I don't think I'd want any of my backups on a service that clearly has access to my data. All such a service should be able to see is utterly opaque encrypted binary blobs they don't have the key for. Dropbox clearly think that's too hard, and prefer to err on the side of making their implementation easier.
rsync to Amazon S3 might be an option, if only for cross-platform capabilities. No versioning though, but outside of Apple's Time Machine (obviously useless for Windows and Linux), you're not going to get that without some major headache
Um, there are plenty of incremental backup tools dotted about, just upload the dumps?
Alternatively tarsnap is currently in beta testing, uses Amazon S3, and the client is written by the top FreeBSD security bod, with the client coming as source (though the service isn't free).
It probably does something similar to Windows activation; it makes a hash of a bunch of your hardware (using similarity hashing, not cryptographic hashing), and has some arbitrary cut-off whereby if your system's existing hash is too different from the stored hash, it considers it to be a new machine.
I won't be buying spore until EA gives us an apology for being dicks
Having played quite a few hours into space stage, I'd suggest not buying it in either case; it's certainly not without it's clever touches, but ultimately it's a bunch of largely pointless model editors (the main one you can buy seperately) with some tedious, repetitive and shallow minigames bolted on the side. I love RTS's, I love Sim City, I love Civilization, I love 4X. Spore takes all these genres and removes everything about them which makes them fun.
Wright likes to wibble on about how the game's misunderstood; that he made it so you could use it to tell your own stories. I like that, I really do, but the game world really doesn't seem made to assist you with that. Sure, you can sink hours into making a "Federation" and "Klingons" in two different saves, and then play having them meet each other and declare war (so you can fight them with your *one* ship) or make friends, but story wise the game's far more likely to get in your way with half a dozen more awful "Save planet $foo from ecological collapse" missions because you needed to sink another few hours into it to get enough ecological stabilizers.
Essentially it lets you install it on 5 unique PCs.
There's no standard for defining what makes a "unique PC". Anything from a HD/GFX card upgrade to an OS reinstall or BIOS update could make one of these ad-hoc systems decide it's no longer on the machine it was installed on.
I've also had problems with overzealous measures such as the one used in Operation Flashpoint activating and making the game unplayable. Guess who didn't have any problems? That's right, the people who pirated them!
Actually, Operation Flashpoint's copy protection caused a lot of problems for pirates too (and, indeed, anyone who bought it and cracked it); it uses a system called "FADE", whereby the game will run if it detects it's been cracked, but will degrade gameplay over time, so it's hard for a cracker to tell if they succeeded or not.
Of course, by not being an obvious "duh, cracked, won't run", much of this was indistinguishable from the game being buggy or ridicuously unbalanced, so I always thought it was pretty silly; you make pirates think the game is crap so they won't buy it even if they might otherwise have, and you make some legitimate users who use trainers or cracks suffer and wish they hadn't bought it in the first place.
Worries over FADE certainly put me off buying Flashpoint and ArmA until they removed it. And that is to their credit; the DRM was removed when it was no longer considered necessary. DRM using companies going on record that they'll do this (and not just "when we go bust", but "in 3 months" or so) would go a long way towards improving consumer confidence.
Steam being bloated? Steam takes up under a hundred meg of the 12 gig of steam games I have installed.
Uh huh. Did you miss the 5GB of.gcf's it keeps hanging around, basically duplicating every file in every game you purchase off it? That, and the app itself takes a good 30 seconds to start, when it's not forcing yet another mandatory update on you.
Steam's overhead here is on the order of 25GB, not 100MB, and it doesn't even put that overhead to good use by providing me the capacity of move installed games to other drives or roll back patches.
On the other hand my entire Impulse install is 19MB, the games I've bought from it are on two other drives, I can archive them, reinstall them, roll back patches, or choose not to install patches without losing a notification that there is in fact a patch, and I don't need to wait for Impulse to start to run any of the games I've bought; they're pretty much just unmodified retail copies without DRM.
GamersGate similarly ships at least *some* unmodified, DRM free games. I'm not sure how far that extends, but Sword of the Stars' publishers gave them a limited exclusive for their latest expansion because they were so fast at distributing new patches, and the users seem to love them.
In FreeBSD at least, the split's not that clear cut; there's em(4) for older cards and igb(4) for newer ones, both of which share a seperate e1000 module where lots of their code lives. I think the situation's similar on Linux.
The sw option is a legacy thing, I think; it used to be that swapon -a would only activate devices of type swap with options sw; as of util-linux 2.12, released in early 2004, swapon -a activates all devices of type swap without options noauto, hence behaving like every other fstab entry and making options sw superfluous.
I used to use a tool on the Amiga called FastBoot. Quite an impressive hack; it's basically Suspend to Disk. Disable task switching, write out memory to disk, when you next boot, run a tool to load it back in. Since I had a lot of crap running on my Amiga, with boot times of a minute or more, it was awesome using this to reduce that to a couple of seconds.
And.. indeed, this is exactly what I do on my Windows desktop, and indeed what I do on my XP partition on my laptop today; I Hibernate them so bootup happens in 20 seconds instead of 120 (yes, I still run a lot of crap).
So, maybe we have ultra quiet electric R/C planes flying around with a single-shot weapon of some sort (perhaps it's explosive.) Maybe they're carried to the site by a Predator at a high altitude, then dropped and silently glide to their targets where they detonate.
my take on the future of weapons is that battle armour and big expensive weapon systems are, IMO, as much a dead-end as the all-big-gun battleship: they'll probably get built, but they're not really relevant. The future is robots and RPVs, diminishing in size and increasing in numbers until we're confronted by millions of stealthed, killer mosquitos providing air cover for suicide-bomber dung beetles. The guys with the powered battle armour or MBTs will be able to drive their heavy metal into enemy territory but they won't be able to climb out of it for a cigarette break without something the size of an angry yellowjacket flying into their ear and exploding. The heavy metal drivers will be like fighter pilots today; demanding better jet fighters like the F22 so they can go dashing around, pulling 9G turns, not realizing they're as obsolete as cavalry officers.
On the other hand, a single consumer HD these days can saturate even wired GigE. I remember upgrading years ago because I was sick of not having the network bandwidth to properly use even a single disk; now I can stream 110MB/s off one, and I can see in a few years I'm going to be hankering after 10GigE, the way I hankered after GigE because disks were several times faster than Fast Ethernet.
I don't want to have to babysit the machines I take away with me, I don't want to carry bulky chargers around, worry about where the next free socket might be, remember to actually plug it in when one might be available, or have to limit my choice of software or display settings because it won't last long enough if I use it like I want to. I don't want to have to make sure it turns itself off if I don't poke it regularly, either.
Ultimately I should have to worry about the power requirements of my laptop, mobile phone, etc, about as much as I have to worry about that of my watch.
Greg Egan's Incandescence universe has relativistic femtometer-sized robotic probes called "strong bullets" you can shoot off somewhere to perform observations:
A new generation of observatories had been designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on strong bullets: specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories.
Of course, Incandescence is based on a trans-galactic meta-civilization that's existed for hundreds of millions of years, not on barely risen apes who can't even make a decent portable telephone.
Thanks, I don't remember it being that quick, but my temporal memory is awful at the best of times. Month, week, it's all the same geologically speaking;)
The sequel, Forged Alliance, was released November 6, 2007, and patched out pretty much immediately, even before the international release.
Yup, all they'll do is clarify a few things, up the install limit a bit, maybe release an after-the-fact deactivator, and that'll be that. Just like they did with BioShock and Mass Effect. There's no way they'll back off enough to actually patch out the DRM, they're way too protective of their next cash cow as their endless milking of The Sims winds down.
Personally, I no longer care very much; the game looks pretty shallow and boring, and certainly not worth £40, especially if the DRM has a reasonable probability of being a hassle. There are plenty of other interesting upcoming or recently released games, most retailing at half the price, all almost certain to have more palatable or even no DRM, and some of them are even free; I'm not exactly hurting for entertainment or novelty.
The patches took a few months, it's not like they patched SecuROM out on the day of release. I would hope most publishers would be happy with that, though given it's relative rarity, I guess not.
And their next RTS, Demigod, will be published by Stardock, released via Impulse and have no DRM to speak of.
Most of the waiting is due to downloading flash monstrosities used by ads
When I find myself waiting, it's normally because the ad servers aren't responding at all; it's always "Looking up ad.foo.com", or "Sending request to ad.foo.com", or "Reading reply from ad.foo.com" with no data actually being transferred. Sites should at least embed this crap in a way that doesn't require the browser to wait on it to diplay the page.
If I open Tab B from Tab A, it should get Tab A's cookies. But cookies in Tab B shouldn't "backport" to tab A
Uh, why not? If I'm browsing a site using multiple tabs, and the site resets the cookie to avoid session fixation attacks, or it uses cookies to configure features to whatever, all my tabs should get the new cookie, they shouldn't behave like entirely separate browsers.
The point is that if different processes can communicate with each other, that significantly increases the likelyhood of cross-tab / cross-process vulnerabilities. The attack footprint just grew, rather sharply, in size.
Compared to what? Everything running in the same memory space?
The multi-process model Chrome's using means tabs communicate via message passing*, rather than grabbing locks around shared data structures and poking at things directly, which seems to be what you think is going on. A message passing model's a far smaller area to attack, since it can be a rigorously defined, limited and enforced protocol, rather than an advisory thing a programming error can easily forget or an attacker ignore. And yes, it allows child processes to be run with significantly reduced privileges; e.g. your tabs could be running as user nobody, chrooted to/var/empty, unable to create files or even see most of the system; any time they need to do anything with higher privileges, they need to talk to the parent process, which can consider what they *should* be able to do and reject anything else.
Sure, the message passing might not be as robust as paranoid as you'd like, but it's a far smaller space to attack and secure than "well, if someone gets an arbitrary code execution attack going on, it's game over".
* I haven't looked at the code, it certainly *could* just be sharing big chunks of memory like that, but I somewhat doubt it.
You still need to get people to configure their editor to expand tabs, and make indents the same size everyone else is using, etc. Fools who can't configure their editors properly will find some way to screw it up either way. And frankly, I don't want fools working on any of the code I maintain;)
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I don't think I'd want any of my backups on a service that clearly has access to my data. All such a service should be able to see is utterly opaque encrypted binary blobs they don't have the key for. Dropbox clearly think that's too hard, and prefer to err on the side of making their implementation easier.
rsync to Amazon S3 might be an option, if only for cross-platform capabilities. No versioning though, but outside of Apple's Time Machine (obviously useless for Windows and Linux), you're not going to get that without some major headache
Um, there are plenty of incremental backup tools dotted about, just upload the dumps?
Alternatively tarsnap is currently in beta testing, uses Amazon S3, and the client is written by the top FreeBSD security bod, with the client coming as source (though the service isn't free).
Quite a few problems like that seem to be MSI-X related, did you try disabling them?
It might be optical drive.
Assuming it can tell what your optical drive is?
It probably does something similar to Windows activation; it makes a hash of a bunch of your hardware (using similarity hashing, not cryptographic hashing), and has some arbitrary cut-off whereby if your system's existing hash is too different from the stored hash, it considers it to be a new machine.
I won't be buying spore until EA gives us an apology for being dicks
Having played quite a few hours into space stage, I'd suggest not buying it in either case; it's certainly not without it's clever touches, but ultimately it's a bunch of largely pointless model editors (the main one you can buy seperately) with some tedious, repetitive and shallow minigames bolted on the side. I love RTS's, I love Sim City, I love Civilization, I love 4X. Spore takes all these genres and removes everything about them which makes them fun.
Wright likes to wibble on about how the game's misunderstood; that he made it so you could use it to tell your own stories. I like that, I really do, but the game world really doesn't seem made to assist you with that. Sure, you can sink hours into making a "Federation" and "Klingons" in two different saves, and then play having them meet each other and declare war (so you can fight them with your *one* ship) or make friends, but story wise the game's far more likely to get in your way with half a dozen more awful "Save planet $foo from ecological collapse" missions because you needed to sink another few hours into it to get enough ecological stabilizers.
Essentially it lets you install it on 5 unique PCs.
There's no standard for defining what makes a "unique PC". Anything from a HD/GFX card upgrade to an OS reinstall or BIOS update could make one of these ad-hoc systems decide it's no longer on the machine it was installed on.
And guess what gamers tend to do quite a bit?
I've also had problems with overzealous measures such as the one used in Operation Flashpoint activating and making the game unplayable. Guess who didn't have any problems? That's right, the people who pirated them!
Actually, Operation Flashpoint's copy protection caused a lot of problems for pirates too (and, indeed, anyone who bought it and cracked it); it uses a system called "FADE", whereby the game will run if it detects it's been cracked, but will degrade gameplay over time, so it's hard for a cracker to tell if they succeeded or not.
Of course, by not being an obvious "duh, cracked, won't run", much of this was indistinguishable from the game being buggy or ridicuously unbalanced, so I always thought it was pretty silly; you make pirates think the game is crap so they won't buy it even if they might otherwise have, and you make some legitimate users who use trainers or cracks suffer and wish they hadn't bought it in the first place.
Worries over FADE certainly put me off buying Flashpoint and ArmA until they removed it. And that is to their credit; the DRM was removed when it was no longer considered necessary. DRM using companies going on record that they'll do this (and not just "when we go bust", but "in 3 months" or so) would go a long way towards improving consumer confidence.
It plays Doom, too.
*squint*
While I really enjoyed GRAW, GRAW 2 had the feel of a community driven map pack, so unfortunately you're not missing much.
Steam being bloated? Steam takes up under a hundred meg of the 12 gig of steam games I have installed.
Uh huh. Did you miss the 5GB of .gcf's it keeps hanging around, basically duplicating every file in every game you purchase off it? That, and the app itself takes a good 30 seconds to start, when it's not forcing yet another mandatory update on you.
Steam's overhead here is on the order of 25GB, not 100MB, and it doesn't even put that overhead to good use by providing me the capacity of move installed games to other drives or roll back patches.
On the other hand my entire Impulse install is 19MB, the games I've bought from it are on two other drives, I can archive them, reinstall them, roll back patches, or choose not to install patches without losing a notification that there is in fact a patch, and I don't need to wait for Impulse to start to run any of the games I've bought; they're pretty much just unmodified retail copies without DRM.
GamersGate similarly ships at least *some* unmodified, DRM free games. I'm not sure how far that extends, but Sword of the Stars' publishers gave them a limited exclusive for their latest expansion because they were so fast at distributing new patches, and the users seem to love them.
In FreeBSD at least, the split's not that clear cut; there's em(4) for older cards and igb(4) for newer ones, both of which share a seperate e1000 module where lots of their code lives. I think the situation's similar on Linux.
So what you're saying is Linux should be split into a microkernel with every driver in it's own private address space?
Good luck with that.
The sw option is a legacy thing, I think; it used to be that swapon -a would only activate devices of type swap with options sw; as of util-linux 2.12, released in early 2004, swapon -a activates all devices of type swap without options noauto, hence behaving like every other fstab entry and making options sw superfluous.
I used to use a tool on the Amiga called FastBoot. Quite an impressive hack; it's basically Suspend to Disk. Disable task switching, write out memory to disk, when you next boot, run a tool to load it back in. Since I had a lot of crap running on my Amiga, with boot times of a minute or more, it was awesome using this to reduce that to a couple of seconds.
And.. indeed, this is exactly what I do on my Windows desktop, and indeed what I do on my XP partition on my laptop today; I Hibernate them so bootup happens in 20 seconds instead of 120 (yes, I still run a lot of crap).
So, maybe we have ultra quiet electric R/C planes flying around with a single-shot weapon of some sort (perhaps it's explosive.) Maybe they're carried to the site by a Predator at a high altitude, then dropped and silently glide to their targets where they detonate.
Reminds me of this comment from Charles Stross:
my take on the future of weapons is that battle armour and big expensive weapon systems are, IMO, as much a dead-end as the all-big-gun battleship: they'll probably get built, but they're not really relevant. The future is robots and RPVs, diminishing in size and increasing in numbers until we're confronted by millions of stealthed, killer mosquitos providing air cover for suicide-bomber dung beetles. The guys with the powered battle armour or MBTs will be able to drive their heavy metal into enemy territory but they won't be able to climb out of it for a cigarette break without something the size of an angry yellowjacket flying into their ear and exploding. The heavy metal drivers will be like fighter pilots today; demanding better jet fighters like the F22 so they can go dashing around, pulling 9G turns, not realizing they're as obsolete as cavalry officers.
On the other hand, a single consumer HD these days can saturate even wired GigE. I remember upgrading years ago because I was sick of not having the network bandwidth to properly use even a single disk; now I can stream 110MB/s off one, and I can see in a few years I'm going to be hankering after 10GigE, the way I hankered after GigE because disks were several times faster than Fast Ethernet.
I don't want to have to babysit the machines I take away with me, I don't want to carry bulky chargers around, worry about where the next free socket might be, remember to actually plug it in when one might be available, or have to limit my choice of software or display settings because it won't last long enough if I use it like I want to. I don't want to have to make sure it turns itself off if I don't poke it regularly, either.
Ultimately I should have to worry about the power requirements of my laptop, mobile phone, etc, about as much as I have to worry about that of my watch.
Greg Egan's Incandescence universe has relativistic femtometer-sized robotic probes called "strong bullets" you can shoot off somewhere to perform observations:
A new generation of observatories had been designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on strong bullets: specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories.
Of course, Incandescence is based on a trans-galactic meta-civilization that's existed for hundreds of millions of years, not on barely risen apes who can't even make a decent portable telephone.
Thanks, I don't remember it being that quick, but my temporal memory is awful at the best of times. Month, week, it's all the same geologically speaking ;)
The sequel, Forged Alliance, was released November 6, 2007, and patched out pretty much immediately, even before the international release.
Yup, all they'll do is clarify a few things, up the install limit a bit, maybe release an after-the-fact deactivator, and that'll be that. Just like they did with BioShock and Mass Effect. There's no way they'll back off enough to actually patch out the DRM, they're way too protective of their next cash cow as their endless milking of The Sims winds down.
Personally, I no longer care very much; the game looks pretty shallow and boring, and certainly not worth £40, especially if the DRM has a reasonable probability of being a hassle. There are plenty of other interesting upcoming or recently released games, most retailing at half the price, all almost certain to have more palatable or even no DRM, and some of them are even free; I'm not exactly hurting for entertainment or novelty.
The patches took a few months, it's not like they patched SecuROM out on the day of release. I would hope most publishers would be happy with that, though given it's relative rarity, I guess not.
And their next RTS, Demigod, will be published by Stardock, released via Impulse and have no DRM to speak of.
Most of the waiting is due to downloading flash monstrosities used by ads
When I find myself waiting, it's normally because the ad servers aren't responding at all; it's always "Looking up ad.foo.com", or "Sending request to ad.foo.com", or "Reading reply from ad.foo.com" with no data actually being transferred. Sites should at least embed this crap in a way that doesn't require the browser to wait on it to diplay the page.
Maybe I am using the wrong add-ons in Firefox/Opera but Chrome gives some very nice tools for inspecting CSS and how it is affecting your layout.
You didn't miss Opera Dragonfly did you?
If I open Tab B from Tab A, it should get Tab A's cookies. But cookies in Tab B shouldn't "backport" to tab A
Uh, why not? If I'm browsing a site using multiple tabs, and the site resets the cookie to avoid session fixation attacks, or it uses cookies to configure features to whatever, all my tabs should get the new cookie, they shouldn't behave like entirely separate browsers.
The point is that if different processes can communicate with each other, that significantly increases the likelyhood of cross-tab / cross-process vulnerabilities. The attack footprint just grew, rather sharply, in size.
Compared to what? Everything running in the same memory space?
The multi-process model Chrome's using means tabs communicate via message passing*, rather than grabbing locks around shared data structures and poking at things directly, which seems to be what you think is going on. A message passing model's a far smaller area to attack, since it can be a rigorously defined, limited and enforced protocol, rather than an advisory thing a programming error can easily forget or an attacker ignore. And yes, it allows child processes to be run with significantly reduced privileges; e.g. your tabs could be running as user nobody, chrooted to /var/empty, unable to create files or even see most of the system; any time they need to do anything with higher privileges, they need to talk to the parent process, which can consider what they *should* be able to do and reject anything else.
Sure, the message passing might not be as robust as paranoid as you'd like, but it's a far smaller space to attack and secure than "well, if someone gets an arbitrary code execution attack going on, it's game over".
* I haven't looked at the code, it certainly *could* just be sharing big chunks of memory like that, but I somewhat doubt it.
Fixed:
Still not sure why the \zs broke it. Also, the \zs in the trailing space regexp is a superfluous leftover from when those two were combined.
You still need to get people to configure their editor to expand tabs, and make indents the same size everyone else is using, etc. Fools who can't configure their editors properly will find some way to screw it up either way. And frankly, I don't want fools working on any of the code I maintain ;)