Ultimate Assasination Weapon
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2
"What about space-based lasers? And again, all you'd get is a very small impact. You'd do much more damage with a cruise missle."
Just how small is small? Spy satelites can read a license plate from orbit. That technology combined with a high powered laser could be a nifty assasination device. I bet Rumsfeld would get a big chubby out of watching Saddam on TV and pushing the special red button.
I know, I know it's far fetched but that certainly hasn't stopped us before.
The fastest I have ever gotten my upstream to work is 30kB/s.....at best......at three in the morning. During the day, it's more like 15KB/s. This seems to be true for everyone I know in this market. I couldn't run an mp3/warez server if I wanted too. Oh gee, I can DOS a dialup user off the net my connection is so 'leet.
As for downloads, you may have a point but I'm paying enough for this as it is. They cap my uplink, tell me I can't run a secured private server (at least they aren't bitching about ssh.....yet), scan my ports and now they want to put a meter on it as well. What a bunch of @Home CRAP!!
This is bad. I installed Debian on this thing with nothing more than a couple of floppies and my net connection. If I wanted a connection that is good for nothing more than websurfing I would have stayed with dialup.
Can I expect to reamed for the price of a Windows CD the next time I build a box?
Way to go guys! All of the SlashTrolls know about it now too. What I thought I asked:
"Where is the restroom?"
What the native speaker heard me say?
"I want to slowly and lovingly take your wife in the rectum."
I recall a Monty Python sketch where a guy was put on trial for fraudulent phrasebooks that did that sort of thing. Someone gave the phrasebook guy a tainted phrasebook from his language back into english and he kept insulting the judge. Hilarious.
How far can we trust this translation project once the trolls make a few choice "contributions"?
Some of the documentation that comes with Samba points out that other Microsoft docs are almost useless. Microsoft's own implementations of CIFS differ from the standard in ways that could be called bugs if you're charitable or obfuscation if not. They had to do a lot of packet sniffing to get Samba to actually work. What's even worse is that the kludgy workarounds differ depending on whether it's 95, 98 or what have you.
I've suggested before that invoking Communism or major communistic leaders like Stalin should be an argument losing tactic as well. How many of you are sick of crap like this:
That GPL stuff is just communism anyway. Yur just out to put 'leet programmers like me out of work.
Communism is invoked to make cheap talking points in exactly the same way Nazism is invoked; it's yet another cheap rhetorical club whose use should brand anyone using it as just another ignorant 11 year old talking out his hind end.
I don't care for Ashcroft either but the parent poster is right. The guy who compared Ashcroft to Stalin shot himself in the foot.
In a way, long duration space probes do work like that. If some RAM in one these probes goes bad, then the software in the probe marks it and uses other memory. Come to think of it, there is a BADRAM patch for the Linux kernel but I wouldn't use a thing like that unless it emailed me that it had to map out some RAM. For that matter, Big Iron tends to be massively redundant and rarely goes down all at once. You can repair the parts that are bad while the parts that are good have a higher load for awhile. That is a large part of why the Big Iron costs so much.
This would effectively replace the W3C with Microsoft. Which do you think is more realistic to implement, a specific published standard or Microsoft's hack-of-the-week-to-break-the-competition? Show us where Microsoft's implementation of html rendering is FULLY documented and perhaps it will be considered.
A machine of that class serves as my mp3 jukebox/cablemodem firewall (I know...I know...but all of this stuff is in my living room and two pcs next to the desk is quite geeky enough......so I'll just have to do without a proper DMZ). For that matter, the guts from some of them could be reworked into a nice audio component for your stereo system. One could transparently handle mp3, ogg, various tracker modules, midi whatever. A cheap video card with TV out and and IR transciever would even give proper stereo component control over the device...with visualization going to the TV even.
Configure them properly and give em away if you have to. Mine had a home once I accumulated enough spare parts to put it together. The point is these machines aren't trash by any means. Oh well, I'm glad you found a use for them after all.
These problems are at least partly Microsoft's fault. The profit margin for these commodity PCs are almost non-existant. The OEM Windows agreements are secret and negotiated on a company by company basis. If one OEM has marginally better components or QA in it's PCs compared to a competitor then the answer may well lie in the difference between those OEM agreements. To an OEM, Windows is NOT a commodity: it is a single sourced component and Bill has 'em by the balls.
There's at least one other thing we can blame on Microsoft as well. How about those "Restore CDs" that coincidentally will blow away any other OS partition that is on a machine? Ostensibly, it is because Microsoft is worried about piracy. Yeah, right.
I'm afraid we're going to have to do it this way.
on
SSSCA Introduced in Senate
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
www.opencores.org
Better buy up as many of those FPGAs as we can before Hollings and Eisner screw those up too. Boy is this gonna suck!
If my choice is between a homebuilt with the power of a Pentium 60 AT BEST or a Pentium 6 Billion Media Player then I'll just get out the soldering iron and the prototyping rig.
Fuck Disney and the bitch Hollings they rode in on.
They should fire their entire legal department for being flaming morons then. Every commercial EULA has all sorts of language disclaiming liability and the Government is falling all over themselves making these EULAs legally enforcable. Believe me, if an Oracle database blew up at your bank and cost them millions of dollars in business Larry Ellison wouldn't even have to so much as say "I'm sorry".
The "legal liability" argument for commercial software has no legs whatsoever.
Ever see what happened to Alex in Clockwork Orange. Tim's gonna love it when an army of geeks clamp him into the Chair Of Torture. He'll kiss our butts to get all the wires out of his head and for that matter.....I'm at work here....the special one connected to his.....
XP came on some new machines we bought for the office and overall they are working pretty well. Except for one issue that is. Now I know why everyone keeps yelling about the following everytime they try to create a new Word document:
All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. All work and know play make JAck a dull boyu. All work and noe plae make JACk a sduull boy. .....
Re:The craziest ideas of the rich get attention.
on
SSSCA Editorials
·
· Score: 2
I've had the same thought. The SSSCA will have two long term effects since every dirty trick in the book will be used to keep challenges to it away from Supreme Court until Shrub gets through packing the court.
One, since Europe and Canana are going in for the same insanity, Asia will be the fount from all future conmputer innovation springs. This crap simply isn't going to over in large swaths of Asia and it will they who have the cool toys that the rest of us must dream about. As a corollary, tech companies in this country will take a severe beating since no one is going to want to "upgrade" to this crap. Imagine that, my little K6-2 500Mhz will MORE capable than a 4 Ghz Itanium 7 DVD player. This will only have about a million wonderful effects on the economy.
Two, computer technology in the Western world will be quickly degraded back to 1977 levels. Let's face it, a lot of are going to be building computers out of whole cloth in our garages again. We'll probably wind up having to reinvent everything done in the past 25 years once the insanity has run course. Since the public nets will be similarly degraded we'll have to roll our own there too. Once we manage to reinvent the Commodore 64, it'll be back to the BBS. Way to go Mikie, Jackie and Hilary! I hope you're reallllyyy happy with yourselves. I hope everyone here knows how to solder!!
VNC can be very easily tunneled over SSH. I do this with several servers and I get desktops on my home machine from work this way. What you do is configure the machine with VNC not to accept connections from VNC's normal port range and (if using it on Windows) configure VNC to allow Loopback connections. By default, a VNC machine won't "connect to itself" but you need it to for this to work. And yes, the server in question will have to be running sshd as well the VNC server.
If your using the Cygwin port of ssh to windows then run the following on the client machine:
Large scale weapons of mass destruction don't grow on trees. They require R&D efforts and some industrial capacity to manufacture, even so-called "cheap" biologicals. A biological intended to reliably take out a city no doubt takes more than a whack-job and a private garage to create. Will nukes deter whack-jobs that have been promised a harem of 30 virgins in heaven for "destroying the infidel"? Nope, nothing will. Will they give pause to those that would arm, train, and house said whack-jobs? Very likely.
All that said, one does not even so much as bandy about that he may use nukes. It makes people scared and scared people don't think rationally. Middle Eastern nations and even some in Europe think we're capable of doing anything right now. The timing is incredibly bad to announce "nuclear contingency plans".
I think the parent poster was trying to point out that some vulnerabilities conform to general patterns that can be spotted in a debugger. There is a big difference between looking for a few specific cases in the code and trying to reverse engineer an API.
I wouldn't be surprised if black hat tools exist which can scan disassemblies for probable stack and buffer vulnerabilities. Where this gets tricky is figuring out enough of what that section of code does to craft an exploit. It is still less difficult than full blown reverse engineering. The process would be akin to finding cheats in MAME or looking for Nintendo cheats with a Game Genie. One way I can think of to ease that part of it is to rebuild the disassembled code so that it can be single stepped when executed. Something like Bochs could also be used so that the black hat investigator can monitor the execution environment to any level of granularity desired. Once it's known what functionality the suspect code implements, one can start coding prospective exploits.
Recreating a secret API would be FAR more difficult. An exploit is basically something that adds itself to already running code. One doesn't have to have extremely deep knowledge of what the vulnerable code does. A project like WINE attempts to replicate the functionality of that code in a source maintainable format. It's a whole 'nother kettle of fish altogether.
A consultant would have a much harder time if he was called in to a site that used "his" code only to find it's been obfuscated. He wouldn't be able to do his job and he wrote the code so he could do his job. A good lawyer could probably make a case for that being "injury" in the legal sense of the word.
The "preferred form" part of the GPL has often cited by now. Not only is his company morally wrong, it is very probably legally wrong as well.
Softwarthat is primarily developed in Assembler is fully commented with meaningful variable and macro names. The output of a disassembler requires a boatload of analysis before it can even approach the usefulness of the "preferred form" of assembler.
The company that the article author works for had better hope that the source they intend to munge isn't owned by the FSF or a corporation with some money for lawyers like TrollTech. As Bruce Perens pointed out, Eben Moglen would love to run their..ahem! er..market penetration device through a pickle slicer.
Granted, batteries come in all shapes and sizes and can a lot for a well equipped geek to keep track of. We have to remember that, technically, a battery is a collection of cells that have been wired together. Since batteries are made from cells there are far fewer types of cells than batteries.
How is this helpful? I had a 486 laptop that I could not find a replacement battery for but Batteries Plus was able to replace the cells in the old battery. When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we recelled batteries all of the time. It was often far cheaper to rebuild a battery than to buy one new. This works for laptops too. If you want to do it yourself, Dremel tools, epoxy and superglue are your friends. Even after paying a Batteries Plus tech it can still be cheaper if you recoil at the thought of wielding the Dremel yourself.
I'll also point out that the cells in the battery are often held together by metal straps that are sort of punched into the terminals of the cell. If you want to try your hand at battery rebuilding , then you will want to run down a supply of the strips and the punch tool.
If i'm not mistaken OS X can already access smb shares and it probably wouldn't be too hard to get something like xsmbrowser running on it. If you want to browse and access smb shares on OS 9 there is a product called Dave that makes them show up in the Chooser. Dave is commercial payware but it does work very well.
You've recreated the protection scheme of the Atari 7800. There was no need to encrypt the binaries, the console wouldn't run any ROM that wasn't signed by Atari. Since the average 14 year old of the time wasn't up to modchipping, this was an effective way to control developer access to the platform.
You're not going to be able deny access to your code from the clients forever. As you say, the public key and therefore the code is recoverable. As a security method against script kiddies though, your idea has merit. They would have to be able to replace your public key with their public key in order excute altered code. This would have to be combined with other security methods like Tripwire or Aide to make something truly effective. I wouldn't even bother obfuscating the code or the public key; just sign your program and stipulate the use of the key enabled Python.
BTW The Atari 7800 private key was lost long ago. 7800 emulators don't even bother to check the signatures on the ROMs. Contrary to popular belief, 7800 ROMs were not encrypted, only signed. This also means a 7800 could be chipped to allow new 7800 games to be played. Don't laugh; new titles have been created for 2600s, ColecoVisions, Vectrex, and others.
I meant that I was able to compile Plugger on PowerPC. I don't think that MPlayer will do me much good on as it can't make use of those retreaded Windows dlls. I use Plugger to do things like embed gv in a Window for reading PDFs online. BTW gv works great as an embedded PDF viewer.
For those who don't know, Plugger allows standalone Unix apps to be handlers for web content. It will embed most any application in a browser window and is an excellent way to handle things like midis, wavs and PDFs. It works much better than "helper" apps as it will do things like close the external app when you hit the back button in your browser.
It comes with a precooked pluggerrc file with sane defaults like Timidity for midi playing and Sox for soundfile playing. By editing pluggerrc, you can turn most any app into a browser plugin.
On my K62-500 based home machine, I use Plugger to embed MPlayer to play online movies. I use Plugger for other things on my Powerbook Firewire laptop.
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"What about space-based lasers? And again, all you'd get is a very small impact. You'd do much more damage with a cruise missle."
Just how small is small? Spy satelites can read a license plate from orbit. That technology combined with a high powered laser could be a nifty assasination device. I bet Rumsfeld would get a big chubby out of watching Saddam on TV and pushing the special red button.
I know, I know it's far fetched but that certainly hasn't stopped us before.
The fastest I have ever gotten my upstream to work is 30kB/s.....at best......at three in the morning. During the day, it's more like 15KB/s. This seems to be true for everyone I know in this market. I couldn't run an mp3/warez server if I wanted too. Oh gee, I can DOS a dialup user off the net my connection is so 'leet.
As for downloads, you may have a point but I'm paying enough for this as it is. They cap my uplink, tell me I can't run a secured private server (at least they aren't bitching about ssh.....yet), scan my ports and now they want to put a meter on it as well. What a bunch of @Home CRAP!!
This is bad. I installed Debian on this thing with nothing more than a couple of floppies and my net connection. If I wanted a connection that is good for nothing more than websurfing I would have stayed with dialup.
Can I expect to reamed for the price of a Windows CD the next time I build a box?
Arrrrggggghhhh!
Way to go guys! All of the SlashTrolls know about it now too. What I thought I asked:
"Where is the restroom?"
What the native speaker heard me say?
"I want to slowly and lovingly take your wife in the rectum."
I recall a Monty Python sketch where a guy was put on trial for fraudulent phrasebooks that did that sort of thing. Someone gave the phrasebook guy a tainted phrasebook from his language back into english and he kept insulting the judge. Hilarious.
How far can we trust this translation project once the trolls make a few choice "contributions"?
Some of the documentation that comes with Samba points out that other Microsoft docs are almost useless. Microsoft's own implementations of CIFS differ from the standard in ways that could be called bugs if you're charitable or obfuscation if not. They had to do a lot of packet sniffing to get Samba to actually work. What's even worse is that the kludgy workarounds differ depending on whether it's 95, 98 or what have you.
I've suggested before that invoking Communism or major communistic leaders like Stalin should be an argument losing tactic as well. How many of you are sick of crap like this:
That GPL stuff is just communism anyway. Yur just out to put 'leet programmers like me out of work.
Communism is invoked to make cheap talking points in exactly the same way Nazism is invoked; it's yet another cheap rhetorical club whose use should brand anyone using it as just another ignorant 11 year old talking out his hind end.
I don't care for Ashcroft either but the parent poster is right. The guy who compared Ashcroft to Stalin shot himself in the foot.
Communism corollary to Godwin's Law anyone?
In a way, long duration space probes do work like that. If some RAM in one these probes goes bad, then the software in the probe marks it and uses other memory. Come to think of it, there is a BADRAM patch for the Linux kernel but I wouldn't use a thing like that unless it emailed me that it had to map out some RAM. For that matter, Big Iron tends to be massively redundant and rarely goes down all at once. You can repair the parts that are bad while the parts that are good have a higher load for awhile. That is a large part of why the Big Iron costs so much.
This would effectively replace the W3C with Microsoft. Which do you think is more realistic to implement, a specific published standard or Microsoft's hack-of-the-week-to-break-the-competition? Show us where Microsoft's implementation of html rendering is FULLY documented and perhaps it will be considered.
A machine of that class serves as my mp3 jukebox/cablemodem firewall (I know...I know...but all of this stuff is in my living room and two pcs next to the desk is quite geeky enough......so I'll just have to do without a proper DMZ). For that matter, the guts from some of them could be reworked into a nice audio component for your stereo system. One could transparently handle mp3, ogg, various tracker modules, midi whatever. A cheap video card with TV out and and IR transciever would even give proper stereo component control over the device...with visualization going to the TV even.
Configure them properly and give em away if you have to. Mine had a home once I accumulated enough spare parts to put it together. The point is these machines aren't trash by any means. Oh well, I'm glad you found a use for them after all.
These problems are at least partly Microsoft's fault. The profit margin for these commodity PCs are almost non-existant. The OEM Windows agreements are secret and negotiated on a company by company basis. If one OEM has marginally better components or QA in it's PCs compared to a competitor then the answer may well lie in the difference between those OEM agreements. To an OEM, Windows is NOT a commodity: it is a single sourced component and Bill has 'em by the balls.
There's at least one other thing we can blame on Microsoft as well. How about those "Restore CDs" that coincidentally will blow away any other OS partition that is on a machine? Ostensibly, it is because Microsoft is worried about piracy. Yeah, right.
www.opencores.org Better buy up as many of those FPGAs as we can before Hollings and Eisner screw those up too. Boy is this gonna suck! If my choice is between a homebuilt with the power of a Pentium 60 AT BEST or a Pentium 6 Billion Media Player then I'll just get out the soldering iron and the prototyping rig. Fuck Disney and the bitch Hollings they rode in on.
They should fire their entire legal department for being flaming morons then. Every commercial EULA has all sorts of language disclaiming liability and the Government is falling all over themselves making these EULAs legally enforcable. Believe me, if an Oracle database blew up at your bank and cost them millions of dollars in business Larry Ellison wouldn't even have to so much as say "I'm sorry".
The "legal liability" argument for commercial software has no legs whatsoever.
And the dead only need to find three Orbs Of Power to turn into a MegaMicroSoftie that can hurl fireballs at the DOJ-Beast.
Meanwhile the SlashWags will chant "Welcome to your Doooooom! Ha! Ha! Ha"
Ever see what happened to Alex in Clockwork Orange. Tim's gonna love it when an army of geeks clamp him into the Chair Of Torture. He'll kiss our butts to get all the wires out of his head and for that matter.....I'm at work here....the special one connected to his.....
[user] Meet my friends Mr. Debian Boot Disk and Mr. Debian Root Disk
[windows] A priority alert has been dispatched to the BSA.
[Debian Boot Disk] So Boss, do ya want to just rough him up a little or completely murdalize the bum?
XP came on some new machines we bought for the office and overall they are working pretty well. Except for one issue that is. Now I know why everyone keeps yelling about the following everytime they try to create a new Word document:
All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.
All work and know play make JAck a dull boyu.
All work and noe plae make JACk a sduull boy.
.....
I've had the same thought. The SSSCA will have two long term effects since every dirty trick in the book will be used to keep challenges to it away from Supreme Court until Shrub gets through packing the court.
One, since Europe and Canana are going in for the same insanity, Asia will be the fount from all future conmputer innovation springs. This crap simply isn't going to over in large swaths of Asia and it will they who have the cool toys that the rest of us must dream about. As a corollary, tech companies in this country will take a severe beating since no one is going to want to "upgrade" to this crap. Imagine that, my little K6-2 500Mhz will MORE capable than a 4 Ghz Itanium 7 DVD player. This will only have about a million wonderful effects on the economy.
Two, computer technology in the Western world will be quickly degraded back to 1977 levels. Let's face it, a lot of are going to be building computers out of whole cloth in our garages again. We'll probably wind up having to reinvent everything done in the past 25 years once the insanity has run course. Since the public nets will be similarly degraded we'll have to roll our own there too. Once we manage to reinvent the Commodore 64, it'll be back to the BBS. Way to go Mikie, Jackie and Hilary! I hope you're reallllyyy happy with yourselves. I hope everyone here knows how to solder!!
VNC can be very easily tunneled over SSH. I do this with several servers and I get desktops on my home machine from work this way. What you do is configure the machine with VNC not to accept connections from VNC's normal port range and (if using it on Windows) configure VNC to allow Loopback connections. By default, a VNC machine won't "connect to itself" but you need it to for this to work. And yes, the server in question will have to be running sshd as well the VNC server.
If your using the Cygwin port of ssh to windows then run the following on the client machine:
ssh -L 590x:localhost:5900 -l username @servermachine
Then start up your vnc client and connect to localhost:1. Easy peasy.
Large scale weapons of mass destruction don't grow on trees. They require R&D efforts and some industrial capacity to manufacture, even so-called "cheap" biologicals. A biological intended to reliably take out a city no doubt takes more than a whack-job and a private garage to create. Will nukes deter whack-jobs that have been promised a harem of 30 virgins in heaven for "destroying the infidel"? Nope, nothing will. Will they give pause to those that would arm, train, and house said whack-jobs? Very likely.
All that said, one does not even so much as bandy about that he may use nukes. It makes people scared and scared people don't think rationally. Middle Eastern nations and even some in Europe think we're capable of doing anything right now. The timing is incredibly bad to announce "nuclear contingency plans".
I think the parent poster was trying to point out that some vulnerabilities conform to general patterns that can be spotted in a debugger. There is a big difference between looking for a few specific cases in the code and trying to reverse engineer an API.
I wouldn't be surprised if black hat tools exist which can scan disassemblies for probable stack and buffer vulnerabilities. Where this gets tricky is figuring out enough of what that section of code does to craft an exploit. It is still less difficult than full blown reverse engineering. The process would be akin to finding cheats in MAME or looking for Nintendo cheats with a Game Genie. One way I can think of to ease that part of it is to rebuild the disassembled code so that it can be single stepped when executed. Something like Bochs could also be used so that the black hat investigator can monitor the execution environment to any level of granularity desired. Once it's known what functionality the suspect code implements, one can start coding prospective exploits.
Recreating a secret API would be FAR more difficult. An exploit is basically something that adds itself to already running code. One doesn't have to have extremely deep knowledge of what the vulnerable code does. A project like WINE attempts to replicate the functionality of that code in a source maintainable format. It's a whole 'nother kettle of fish altogether.
A consultant would have a much harder time if he was called in to a site that used "his" code only to find it's been obfuscated. He wouldn't be able to do his job and he wrote the code so he could do his job. A good lawyer could probably make a case for that being "injury" in the legal sense of the word.
The "preferred form" part of the GPL has often cited by now. Not only is his company morally wrong, it is very probably legally wrong as well.
Softwarthat is primarily developed in Assembler is fully commented with meaningful variable and macro names. The output of a disassembler requires a boatload of analysis before it can even approach the usefulness of the "preferred form" of assembler.
The company that the article author works for had better hope that the source they intend to munge isn't owned by the FSF or a corporation with some money for lawyers like TrollTech. As Bruce Perens pointed out, Eben Moglen would love to run their..ahem! er..market penetration device through a pickle slicer.
Granted, batteries come in all shapes and sizes and can a lot for a well equipped geek to keep track of. We have to remember that, technically, a battery is a collection of cells that have been wired together. Since batteries are made from cells there are far fewer types of cells than batteries.
How is this helpful? I had a 486 laptop that I could not find a replacement battery for but Batteries Plus was able to replace the cells in the old battery. When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we recelled batteries all of the time. It was often far cheaper to rebuild a battery than to buy one new. This works for laptops too. If you want to do it yourself, Dremel tools, epoxy and superglue are your friends. Even after paying a Batteries Plus tech it can still be cheaper if you recoil at the thought of wielding the Dremel yourself.
I'll also point out that the cells in the battery are often held together by metal straps that are sort of punched into the terminals of the cell. If you want to try your hand at battery rebuilding , then you will want to run down a supply of the strips and the punch tool.
If i'm not mistaken OS X can already access smb shares and it probably wouldn't be too hard to get something like xsmbrowser running on it. If you want to browse and access smb shares on OS 9 there is a product called Dave that makes them show up in the Chooser. Dave is commercial payware but it does work very well.
You've recreated the protection scheme of the Atari 7800. There was no need to encrypt the binaries, the console wouldn't run any ROM that wasn't signed by Atari. Since the average 14 year old of the time wasn't up to modchipping, this was an effective way to control developer access to the platform.
You're not going to be able deny access to your code from the clients forever. As you say, the public key and therefore the code is recoverable. As a security method against script kiddies though, your idea has merit. They would have to be able to replace your public key with their public key in order excute altered code. This would have to be combined with other security methods like Tripwire or Aide to make something truly effective. I wouldn't even bother obfuscating the code or the public key; just sign your program and stipulate the use of the key enabled Python.
BTW The Atari 7800 private key was lost long ago. 7800 emulators don't even bother to check the signatures on the ROMs. Contrary to popular belief, 7800 ROMs were not encrypted, only signed. This also means a 7800 could be chipped to allow new 7800 games to be played. Don't laugh; new titles have been created for 2600s, ColecoVisions, Vectrex, and others.
I meant that I was able to compile Plugger on PowerPC. I don't think that MPlayer will do me much good on as it can't make use of those retreaded Windows dlls. I use Plugger to do things like embed gv in a Window for reading PDFs online. BTW gv works great as an embedded PDF viewer.
For those who don't know, Plugger allows standalone Unix apps to be handlers for web content. It will embed most any application in a browser window and is an excellent way to handle things like midis, wavs and PDFs. It works much better than "helper" apps as it will do things like close the external app when you hit the back button in your browser.
It comes with a precooked pluggerrc file with sane defaults like Timidity for midi playing and Sox for soundfile playing. By editing pluggerrc, you can turn most any app into a browser plugin.
On my K62-500 based home machine, I use Plugger to embed MPlayer to play online movies. I use Plugger for other things on my Powerbook Firewire laptop.