Classic wasn't precisely a VM in the normal sense, though, but rather more of an abstraction layer. Most PowerPC code was just run native and unchanged, and there was simply an abstraction layer that turned all the classic system calls (and some old hardware calls, admittedly) into modern equivalents.
The benefit of which was that you did not take nearly the performance hit you would for virtualizing the entire computer a'la a traditional VM, but the downside was that Classic would no longer work once Macs made the switch to Intel architectures because you weren't virtualizing hardware at all, just abstracting the system APIs into newer calls.
Which is why Classic is no longer in Mac OS X as of Leopard, now that all newer Macs are Intel-based. There's still true VM based equivalents for Intel machines, though, like Sheepshaver.
Except Boxee didn't strip the commercials from Hulu. I used to watch Hulu in the browser in the beta days, and then later in Boxee. I saw the same ads inlaid in the show whether I watched on the site or via Boxee. The difference was that Boxee had better UI for browsing the programs, and that Boxee's method of reading the stream gave me considerably better framerate/performance than trying to view full-screen in Flash on the site did.
In other words, Boxee was a great deal more usable for me as a viewer, and I saw all the same commercials I did as a user of the website. (Hulu doesn't do sidebar advertising, their adverts are in the programs themselves where ad-breaks would normally be.)
It wasn't just 'not in the fine print,' as I recall. When I switched to the Silverlight viewer (to be able to use Netflix instant streaming on the Mac), I seem to vaguely remember the warning being in large, bold print about two point-sizes larger than the rest of the page.
Except the PS2 was like this as well. (Albeit to a lesser degree.) Until later in the life-cycle, no one had really fully figured out what you could fully do with the hardware.
Speaking as someone who actually did work a bit on coding for the PS2 at a past job, my understanding is not that they/deliberately/ made the console difficult, but that they poured technology into the console without regard for saying 'this piece must be used in this way.' As such, people figured out their own paths (and innovated what was done on the platform).
In some ways, it's a valid strategy. PS2 games unquestionably got more advanced as people explored what they could do with the console's capabilities. (Granted, this understanding comes from other developers at the PS2 training seminar I went to, not officially from Sony themselves.)
Since different companies came up with different techniques (probably including some Sony didn't expect), there was some real variety in the games as well. But the PS2 was also the dominant console, hands down, and so developers were targeting that as their primary platform; they had the freedom to get into exploring the edges of the hardware and figuring out what they could do with future projects.
I suspect the same philosophy applies here. Not so much 'let's make it hard,' but 'let's put lots of power in this thing, and not provide guidance on any particular best way to use it all.' There's a sort of hacker beauty to 'there's no One Right Way, find your own.'
The issue this time around, of course, is that the Xbox 360 is 'good enough' for most gamers; even if the PS3 is more advanced, the 360 is a perfectly workable gaming platform and quite popular. Most major games need to release on both platforms, and so developers are generally not trying to innovate on the PS3 but just trying to take the same game and shoehorn it more or less equally onto both. And so the PS3's untapped potential becomes less a cool puzzle to figure out ('hey, look what I realized we can do!') and more of a higher bar to entry.
Apple makes a little plastic box, sells the boxes and licenses the software. People modify the software to allow you to write to the 'secured' portions of the device storage, thus allowing third-party software to be installed and device functionality to be modified. Apple turns a blind eye.
Jailbreaking folks come up with a way to unlock the radio baseband, making it possible to use a SIM card from any provider in the phone. Cellular companies who want exclusivity complain when phones are unlocked to work on any network. Apple complies with the cell companies' demands and makes changes to prevent unlocking. Apple continues to turn a blind eye to the jailbreaking itself, though does warn folks that if you modify the software they can't be responsible for supporting the modified OS.
Apple releases a new version of the OS containing a locked-down sandbox for third-party apps, allowing people to install apps without jailbreaking. People continue to jailbreak the phones to use private APIs (allowing tethering) or do things like have apps that run in the background and so on. Apple continues to turn a blind eye, and apps exist in both realms.
Someone in the jailbreaking community comes out with a way to basically point-and-click 'crack' software bought from the App Store, and allow people to send it around freely for jailbroken devices. Some app authors find up to 2/3rds (especially for games) of their users are using pirated copies that weren't paid for. Much fuss and to-do on blogs, news sites, etc. App authors complain to Apple that there needs to be Something Done! Oh noes!
Apple, after a year and a half of turning a blind eye to the jailbreaking scene, suddenly makes an abrupt about-face and says 'Jailbreaking is verboten.'
Now, none of us are in the heads of the Apple folks behind this decision, so we can't say for certain whether the sudden shift is due to the EFF's claims, or Crackulous, or maybe just random whim or signs read in tea leaves in the Apple cafeteria. But the timing and sudden nature of Apple's shift here does make a connection to the Crackulous brouhaha at the least a strong possibility.
This is a key point, unfortunately. The people who actually have a full grasp of all the complexities of any situation are generally those who have some involvement -- present or past -- in the situation. If you eliminate anyone with ties to a given sector, then all you have left are 'armchair experts,' who have little practical experience.
Because, quite frankly, people were upset that their 'Vista Capable' computers couldn't run Vista with Aero enabled. The integrated cards don't have the 'oomph' for Aero's glassy transparency effects, but Microsoft had tooted the horn of 'Look! Shiny!' loud and long, so people expected that functionality. In addition, there are other places extended graphics capabilities are used (the Vista DVD maker program, for instance), where if your card isn't up to snuff, you can't use those programs.
By showing 'we can make this work in software, slowly, but work,' they're trying to address that. This isn't for gaming, despite the demo. This is an attempt to solve the problem out of the gate in Windows 7 so that they don't have another Vista Capable type class action suit.
Aero was/advertised as such/, which is part of the point here. The issue isn't the actual functionality of stuff in Vista Business or Ultimate; the issue is the misleading expectations Microsoft allowed.
Microsoft went, "Look! Here is our new shiny OS, Vista! Vista can play movies! Vista has shiny UI! Vista can sing and dance and make you coffee! And look, because this will be coming out soon, we've even labeled computers for you so you'll know which ones are ready for the Vista Experience!"
Consumers went, "Yay! Thank you, Microsoft! This makes my life easier! I, a non-technical consumer who do not wish to have to worry about hardware specifications but do wish to enjoy the benefits of this OS you are telling me about, have gone and bought one of your conveniently labeled computers!"
Then Vista comes out and the consumers try to run Vista Ultimate or Vista Business or whatever, and discover their computer can't. And Microsoft goes, "Oh... yeah,/that/ computer? That one is kind of a piece of junk. That has a crappy Intel chip which can only run this lower-end version. This version doesn't have shiny UI, only plays movies that are 3 years old, and the singing and dancing part only includes musical numbers from Bollywood films. And while this version of Vista can still make you coffee, the coffee can only be decaf with artificial creamer. Didn't you read all the fine print specifications on the Vista box?"
And the consumers go, "WTF BBQ I paid $2600 for this laptop! You said this would run Vista! There's a label right on the computer! I bought this because I didn't want to have to worry about figuring out what hardware my computer had and whether that was enough for various Vista stuff! I bought this computer/specifically/ since the computer says it can run Vista!"
Microsoft goes, "Well, that computer/does/ run Vista! Just not the same version of Vista we were telling you about earlier, that's all. Not our fault you got confused about that."
I think it would be wonderful to teach the biblical theory: flat earth sitting on a firmament; with the sun planets and stars under a dome of water,.... and slowly work through why these ideas were rejected.
I had a teacher who actually did precisely that over the course of a school year in junior high; used the changes in scientific understanding to illustrate the importance of challenging things and continually questioning accepted belief. Basically, the entire gist of his class was the importance of looking at the world around you and asking 'why' rather than blindly accepting what others tell you.
He got in some trouble for not sticking blindly to a textbook, unsurprisingly. But I like to think all of his students learned a lot more from him than we did from many of our other science teachers. Instead of learning rote scientific theory, we learned to question and investigate for ourselves.
Their statement was not 'we are going to brick other people's phones,' but 'if you have messed around in the baseband firmware, we can't promise this upgrade isn't going to break something significantly.'
They didn't set out to brick phones (and quite a few unlocked phones I know of took the firmware upgrade just fine). It was more a 'look, if you did this, you're on your own; we're not promising that this firmware won't completely break your modified phone.'
Which actually seems reasonably fair; if someone takes a car and decides to tinker in the brake system and try to come up with their own antilock braking system they feel is better, that's fine. But if they then have an accident, they can't realistically hold the car manufacturer responsible for the ABS they modified.
That said, the AT&T exclusivity contact may well verge on antitrust violations; IANAL, so I cannot really speak with any authority on that. However, restricting phones to specific carriers is pretty much par for the course. T-Mobile doesn't let you use the Sidekick on AT&T, nor the new Google Android phone that just came out. As far as I know, the Instinct is exclusive to Sprint. Etc.
So if they do rule that the AT&T exclusivity contract violates antitrust, I really do hope that decision can crack the practice of carrier exclusives overall. Forcing all phones to be sold unlocked, so that they can be taken to any other carrier with compatible cellular technology, would force carriers to actually focus on providing good service rather than relying on handset exclusives.
I wasn't aware that Mass Effect, BioShock, The Force Unleashed, Spore or The Sims 3 were open source.
I will agree that piracy of commercial software (word processors et al) is down due to software like OpenOffice.org being more or less equivalent to the commercial counterparts while remaining free, but as you yourself acknowledge -- 'other than copies of... video games' -- piracy is still alive and well within the genre of games, and that is one place that 'open source' does not necessarily help.
I've yet to see a Mass Effect or Spore come out of the open source games community; this is not to say that there never will be such, but right now there's less chance of a 'well, there's an OpenSpore.org free competitor to download' in the case of prominent games.
I agree that things like socket limits and so on only matter at the ISP level if they're mucking with things. (Though I have, to my dismay, encountered RTG networking tools before which actually/do/ impose such limits.) You're right that the irony of this is that the problem for the ISPs becomes greater when they start trying to muck with traffic (thus requiring per-connection rather than per-packet information), and so they want to try to muck with the traffic to fix it.
But there are still differences. If you're opening 10 streamed stateful connections versus 1, you'll still on average generate more overall traffic; if there's a momentary lag on the connection to one place, you're still generating traffic through to others.
Though this, of course, assumes a sufficient number of seeds and peers to have a BitTorrent download be notably faster than the same download over a single HTTP connection. When the BitTorrent file takes 5 hours to download, you're probably actually using far less bandwidth overall and being friendly.:)
This doesn't get into the upload issue, of course. To go back to the original 'there's no difference between downloading a 600MB ISO over HTTP versus BitTorrent' objection up-thread, when downloading the ISO over HTTP, you have very little traffic upstream. BitTorrent, you have a lot upstream, which also introduces additional overall load on the network.
So, yeah, BitTorrent can be a heavier burden than an HTTP connection. (Not in all cases, but the possibility exists.) I personally remain unconvinced that this problem is The End of the World and requires throttling people, but I will still grant that P2P connections/can/ consume more bandwidth and cause more load on the network than straight HTTP downloads.
And that there are significant differences at the network layer between a 600MB ISO downloaded over HTTP and over P2P.
In fairness, the 600 MB ISO over HTTP is a single sustained connection. BitTorrent is a whole bunch of simultaneous connections. There are a number of reasons why the second is actually more 'expensive' than the first for the network. Even when you throttle it in terms of throughput, there's still the expense needed of opening multiple connections at once to talk to all the peers, etc.
But I'm not entirely convinced that difference in expense is the huge burden on the network they want us to believe.
I/will/ grant that there's probably enough of a difference to worry them. "What if everyone starts using it?" may be a valid fear, and I'll grant that the networks would probably become unusable due to congestion if literally every customer were BitTorrenting stuff. Through quantity of opened connections, if nothing else.
But I remain unconvinced that 'we must promise people X bps speed and unlimited bandwidth, and then choke that!' is the correct solution.
ObjC is my language of choice to develop in when possible, and I grant you that some of the nature of ObjC makes it easier to avoid some of the 'stock' security pitfalls. But not all of the system is in ObjC -- most of the daemons and so on are in C, after all.
Beyond that, the very adoption of ObjC as the primary language of the system is, itself, a break with legacy code (Mac OS 9 and earlier did not have ObjC, after all, much less have anything written in it).;)
Mac OS X has some advantages in security. But I can't really say those advantages are due to Apple being somehow inherently 'better' coders than Microsoft or having made some kind of perfect system.
In my opinion, Mac OS X is less vulnerable than Windows in many areas is due to Apple being willing to go 'okay, this particular technology is dead, move along.' Microsoft relies on backwards compatibility for large market share; break backwards compatibility, and people do not upgrade. (Case in point: Vista.)
Apple has a smaller market share (and speaking as a Mac user and developer, we tend to sort of go, 'yes please, whatever you say' when they want to change things). We might bitch about it periodically (whither thou, 64-bit Carbon?), but this gives them the freedom to throw out legacy code and simplifies the code maintenance.
Or, in short: Apple's coders are not inherently better, but they end up with less old cruft to support and try to be aware of.
As a case in point, I'll note that the worst offender in terms of security on Mac OS X has, historically, been Quicktime. Quicktime is perhaps the oldest, most legacy-laden bit of crud in Apple's library. (The Quicktime APIs are darn near prehistoric, especially compared to things like CoreImage et al.) One would assume this means that Quicktime, more than almost anything else, has chunks of code that predate most of the programmers working on it, and which no one remembers or thinks about.
And in my experience, that's often where those kind of bugs come from... you change something, add a new bit of code that passing something into a function somewhere, completely unaware that four levels deeper there's some function which assumes the buffer is only 4k long. The old programmers knew there was an implicit limit down in this ancient routine, but no one now knows of that limit, and so -- unaware of this lurking nightmare 5 levels deeper in the stack -- they pass in a 6k buffer. Boom, security issue.
Windows has this problem in almost every corner of the OS. Worse, they cannot readily get around it... you can't just rewrite things from scratch, or you break legacy support! But as a result, there often are quite a few lurking behaviors that newer coders aren't aware of somewhere deeper in the system, things that never got documented, and which will eventually reach out to bite them.
Sure, there's situations which are just plain dumb (the carpet-bombing attack, for instance, is inexcusable behavior on IE's part), but most of those seem to be the minority.
So, yeah, Mac OS X has some advantage, as they have less legacy stuff to deal with. But even with that sort of advantage, no operating system -- not even Linux! -- is completely free of all flaws. We as users need to accept as a given that almost nothing is completely secure (at least, not and still be usable). This is especially true when many viruses and trojans rely on social engineering.
Even if Mac OS X prompts the user before allowing a program to elevate privileges, does that matter if users just click without looking? After all, lots of programs prompt for such things in order to install some shared framework they use at the installation or first-run stage. I know a lot of Mac users who just click on that warning blindly. And the warning doesn't matter if the user doesn't really pay attention.
So, yeah. Mac OS X may have less tangled, jungle-like legacy code for scary security holes to lurk in, but that does not mean it is invulnerable. Certainly not immune even to automated bugs, and especially not immune from social engineering.
Because the biggest security hole -- on ANY operating system -- is often user behavior.
From my (admittedly cursory) read of the article, I gather they claim the malware was trying to pop up the images to a broken account. I.e., the malware downloaded the images (hence their being in the temp directory) and tried to display, but then failed. Thus, the user never saw that the laptop was doing this, or else he could've gone, 'uhm, something is very wrong with this machine.'
If this is true, though, the real question then becomes how they didn't notice the virus on the machine when reconfiguring things (poorly) for the new user. At that point, if the defense argument is accurate, the malware should have still been able to display this stuff, and you'd think the IT guys would have noticed...
I think the idea is that you buy the wireless spectrum to use it for other things, but are required to provide free internet on part of that spectrum IN ADDITION to whatever your other business plans are.
TiVo actually supports this when a provider marks ads accordingly; you will on occasion see a little '(Thumbs Up Icon) To Record' banner atop an ad for a new television show or a TV movie. (Some ads, like those for a new SUV or whatever, also occasionally have 'Thumbs Up For More Information' banners, where you can get an informational video about the product.)
However, most ads do not have the appropriate flags.
Why not just make a law that if someone has leaked your identifying financial information, if you become a victim of identity fraud they can be held responsible? I.e., have to fund the fixing-it-up?
Doesn't matter if you can't prove/their/ leak is where the information got out. If they leaked and your identity is stolen, they're liable. THAT would work as a deterrent, I think.
Doubtless that's a large number, but I don't think they're represented in this slice of consumers.
After all, if they are not aware they're not on their own network they would not have answered 'I use a neighbor's WiFi' on the survey, and so wouldn't be counted in the 12%.:)
Trakhtman is a Russian Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1992 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the article says that he had trouble finding work during the influx of refugees. Not because of his background, but because of a sudden unemployment glut. This is why he previously ended up serving as a night watchman, a laborer, a maintenance worker or whatever else he did.
However, the article ALSO says he's been teaching mathematics at Bar Ilan University since 1995; the university is where he solved the problem.
I'm not saying there are no alternatives. I'm just saying in reply to the post about 'when will they cut off folks for spamming,' spam-zombie machines are cut off already. I just find it unfortunate that they do so without ever contacting the customers who are cut off, and with no recourse to ever get off the blocked list. (Really, more the 'without contacting the customers.')
The second point -- mail software often picking port 25 instead of 587 by default -- has bitten less-computer literate friends. I know someone who downloaded a BitTorrent client to grab an Ubuntu Linux ISO, wanting to try out Ubuntu from all the things they'd heard about it being Linux for normal people. The next day, they could no longer send e-mail when their client had been previously working fine. I had to help them sort out what had gone wrong, so that they could send e-mail again.
It took a while to realize that this was because some of the folks seeding the Ubuntu ISO had been seeding on port 25, which triggered the 'antispam' protection, and that the person's mail client was still connecting to all their sites on port 25 (because that was how Eudora configured accounts by default).
I'm not arguing that blocking SMTP on port 25 is a good thing. I just wish Comcast was a little more professional about how they did so... some people are using port 25 for reasons other than sending spam, whether that be server-to-server communication, or the more mundane 'mail clients still use 25 by default' issue! Hopefully that helps clarify my point.:)
1) Not all sites use port 587; though most major ISPs do, smaller businesses with their own mailservers, or small shell-account providers sometimes only have port 25. Very annoying.
2) Many mail clients still auto-configure for port 25, which is arguably an increasingly outdated behavior, but still affects many home users who never really figure out how to go and change their SMTP server settings from the defaults.
3) Some residential users run home Linux mailservers (with dyndns or some other similar dynamic DNS nameservice), which will want to connect out on port 25.
They actually do cut off users, sort of. Comcast, if you connect on port 25 somewhere more than some threshhold like 2-3 times a minute, they shut down your outgoing SMTP on port 25. And will never, ever turn it back on, so you have to start using alternate ports.
This is kind of annoying, since a lot of BitTorrent folks put their torrent clients to use ports 25 or 80, and Comcast's net-traffic tools cannot tell the difference between connecting to a remote BitTorrent client, or sending spam. And of course, since this is a false positive, the content doesn't matter. You can download your latest Ubuntu ISO via torrent, or grab one of those net-distributed shows that proliferated during the writers' strike, and have your SMTP shut off!
Fun stuff.
On the other hand, it does stop SOME zombie-spam boxes.
Wasn't the original Slashdot posting about the iPod (now legendarily) just, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." with a number of followup comments about "Probably just OEM'd." and "Mediocre at best" type summaries?
In fairness, a few did say that the device shouldn't be dismissed, but I call shenanigans that people saw it was going to dominate.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Classic wasn't precisely a VM in the normal sense, though, but rather more of an abstraction layer. Most PowerPC code was just run native and unchanged, and there was simply an abstraction layer that turned all the classic system calls (and some old hardware calls, admittedly) into modern equivalents.
The benefit of which was that you did not take nearly the performance hit you would for virtualizing the entire computer a'la a traditional VM, but the downside was that Classic would no longer work once Macs made the switch to Intel architectures because you weren't virtualizing hardware at all, just abstracting the system APIs into newer calls.
Which is why Classic is no longer in Mac OS X as of Leopard, now that all newer Macs are Intel-based. There's still true VM based equivalents for Intel machines, though, like Sheepshaver.
Except Boxee didn't strip the commercials from Hulu. I used to watch Hulu in the browser in the beta days, and then later in Boxee. I saw the same ads inlaid in the show whether I watched on the site or via Boxee. The difference was that Boxee had better UI for browsing the programs, and that Boxee's method of reading the stream gave me considerably better framerate/performance than trying to view full-screen in Flash on the site did.
In other words, Boxee was a great deal more usable for me as a viewer, and I saw all the same commercials I did as a user of the website. (Hulu doesn't do sidebar advertising, their adverts are in the programs themselves where ad-breaks would normally be.)
It wasn't just 'not in the fine print,' as I recall. When I switched to the Silverlight viewer (to be able to use Netflix instant streaming on the Mac), I seem to vaguely remember the warning being in large, bold print about two point-sizes larger than the rest of the page.
Except the PS2 was like this as well. (Albeit to a lesser degree.) Until later in the life-cycle, no one had really fully figured out what you could fully do with the hardware.
Speaking as someone who actually did work a bit on coding for the PS2 at a past job, my understanding is not that they /deliberately/ made the console difficult, but that they poured technology into the console without regard for saying 'this piece must be used in this way.' As such, people figured out their own paths (and innovated what was done on the platform).
In some ways, it's a valid strategy. PS2 games unquestionably got more advanced as people explored what they could do with the console's capabilities. (Granted, this understanding comes from other developers at the PS2 training seminar I went to, not officially from Sony themselves.)
Since different companies came up with different techniques (probably including some Sony didn't expect), there was some real variety in the games as well. But the PS2 was also the dominant console, hands down, and so developers were targeting that as their primary platform; they had the freedom to get into exploring the edges of the hardware and figuring out what they could do with future projects.
I suspect the same philosophy applies here. Not so much 'let's make it hard,' but 'let's put lots of power in this thing, and not provide guidance on any particular best way to use it all.' There's a sort of hacker beauty to 'there's no One Right Way, find your own.'
The issue this time around, of course, is that the Xbox 360 is 'good enough' for most gamers; even if the PS3 is more advanced, the 360 is a perfectly workable gaming platform and quite popular. Most major games need to release on both platforms, and so developers are generally not trying to innovate on the PS3 but just trying to take the same game and shoehorn it more or less equally onto both. And so the PS3's untapped potential becomes less a cool puzzle to figure out ('hey, look what I realized we can do!') and more of a higher bar to entry.
Apple makes a little plastic box, sells the boxes and licenses the software. People modify the software to allow you to write to the 'secured' portions of the device storage, thus allowing third-party software to be installed and device functionality to be modified. Apple turns a blind eye.
Jailbreaking folks come up with a way to unlock the radio baseband, making it possible to use a SIM card from any provider in the phone. Cellular companies who want exclusivity complain when phones are unlocked to work on any network. Apple complies with the cell companies' demands and makes changes to prevent unlocking. Apple continues to turn a blind eye to the jailbreaking itself, though does warn folks that if you modify the software they can't be responsible for supporting the modified OS.
Apple releases a new version of the OS containing a locked-down sandbox for third-party apps, allowing people to install apps without jailbreaking. People continue to jailbreak the phones to use private APIs (allowing tethering) or do things like have apps that run in the background and so on. Apple continues to turn a blind eye, and apps exist in both realms.
Someone in the jailbreaking community comes out with a way to basically point-and-click 'crack' software bought from the App Store, and allow people to send it around freely for jailbroken devices. Some app authors find up to 2/3rds (especially for games) of their users are using pirated copies that weren't paid for. Much fuss and to-do on blogs, news sites, etc. App authors complain to Apple that there needs to be Something Done! Oh noes!
Apple, after a year and a half of turning a blind eye to the jailbreaking scene, suddenly makes an abrupt about-face and says 'Jailbreaking is verboten.'
Now, none of us are in the heads of the Apple folks behind this decision, so we can't say for certain whether the sudden shift is due to the EFF's claims, or Crackulous, or maybe just random whim or signs read in tea leaves in the Apple cafeteria. But the timing and sudden nature of Apple's shift here does make a connection to the Crackulous brouhaha at the least a strong possibility.
This is a key point, unfortunately. The people who actually have a full grasp of all the complexities of any situation are generally those who have some involvement -- present or past -- in the situation. If you eliminate anyone with ties to a given sector, then all you have left are 'armchair experts,' who have little practical experience.
The issue is how to balance these factors.
Because, quite frankly, people were upset that their 'Vista Capable' computers couldn't run Vista with Aero enabled. The integrated cards don't have the 'oomph' for Aero's glassy transparency effects, but Microsoft had tooted the horn of 'Look! Shiny!' loud and long, so people expected that functionality. In addition, there are other places extended graphics capabilities are used (the Vista DVD maker program, for instance), where if your card isn't up to snuff, you can't use those programs.
By showing 'we can make this work in software, slowly, but work,' they're trying to address that. This isn't for gaming, despite the demo. This is an attempt to solve the problem out of the gate in Windows 7 so that they don't have another Vista Capable type class action suit.
Aero was /advertised as such/, which is part of the point here. The issue isn't the actual functionality of stuff in Vista Business or Ultimate; the issue is the misleading expectations Microsoft allowed.
Microsoft went, "Look! Here is our new shiny OS, Vista! Vista can play movies! Vista has shiny UI! Vista can sing and dance and make you coffee! And look, because this will be coming out soon, we've even labeled computers for you so you'll know which ones are ready for the Vista Experience!"
Consumers went, "Yay! Thank you, Microsoft! This makes my life easier! I, a non-technical consumer who do not wish to have to worry about hardware specifications but do wish to enjoy the benefits of this OS you are telling me about, have gone and bought one of your conveniently labeled computers!"
Then Vista comes out and the consumers try to run Vista Ultimate or Vista Business or whatever, and discover their computer can't. And Microsoft goes, "Oh... yeah, /that/ computer? That one is kind of a piece of junk. That has a crappy Intel chip which can only run this lower-end version. This version doesn't have shiny UI, only plays movies that are 3 years old, and the singing and dancing part only includes musical numbers from Bollywood films. And while this version of Vista can still make you coffee, the coffee can only be decaf with artificial creamer. Didn't you read all the fine print specifications on the Vista box?"
And the consumers go, "WTF BBQ I paid $2600 for this laptop! You said this would run Vista! There's a label right on the computer! I bought this because I didn't want to have to worry about figuring out what hardware my computer had and whether that was enough for various Vista stuff! I bought this computer /specifically/ since the computer says it can run Vista!"
Microsoft goes, "Well, that computer /does/ run Vista! Just not the same version of Vista we were telling you about earlier, that's all. Not our fault you got confused about that."
And the consumers go, "LAWSUIT!"
I think it would be wonderful to teach the biblical theory: flat earth sitting on a firmament; with the sun planets and stars under a dome of water, .... and slowly work through why these ideas were rejected.
I had a teacher who actually did precisely that over the course of a school year in junior high; used the changes in scientific understanding to illustrate the importance of challenging things and continually questioning accepted belief. Basically, the entire gist of his class was the importance of looking at the world around you and asking 'why' rather than blindly accepting what others tell you.
He got in some trouble for not sticking blindly to a textbook, unsurprisingly. But I like to think all of his students learned a lot more from him than we did from many of our other science teachers. Instead of learning rote scientific theory, we learned to question and investigate for ourselves.
Their statement was not 'we are going to brick other people's phones,' but 'if you have messed around in the baseband firmware, we can't promise this upgrade isn't going to break something significantly.'
They didn't set out to brick phones (and quite a few unlocked phones I know of took the firmware upgrade just fine). It was more a 'look, if you did this, you're on your own; we're not promising that this firmware won't completely break your modified phone.'
Which actually seems reasonably fair; if someone takes a car and decides to tinker in the brake system and try to come up with their own antilock braking system they feel is better, that's fine. But if they then have an accident, they can't realistically hold the car manufacturer responsible for the ABS they modified.
That said, the AT&T exclusivity contact may well verge on antitrust violations; IANAL, so I cannot really speak with any authority on that. However, restricting phones to specific carriers is pretty much par for the course. T-Mobile doesn't let you use the Sidekick on AT&T, nor the new Google Android phone that just came out. As far as I know, the Instinct is exclusive to Sprint. Etc.
So if they do rule that the AT&T exclusivity contract violates antitrust, I really do hope that decision can crack the practice of carrier exclusives overall. Forcing all phones to be sold unlocked, so that they can be taken to any other carrier with compatible cellular technology, would force carriers to actually focus on providing good service rather than relying on handset exclusives.
I wasn't aware that Mass Effect, BioShock, The Force Unleashed, Spore or The Sims 3 were open source.
I will agree that piracy of commercial software (word processors et al) is down due to software like OpenOffice.org being more or less equivalent to the commercial counterparts while remaining free, but as you yourself acknowledge -- 'other than copies of ... video games' -- piracy is still alive and well within the genre of games, and that is one place that 'open source' does not necessarily help.
I've yet to see a Mass Effect or Spore come out of the open source games community; this is not to say that there never will be such, but right now there's less chance of a 'well, there's an OpenSpore.org free competitor to download' in the case of prominent games.
I agree that things like socket limits and so on only matter at the ISP level if they're mucking with things. (Though I have, to my dismay, encountered RTG networking tools before which actually /do/ impose such limits.) You're right that the irony of this is that the problem for the ISPs becomes greater when they start trying to muck with traffic (thus requiring per-connection rather than per-packet information), and so they want to try to muck with the traffic to fix it.
But there are still differences. If you're opening 10 streamed stateful connections versus 1, you'll still on average generate more overall traffic; if there's a momentary lag on the connection to one place, you're still generating traffic through to others.
Though this, of course, assumes a sufficient number of seeds and peers to have a BitTorrent download be notably faster than the same download over a single HTTP connection. When the BitTorrent file takes 5 hours to download, you're probably actually using far less bandwidth overall and being friendly. :)
This doesn't get into the upload issue, of course. To go back to the original 'there's no difference between downloading a 600MB ISO over HTTP versus BitTorrent' objection up-thread, when downloading the ISO over HTTP, you have very little traffic upstream. BitTorrent, you have a lot upstream, which also introduces additional overall load on the network.
So, yeah, BitTorrent can be a heavier burden than an HTTP connection. (Not in all cases, but the possibility exists.) I personally remain unconvinced that this problem is The End of the World and requires throttling people, but I will still grant that P2P connections /can/ consume more bandwidth and cause more load on the network than straight HTTP downloads.
And that there are significant differences at the network layer between a 600MB ISO downloaded over HTTP and over P2P.
In fairness, the 600 MB ISO over HTTP is a single sustained connection. BitTorrent is a whole bunch of simultaneous connections. There are a number of reasons why the second is actually more 'expensive' than the first for the network. Even when you throttle it in terms of throughput, there's still the expense needed of opening multiple connections at once to talk to all the peers, etc.
But I'm not entirely convinced that difference in expense is the huge burden on the network they want us to believe.
I /will/ grant that there's probably enough of a difference to worry them. "What if everyone starts using it?" may be a valid fear, and I'll grant that the networks would probably become unusable due to congestion if literally every customer were BitTorrenting stuff. Through quantity of opened connections, if nothing else.
But I remain unconvinced that 'we must promise people X bps speed and unlimited bandwidth, and then choke that!' is the correct solution.
ObjC is my language of choice to develop in when possible, and I grant you that some of the nature of ObjC makes it easier to avoid some of the 'stock' security pitfalls. But not all of the system is in ObjC -- most of the daemons and so on are in C, after all.
Beyond that, the very adoption of ObjC as the primary language of the system is, itself, a break with legacy code (Mac OS 9 and earlier did not have ObjC, after all, much less have anything written in it). ;)
Well...
Mac OS X has some advantages in security. But I can't really say those advantages are due to Apple being somehow inherently 'better' coders than Microsoft or having made some kind of perfect system.
In my opinion, Mac OS X is less vulnerable than Windows in many areas is due to Apple being willing to go 'okay, this particular technology is dead, move along.' Microsoft relies on backwards compatibility for large market share; break backwards compatibility, and people do not upgrade. (Case in point: Vista.)
Apple has a smaller market share (and speaking as a Mac user and developer, we tend to sort of go, 'yes please, whatever you say' when they want to change things). We might bitch about it periodically (whither thou, 64-bit Carbon?), but this gives them the freedom to throw out legacy code and simplifies the code maintenance.
Or, in short: Apple's coders are not inherently better, but they end up with less old cruft to support and try to be aware of.
As a case in point, I'll note that the worst offender in terms of security on Mac OS X has, historically, been Quicktime. Quicktime is perhaps the oldest, most legacy-laden bit of crud in Apple's library. (The Quicktime APIs are darn near prehistoric, especially compared to things like CoreImage et al.) One would assume this means that Quicktime, more than almost anything else, has chunks of code that predate most of the programmers working on it, and which no one remembers or thinks about.
And in my experience, that's often where those kind of bugs come from... you change something, add a new bit of code that passing something into a function somewhere, completely unaware that four levels deeper there's some function which assumes the buffer is only 4k long. The old programmers knew there was an implicit limit down in this ancient routine, but no one now knows of that limit, and so -- unaware of this lurking nightmare 5 levels deeper in the stack -- they pass in a 6k buffer. Boom, security issue.
Windows has this problem in almost every corner of the OS. Worse, they cannot readily get around it... you can't just rewrite things from scratch, or you break legacy support! But as a result, there often are quite a few lurking behaviors that newer coders aren't aware of somewhere deeper in the system, things that never got documented, and which will eventually reach out to bite them.
Sure, there's situations which are just plain dumb (the carpet-bombing attack, for instance, is inexcusable behavior on IE's part), but most of those seem to be the minority.
So, yeah, Mac OS X has some advantage, as they have less legacy stuff to deal with. But even with that sort of advantage, no operating system -- not even Linux! -- is completely free of all flaws. We as users need to accept as a given that almost nothing is completely secure (at least, not and still be usable). This is especially true when many viruses and trojans rely on social engineering.
Even if Mac OS X prompts the user before allowing a program to elevate privileges, does that matter if users just click without looking? After all, lots of programs prompt for such things in order to install some shared framework they use at the installation or first-run stage. I know a lot of Mac users who just click on that warning blindly. And the warning doesn't matter if the user doesn't really pay attention.
So, yeah. Mac OS X may have less tangled, jungle-like legacy code for scary security holes to lurk in, but that does not mean it is invulnerable. Certainly not immune even to automated bugs, and especially not immune from social engineering.
Because the biggest security hole -- on ANY operating system -- is often user behavior.
There's my $0.02, anyway. :)
From my (admittedly cursory) read of the article, I gather they claim the malware was trying to pop up the images to a broken account. I.e., the malware downloaded the images (hence their being in the temp directory) and tried to display, but then failed. Thus, the user never saw that the laptop was doing this, or else he could've gone, 'uhm, something is very wrong with this machine.'
If this is true, though, the real question then becomes how they didn't notice the virus on the machine when reconfiguring things (poorly) for the new user. At that point, if the defense argument is accurate, the malware should have still been able to display this stuff, and you'd think the IT guys would have noticed...
I think the idea is that you buy the wireless spectrum to use it for other things, but are required to provide free internet on part of that spectrum IN ADDITION to whatever your other business plans are.
TiVo actually supports this when a provider marks ads accordingly; you will on occasion see a little '(Thumbs Up Icon) To Record' banner atop an ad for a new television show or a TV movie. (Some ads, like those for a new SUV or whatever, also occasionally have 'Thumbs Up For More Information' banners, where you can get an informational video about the product.)
However, most ads do not have the appropriate flags.
Why not just make a law that if someone has leaked your identifying financial information, if you become a victim of identity fraud they can be held responsible? I.e., have to fund the fixing-it-up?
/their/ leak is where the information got out. If they leaked and your identity is stolen, they're liable. THAT would work as a deterrent, I think.
Doesn't matter if you can't prove
Doubtless that's a large number, but I don't think they're represented in this slice of consumers.
:)
After all, if they are not aware they're not on their own network they would not have answered 'I use a neighbor's WiFi' on the survey, and so wouldn't be counted in the 12%.
Trakhtman is a Russian Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1992 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the article says that he had trouble finding work during the influx of refugees. Not because of his background, but because of a sudden unemployment glut. This is why he previously ended up serving as a night watchman, a laborer, a maintenance worker or whatever else he did.
However, the article ALSO says he's been teaching mathematics at Bar Ilan University since 1995; the university is where he solved the problem.
I'm not saying there are no alternatives. I'm just saying in reply to the post about 'when will they cut off folks for spamming,' spam-zombie machines are cut off already. I just find it unfortunate that they do so without ever contacting the customers who are cut off, and with no recourse to ever get off the blocked list. (Really, more the 'without contacting the customers.')
:)
The second point -- mail software often picking port 25 instead of 587 by default -- has bitten less-computer literate friends. I know someone who downloaded a BitTorrent client to grab an Ubuntu Linux ISO, wanting to try out Ubuntu from all the things they'd heard about it being Linux for normal people. The next day, they could no longer send e-mail when their client had been previously working fine. I had to help them sort out what had gone wrong, so that they could send e-mail again.
It took a while to realize that this was because some of the folks seeding the Ubuntu ISO had been seeding on port 25, which triggered the 'antispam' protection, and that the person's mail client was still connecting to all their sites on port 25 (because that was how Eudora configured accounts by default).
I'm not arguing that blocking SMTP on port 25 is a good thing. I just wish Comcast was a little more professional about how they did so... some people are using port 25 for reasons other than sending spam, whether that be server-to-server communication, or the more mundane 'mail clients still use 25 by default' issue! Hopefully that helps clarify my point.
Three very simple reasons you might be:
1) Not all sites use port 587; though most major ISPs do, smaller businesses with their own mailservers, or small shell-account providers sometimes only have port 25. Very annoying.
2) Many mail clients still auto-configure for port 25, which is arguably an increasingly outdated behavior, but still affects many home users who never really figure out how to go and change their SMTP server settings from the defaults.
3) Some residential users run home Linux mailservers (with dyndns or some other similar dynamic DNS nameservice), which will want to connect out on port 25.
They actually do cut off users, sort of. Comcast, if you connect on port 25 somewhere more than some threshhold like 2-3 times a minute, they shut down your outgoing SMTP on port 25. And will never, ever turn it back on, so you have to start using alternate ports.
This is kind of annoying, since a lot of BitTorrent folks put their torrent clients to use ports 25 or 80, and Comcast's net-traffic tools cannot tell the difference between connecting to a remote BitTorrent client, or sending spam. And of course, since this is a false positive, the content doesn't matter. You can download your latest Ubuntu ISO via torrent, or grab one of those net-distributed shows that proliferated during the writers' strike, and have your SMTP shut off!
Fun stuff.
On the other hand, it does stop SOME zombie-spam boxes.
Slashdot saw that the iPod was going to dominate?
:)
Wasn't the original Slashdot posting about the iPod (now legendarily) just, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." with a number of followup comments about "Probably just OEM'd." and "Mediocre at best" type summaries?
In fairness, a few did say that the device shouldn't be dismissed, but I call shenanigans that people saw it was going to dominate.