... and frankly, i really am not looking forward to the day astronomy becomes more than just white dots on black background, i like those dots to remain just that... dots. grmf.
well lemme ask you this, could you have a machine on your local network "fake" that "feedback protocol" to keep the DRM thing running? well it could very well be localhost. If their DRM thing connects to a host via hostname, and not ip address, then you can easily point that host to 127.0.0.1 in/etc/hosts, and have some local daemon running faking that feedback. mm.
I'm also curious to see what port it's guna do its communication on. I do hope they won't be totally gay and use port 80 to increase their chances at a freely open port.
i would like to get a bird's eye view understanding of what other platforms are doing different to avert similar issues? is OS X more or less immune to that? what about linux/X11? *BSD?
I'm thinking that unix was designed from the ground-up to be a multi-user environment, so for example students could compile their C apps for their CS101 class assignments on their own little shell account, while not being readily able to wreak havoc on the system...
When microsoft states "If a bad guy
can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your
computer anymore", this means to me:
windows is *by design* not a secure multi-user environment. Which is fine by me as long as they don't advertise it to be.
the definition of "bad guy" seems fairly blurry to me, in light of the popularity of peer-to-peer applications which I'm sure would *love* to exploit such holes
are there still easy/obvious ways to root a unix/linux/bsd shell from compiling and running a piece of C code? aside from attempting to kill the CPU, infinite loops, and/or render the machine useless?
You can also get
dedicated wireless service from EarthLink. They're spreading wireless access points all over the place via their partnership with Boingo.
Unpatched IE vulnerabilities. The mere fact that the browser is so tightly integrated to the operating system makes this browser potentially more vulnerable.
Mozilla tabbed browsing. 'nuff said
Mozilla pop-up blocking
Mozilla cookies management, tho it's also a good feature on IE5 for the mac, IE5 for the PC doesn't let you easily manage your existing cookies, I dunno if IE6 fixes this.
Well it may become more of an issue with HTTP_REFERER http header which is the URL the user was on before clicking a link.
If a user reads a malicious e-mail i sent which has link to somewhere on my web server, if i happen to be tailing my logs at that very moment, chances are i can turn around and paste their referrer URL into my own browser and be reading their e-mail.
But that's an issue with URL-based session persistence/authentication tracking overall. This should at the very least be coupled with checking against the user's IP address.
But a Cookie-Based session persistence scheme would seem more appropriate/secure in this case.
I do hope Apple also took care of client-side scripting vulnerabilities. mmMMm.
A while ago i put-up a journal entry on very basics procedures to make your apache logs less clutered by codered and nimda queries.
I have since then been saving each nimda hit in a separate log and recently compiled a list of *ALL* unique nimda queries made to my web server which I use with home-grown cgi/shell scripts to make a series of requests back to the attackers ip addresses as they hit me, which attempt to place warning text files in various places on their system and pop alert messages.
So I also recently posted a follow-up article on nimda which points you to all the queries i have catalogged so far.
Note: if you *really* want some of the shell scripts i use to attempt to warn the attackers just request so in comments to my journal, tho they really are nasty hacks. I just may write a java app triggered by a servlet or cgi one of these days.
adultery is not a government matter. it is not illegal per se. it simply gives your wife the right to divorce your sorry ass and milk you for all your net-worth.
oh that's funny i'm still running my powerpc 7500/100 which i bought OVER 6 years ago, which is currently running LinuxPPC Q4/2000. Guess what's serving my site off of my very basic home DSL connection rite now? Guess which computer I was using to develop XML Tidy?
Oh yea and I can *still* easily and cost-effectively upgrade it to comfortably run OS X.
it is not censorship at all. Again, the government here is simply trying to prevent companies from practicing "false advertising". You cannot tell people you offer one thing and give them another. FCC regulates that kind of things.
the big freakin deal is that the average joe user is not able to distinguish search engines which have sold out, and will take any search result they're given to face-value. FCC's effort is to ensure consumers to have the information they need to make the informed choice to go to google.
you can get a brand new fully-loaded (384MB RAM, 30GIG hard drive, aiport card) high-end ibook laptop for $2k out of the door.
my titanium powerbook is the first model they put out, my company bought it fairly late when prices had dropped for $1300, and that includes airport card and 384MB of RAM.
if you go to store.apple.com, look at the bottom-left corner, they have a section for refurbed or older-model systems at great discounts.
you can also scour eBay for people selling their older macs, any mac above the 1996 PPC 7500/100 is still worth buying for dirt-cheap ($200?), upgrade the processor to a new G4 or fast G3, maybe add a separate PCI SCSI or ATA controller to add internal and/or external IBM drives and install OS X on it, or LinuxPPC which is free, which would at the very least make a *great* little server.
actually i believe Ximian would let you connect to exchange servers with their proprietary plug-in to their open-source ware. I wouldn't be surprised if an OS X port of Ximian was to pop out.
The whole microsoft office suite is ported natively to OS X. you just gotta buy office for os x tho. I just found this article that basically says that echange server is not available to Miscrosoft Entourage just yet, but is available on Outlook 2001 for classic mac os, if you feel like firing-up the classic environment which i personally loathe.
i don't know about your second question. I do know you can install the samba daemon on OS X ( i have) and that OS X comes built-in with a samba client you can invoke from the finder "gui" or from a terminal shell.
well it really depends how badly you need to have a secure, stable and reliable computer. maybe you don't. My TiBook is at the center of my j2ee web applications development and digital fun at home with mp3 player, digital camera and DVDs.
the author of the article seemed to emphasize needing a powerful desktop computer that "just works". I empathize with him, hence my suggestion.
That said, many people like to spend significant time fiddling with hardware and kernels, and that is also a very rewarding albeit challenging way of doing computing. It keeps your mind sharp and your hardware costs low.
With that in mind, i should rephrase the last statement of my initial post to something like "the best operating system for geeks who have had enough messing with hardware and kernels and who are ready to spend a little more money to get what they need".
Keep in mind that the article's author did *buy* windows XP. that's not cheap. But yes, high-end x86 boxes do offer you more gigahertz horsepower, fair enough. But you can't run OS X on x86. And one of the reasons why OS X works so well on apple hardware, is that they don't have to hack a BSD kernel that handles a bazillion variations of hardware configurations to work with various peripherals. So it's a trade-off, but one that makes sense to *me* and would make sense to people like the author of that article.
Also keep in mind that Macs are now *highly* standards-compliant: monitors are VGA monitors, all peripherals are USB, they come with ATA controllers, they have multiple PCI expansion bays. You can very easily upgrade your mac with non-apple hardware, you just can't build a mac from scratch. Again, a trade-off.
If you want a platform that has absolutely ALL the benefits of a BSD unix platform, including security by design, stability, reliability, on TOP the ability to use your machine as an everyday desktop operating system to perform any task such as accounting, web surfing, office documents authoring, J2EE web applications development, mess around a tcsh shell, author and run scripts, play with your/etc/hosts file to filter ad servers, mixed-network-protocol networking at both server AND client levels, open any document from any other platform, create PDF documents from any application from which you can print, then OS X is the operating sytem for you.
Face it. OS X is by far, and i'm carefuly measuring my words here, the absolute best operating system whether you're a unix geek, a business development drone, an engineer or... my Mom.
yea those xserves sure look yummy. you should check out Steve Jobs keynote on those babies at his developers' conference, *very* interesting stuff, even if you manage to stay away from the reality distortion field.
back in like '93 i remember visiting some french local cable channel broadcasting company who would constantly rotate local advertising "slides" thru their channel, which would be exclusively handled 24/7/365 by a couple of those early lower-end "AV" macs using Macromedia Director scheduled presentations. one box was like for development/staging/testing, the other one was the live box. the tech guy there told us apple wasn't too thrilled they'd put their hardware thru that kind of stress, but that the thing had been doing just fine for like a year and still not flinching.
Shit man '93 was like still early versions of "System 7". heh. Back during the days of "windows 3.1", to put things in perspective.
depending on your budget, if you want reliable hardware with moving parts which do not break, you might wanna look at refurbed or new apple hardware.
Back in early '96 i bought Apple's first "PCI Mac", the PowerPC 7500/100. The thing has been on 24/7 every single day for the last 6 years and has run a slew of operating systems, and i have crashed the thing many, many times while never corrupting a single hard drive.
While in college, i used it as a TV, video capture platform, web surfing, web serving, web authoring, C programming tool.
Then it was used for about 3 years as a dedicated web server on a T1 connection, serving filemaker-pro-db/lasso/webstar-driven sites for multiple clients until they'd migrate to their own boxes.
And for the last two years it has been happily sitting on my kitchen table running LinuxPPC Q4 2000 24/7 serving some hobby sites of mine off of my DSL connection
I've upgraded its processor to a 250mhz G3, added an Ultra2 LVD SCSI card, a 9gig 8.5ms 10,000 rpm IBM cheetah hard drive, boosted the ram to 200MB (could be up to 1gig in theory) and other nifty things.
I've been opening the case and cleaning its guts about once every 2 years whenever i fellt the need to mess with it.
in any case, it has been my experience that apple hardware just doesn't break, no matter how much i fuck with it. I still see 5 year-old apple laptops still running MacOS 8.5 and allowing you to surf the 'net. Sure the battery no-longer holds a charge, which is to be expected, but once the power supply is plugged-in, they still work.
and i bet you could get an old 100mhz PPC 7500 CPU for around $300.
Slashdot Mirror
well lemme ask you this, could you have a machine on your local network "fake" that "feedback protocol" to keep the DRM thing running? well it could very well be localhost. If their DRM thing connects to a host via hostname, and not ip address, then you can easily point that host to 127.0.0.1 in
I'm also curious to see what port it's guna do its communication on. I do hope they won't be totally gay and use port 80 to increase their chances at a freely open port.
I'm thinking that unix was designed from the ground-up to be a multi-user environment, so for example students could compile their C apps for their CS101 class assignments on their own little shell account, while not being readily able to wreak havoc on the system ...
When microsoft states "If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore", this means to me:
are there still easy/obvious ways to root a unix/linux/bsd shell from compiling and running a piece of C code? aside from attempting to kill the CPU, infinite loops, and/or render the machine useless?
You can also get dedicated wireless service from EarthLink. They're spreading wireless access points all over the place via their partnership with Boingo.
Apple only wants to sell to "real countries" >;]
If a user reads a malicious e-mail i sent which has link to somewhere on my web server, if i happen to be tailing my logs at that very moment, chances are i can turn around and paste their referrer URL into my own browser and be reading their e-mail.
But that's an issue with URL-based session persistence/authentication tracking overall. This should at the very least be coupled with checking against the user's IP address.
But a Cookie-Based session persistence scheme would seem more appropriate/secure in this case.
I do hope Apple also took care of client-side scripting vulnerabilities. mmMMm.
I have since then been saving each nimda hit in a separate log and recently compiled a list of *ALL* unique nimda queries made to my web server which I use with home-grown cgi/shell scripts to make a series of requests back to the attackers ip addresses as they hit me, which attempt to place warning text files in various places on their system and pop alert messages.
So I also recently posted a follow-up article on nimda which points you to all the queries i have catalogged so far.
Note: if you *really* want some of the shell scripts i use to attempt to warn the attackers just request so in comments to my journal, tho they really are nasty hacks. I just may write a java app triggered by a servlet or cgi one of these days.
adultery is not a government matter. it is not illegal per se. it simply gives your wife the right to divorce your sorry ass and milk you for all your net-worth.
Oh yea and I can *still* easily and cost-effectively upgrade it to comfortably run OS X.
6 years!
it is not censorship at all. Again, the government here is simply trying to prevent companies from practicing "false advertising". You cannot tell people you offer one thing and give them another. FCC regulates that kind of things.
the big freakin deal is that the average joe user is not able to distinguish search engines which have sold out, and will take any search result they're given to face-value. FCC's effort is to ensure consumers to have the information they need to make the informed choice to go to google.
my titanium powerbook is the first model they put out, my company bought it fairly late when prices had dropped for $1300, and that includes airport card and 384MB of RAM.
if you go to store.apple.com, look at the bottom-left corner, they have a section for refurbed or older-model systems at great discounts.
you can also scour eBay for people selling their older macs, any mac above the 1996 PPC 7500/100 is still worth buying for dirt-cheap ($200?), upgrade the processor to a new G4 or fast G3, maybe add a separate PCI SCSI or ATA controller to add internal and/or external IBM drives and install OS X on it, or LinuxPPC which is free, which would at the very least make a *great* little server.
is that cheap enough for ye?
The whole microsoft office suite is ported natively to OS X. you just gotta buy office for os x tho. I just found this article that basically says that echange server is not available to Miscrosoft Entourage just yet, but is available on Outlook 2001 for classic mac os, if you feel like firing-up the classic environment which i personally loathe.
i don't know about your second question. I do know you can install the samba daemon on OS X ( i have) and that OS X comes built-in with a samba client you can invoke from the finder "gui" or from a terminal shell.
as a side note, for people who like tinkering with their OS X i would point them to two cool sources:
Fink, lets you install pretty much any open-source package on OS X.
mac os x hints, gives you lots of useful resources to tweak the heck out of OS X using standards unix hackery.
the author of the article seemed to emphasize needing a powerful desktop computer that "just works". I empathize with him, hence my suggestion.
That said, many people like to spend significant time fiddling with hardware and kernels, and that is also a very rewarding albeit challenging way of doing computing. It keeps your mind sharp and your hardware costs low.
With that in mind, i should rephrase the last statement of my initial post to something like "the best operating system for geeks who have had enough messing with hardware and kernels and who are ready to spend a little more money to get what they need".
Keep in mind that the article's author did *buy* windows XP. that's not cheap. But yes, high-end x86 boxes do offer you more gigahertz horsepower, fair enough. But you can't run OS X on x86. And one of the reasons why OS X works so well on apple hardware, is that they don't have to hack a BSD kernel that handles a bazillion variations of hardware configurations to work with various peripherals. So it's a trade-off, but one that makes sense to *me* and would make sense to people like the author of that article.
Also keep in mind that Macs are now *highly* standards-compliant: monitors are VGA monitors, all peripherals are USB, they come with ATA controllers, they have multiple PCI expansion bays. You can very easily upgrade your mac with non-apple hardware, you just can't build a mac from scratch. Again, a trade-off.
Also macs have a *very long* shelf-life.
he should have moved to a Mac running OS X.
If you want a platform that has absolutely ALL the benefits of a BSD unix platform, including security by design, stability, reliability, on TOP the ability to use your machine as an everyday desktop operating system to perform any task such as accounting, web surfing, office documents authoring, J2EE web applications development, mess around a tcsh shell, author and run scripts, play with your /etc/hosts file to filter ad servers, mixed-network-protocol networking at both server AND client levels, open any document from any other platform, create PDF documents from any application from which you can print, then OS X is the operating sytem for you.
you don't believe me?
Check out my journal to see my migration story from a win2k laptop to a titanium powerbook.
You want to see more gorey details on some of the crazy things you can do with OS X?
Then you might wanna take a look at this journal entry.
Face it. OS X is by far, and i'm carefuly measuring my words here, the absolute best operating system whether you're a unix geek, a business development drone, an engineer or ... my Mom.
back in like '93 i remember visiting some french local cable channel broadcasting company who would constantly rotate local advertising "slides" thru their channel, which would be exclusively handled 24/7/365 by a couple of those early lower-end "AV" macs using Macromedia Director scheduled presentations. one box was like for development/staging/testing, the other one was the live box. the tech guy there told us apple wasn't too thrilled they'd put their hardware thru that kind of stress, but that the thing had been doing just fine for like a year and still not flinching.
Shit man '93 was like still early versions of "System 7". heh. Back during the days of "windows 3.1", to put things in perspective.
i have no idea what you look like but
depending on your budget, if you want reliable hardware with moving parts which do not break, you might wanna look at refurbed or new apple hardware.
Back in early '96 i bought Apple's first "PCI Mac", the PowerPC 7500/100. The thing has been on 24/7 every single day for the last 6 years and has run a slew of operating systems, and i have crashed the thing many, many times while never corrupting a single hard drive.
While in college, i used it as a TV, video capture platform, web surfing, web serving, web authoring, C programming tool.
Then it was used for about 3 years as a dedicated web server on a T1 connection, serving filemaker-pro-db/lasso/webstar-driven sites for multiple clients until they'd migrate to their own boxes.
And for the last two years it has been happily sitting on my kitchen table running LinuxPPC Q4 2000 24/7 serving some hobby sites of mine off of my DSL connection
I've upgraded its processor to a 250mhz G3, added an Ultra2 LVD SCSI card, a 9gig 8.5ms 10,000 rpm IBM cheetah hard drive, boosted the ram to 200MB (could be up to 1gig in theory) and other nifty things.
I've been opening the case and cleaning its guts about once every 2 years whenever i fellt the need to mess with it.
in any case, it has been my experience that apple hardware just doesn't break, no matter how much i fuck with it. I still see 5 year-old apple laptops still running MacOS 8.5 and allowing you to surf the 'net. Sure the battery no-longer holds a charge, which is to be expected, but once the power supply is plugged-in, they still work.
and i bet you could get an old 100mhz PPC 7500 CPU for around $300.