thank you for flying with the TSA. The TSA: Drawing on our imagination to creatively protect America from imagined harm.
why would an end user expect the game to run any more than one would expect a Wii game to run on an Xbox 360?
[sigh] You haven't worked in tech support, have you?
Similarly, this doesn't inpinge upon US sovereignty, in that it doesn't go to the US and extract value from US bank accounts. It simply allows this Caribbean country to exercise their own sovereignty within their borders in a way that they had given up when entering the WTO.
They had a valid complaint, the WTO ruled, the US willfully ignored that ruling for years. As damages, the WTO is sanctioning specific actions that this country may take within its own borders. Essentially, the WTO is restoring a degree of sovereignty to this little country. We're still free to invade, or impose our own sanctions, or what have you.
We have to live with the idea that if we do things other people don't like within our borders, they're going to do things that we don't like within theirs. The WTO is simply the mechanism that the world uses to validate and sanction certain complaints.
I didn't realize they had released a web-version of the game. Thanks for the pointer!
So in other words, 36.4% of all really dumb people have Limewire installed?
Sounds about right.
How do these people have anything other than bright futures ahead? The directors have all been high-profile people in the news for many, many years now. Daryl McBride probably has a slew of potential opportunities in front of him. He should have no problem getting tons of offer letters, considering how well known his name is and the unique experiences that he has had (like trying to sue every company in america).
I'm sure we'll see him as the CEO of Royal Crown soon, suing Coke and Pepsi for stealing his formula.
It's just their way of preserving the story.
Weird Al Yankovic makes money by parodying other artists; but the key concept is he does it, by creating the parody himself with his own sick-warped genius; He doesn't steal other peoples parodies.
Weird Al also generally gets the permission of the subject of the parody, which covers up any grey areas.
you have to keep upgrading to the latest formats...
Really? We've got some pretty solid (though huge) lossless video formats out there, and some simple codec implementations. We're not talking about some magic mumbo-jumbo here. We're talking about simple ones and zeros representing colors that any first-level CS student could write a decoder for on a notebook. If storage space is no limit (and at 200 thousand dollars per day, it shouldn't be), then a straightforward lossless format should be fine.
If you paid some intern to do a HDD switch to two copies in four locations, for eight colo machines total, it should cost at most 10,000 dollars per year. If you're willing to host yourself and have your own IT department, this repeating cost (representing primarily colo fees), should be much less, and can be amortized across many titles.
There are some who think that children should be protected from movies with normal gay relationships. There are some who feel that games like "Left Behind" are detrimental. Others just want to ban driving games as they promote bad habits.
There are very few games that feature sadistically disemboweling small bunnies. Generally speaking, lots of things are banned for more controversial social violations... ones that should be in the hands of parents.
Chuck Norris's posts go to 6.
And people wonder why they cannot rely upon employee loyalty these days. Personally, I'm investing all of my money in pitchforks and fire insurance.
I've kept bumping into this with Hard Disk Drives and Windows over the years. Generally speaking, a windows system installer will support the largest HDD on the market when the installer was made, and THAT'S IT. Trying to re-install win 98 on a 40 GB drive was a nightmare, as was re-installing XP on a 160 GB drive.
I really have to wonder if the repeated inability to future-proof this stuff is intentional. If, for example, the 4 GB ram limit was intended to be satisfied by the massive quantities of 64 bit Vista flowing through the channel.
I worked somewhere that our network was rather violently infected by a new and nasty worm. Being an all windows-shop at the time, every computer that was tasked with figuring out the problem and fixing it was also infected. Thank goodness for Knoppix.
It doesn't even need to be feature creep. If things just don't "Gel," especially with the team, then no matter how many times you reset you still can get a mediocre game. They would have just made 5 or 6 mediocre games, and only released the last one.
...We'll see.
Kojima or Miyamoto, I have full faith would put those 10 years to good use. Rotating teams at 3D Realms?
Sammy's primary market is pachinko and gambling machines. My guess is Sega really wanted some of that lucre, and Sammy wanted to leverage Sega's characters, and both of their arcade manufacturing operations are small enough to benefit from some consolidation.
If you even stop off in the Los Vegas airport, you'll find gambling machines created by Konami, Namco, and Sega, amongst others. My guess is that Sega just merged it's way into this obvious ancillary revenue stream.
Really? My limited understanding is that the default numberset isn't a seed so much as controlling the method of randomization. But that the result may be predictable if one knows the encrypted number which pairs with the default numberset. In other words, if you change the default numberset to ANYTHING else, even a static number, you've effectively thwarted anyone who may have a key pair.
It's not randomizing the data twice. It's simply changing the default numberset to a different numberset and thus thwarting the potential issue.