I'd love to get a BrainPort device and hook it up to the CPU of my PC. Every time the processor executes an instruction I'd like to have hardware decode it and stimulate a bit on the BrainPort. Every time the processor fetches from memory the BrainPort would be notified of a little bit of the data at the fetch memory address (say, 50 bytes above and below the fected address). Same with writes. After a while of using this I would expect debugging low level software problems would become a LOT faster. Add some software the utilitizes debugging information to map addresses to line numbers/variable names and I think source level debugging would become faster too. At last, I could have that zen level connection with my machine that I've dreamed about since I read neuromancer all those years ago.
You don't understand cause you're entering the conversation in the middle. People keep saying that FireFox is this magically spyware-proof security utopia and that Microsoft is at fault for all the spyware that is available for IE. I'm simply pointing out that there's no reason why all these problems that plague users of IE can't one-day plague users of FireFox.
That said, there is absolutely no reason why we should have to live in a world where a random piece of software that I download can go and fuck around with the dlls in my FireFox directory! Just as we these days don't accept that it is a-ok for any old app I download to open any port it wants to the Internet. We all use network firewalls. Where are the firewalls for the harddrive?
and so we see the real problem. All the current OSs fail to seperate programs from each other. We're required to trust all the code or none of the code. This is truely a sad state of affairs. It's been like this for a long time. It's been like this for too long. Let's do something about it.
but really it is true.. cause a plugin is unrestrained native code.. it can modify the browser to prohibit uninstalling. It can modify other plugins to do its dirty work. It can do anything.
Say I go download the source code for the FireFox search bar extension. Say I'm an ad company and I really wanna target my ads at FireFox users, so I'd like to know what they search for using the search bar extension. So all I do is put in some code that once a month sends the list of everything they searched for to my web site (say I have a really big web site cause I get lots of money from ad companies for doing evil things like this). How oh how will I get these unwitting FireFox users to download my search bar extension from me instead of downloading it from the official site? Well I could just offer it and see how many people download it from my site once Google indexes it. That would work. But more likely what I would do is put it in some random program that lots and lots of people download (say, Kazza) and enter into agreements with shareware web sites to embed it into all the junk people download from them (say, Download.com). When the user downloads the spyware infected shareware it will silently replace the official FireFox search bar extension with my evil snooping search bar extension. But won't someone notice?!! Well no, because the extensions are not signed are they?
I don't get your point. Once native code runs on your machine it can do just about anything. For example, it could change one the extensions you already have installed to do its nasty work.. or Mozilla itself. People can do the same with IE (and do) but that's not the point here. Five times over the last two days I've heard people shouting from the rooftops that everyone should use FireFox cause you don't get spyware. This is so stupid. The reason you don't get spyware is because it's a waste of freakin' time for the spyware makers to target 5% of users instead of 95% of users. If 95% of people were using FireFox there would be just as much spyware for FireFox as there is for IE. So shut the hell up about spyware already.
I doubt that a single site that wanted to install a spyware plugin for mozilla would go about it via the front door. I recently completed making a plugin for Mozilla on win32 to display some 3d graphics files in a web page. To get your plugin installed all you have to do is copy the dll and the xpt to the components/plugins directory of Mozilla. Every time Mozilla starts up it scans for new plugins and it doesn't alert the user if it finds more. Even if it did, it would be trivial to replace a currently installed plugin with your own plugin which has the same behaviour + the spy ware. This is really easy to do with Firefox because there are open source plugins which ship with Firefox that could easily be hijacked for spyware purposes. Mozilla/Firefox need to do some signature checking using a strong crypto algorithm and quick smart before we all start claiming we're immune to spyware.
The power of statistics.. just think for 5 little seconds. Done? Ok, now how many people run linux desktops who don't also run windows desktops? hmmm? What's that? Oh yes, about 0.1% of PC users. Brilliant isn't it?
I'm reminded of Linux vs Mac market share arguments.
Linux has 1% of the desktop market, so nah!
Mac has 1.1% of the market, so nah!
Meanwhile Microsoft sits there with 98.9% of the market saying "yes, and?" Even if you include games, movies and books, it doesn't even add up to 1% of the GDP of the US.
I really don't get this attitude. FireFox also has plugins (in fact, that's one of its biggest selling features) and you even get a nice little pop up box when you click on them that says "do you want to install this?" much like you get when installing an ActiveX control. There's nothing stopping a user from pressing no in both cases, and there's nothing stopping a user from pressing yes in both cases. Both can do the same amount of damage (as they're just binaries).
In the future we might have to deal with Slashdot gaining some journalistic integrity, but for some reason I don't think talking about it today is going to make any difference to the color of the snow in hell when it happens.
Blah, SuprNova has a moderator system where actual people check to ensure that the data in the torrent is what it claims to be. Those people are responsible for ensuring that the person injecting the torrent has a legal right to do so.
Go to SuprNova's upload page. Ignore the disclaimer, that's their legal opinion, which is obviously biased. Press 'I Agree'. Now you have three options:
Anonymous submission (your torrents will be moderated)
Create an account (your torrents will be moderated till you get approved)
Login with existing account
Now read the rest of the page...
"How can I add a torrent to SuprNova library? It's all quite simple.. you fill in the form on this page, attach the torrent file and when a moderator approves of the submission, it gets added to the next listing after the moderation (torrent listings are generated every 30 minutes)."
"What? Moderation? Don't you trust me? Well this is the internet afterall...:) Though if you want to do without that moderation, upload a few good torrents with good descriptions / links. When an admin sees your good work, he can grant you the officious status of 'Unmoderated Submitter', which gives you a neat green nickname! (and who doesn't want that, eh?) Progressing from that point, if you really want to help out, you can request to become a 'Moderator', who.. you guessed it.. moderates incoming torrents! (plus this one gives you a cool blue nick)"
So even if it were the case that warez were put onto SuprNova solely by these "Unmoderated Submitters" SuprNova is still responsible for their actions because they are responsible for who gets unmoderated submitter status.
This is really really stupid. Here's a retort for you: as all the.torrent files that go into the system must pass a moderator before they can be downloaded it is the responsibility of that moderator to ensure that the person injecting the.torrent has the legal right to do so.
If you don't like copyright law (and I don't) just stand up and say so, don't hide behind decisions like Betamax.
Which is why the upgrade cycle is not a smart way to buy software. If you really truely want to spend money on software and get everything you want, just hire a developer to tune open source software to your particular needs. If what you want is more expensive than you personally can afford to pay a developer then find the 1000 other people out there who want that same thing and split the costs. Microsoft isn't dumb, but their business strategy is, and the only reason they're still making money with it is because people don't know that they are getting ripped off.
Yeah, I think you're really belittling this engineering.. The point is Google is doing all this with a straight-jacket (also known as a web browser) on. It's kinda like minimalist composition. I can imagine that next year some time when The Matrix Online comes out everyone will be saying "yeah, so, it's just kungfu fighting in a game.. the only really it's impressive is because it's a MMORPG, we've had kungfu in video games since Street Fighter." or something equally silly. The point is that twitch games a really really had to do over the wild wild internet (which is why FPS games are SOOO much better on a LAN) and close combat twitch games that involve kungfu style fighting are even harder. If TMO pulls it off I'd expect the same geek response as we've had over Google Suggest, cause it's just a bitch to do with the technology available.
Ya know, as soon as they release a Microsoft branded spyware removal tool will be the day they draw the line in the sand defining exactly what apps are welcome on the Microsoft platform and what apps are not. If Microsoft gets the final say of what runs on your machine, what makes you think they're only going to be removing spyware?
Re:If it worked, what would you use it for?
on
Honda Updates ASIMO
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· Score: 1
Yeah, cause I've got a LOT of bombs that need disposing. The ultimate intent of ASIMO is to be a perfect little slave. Maybe your life is hard but I've pretty much got no slavin' jobs that need doing. Maybe I need to get me a cotton field or something.
Slashdot Mirror
so when the FSF asks you to assign copyright to them that's bullshit too?
I'd love to get a BrainPort device and hook it up to the CPU of my PC. Every time the processor executes an instruction I'd like to have hardware decode it and stimulate a bit on the BrainPort. Every time the processor fetches from memory the BrainPort would be notified of a little bit of the data at the fetch memory address (say, 50 bytes above and below the fected address). Same with writes. After a while of using this I would expect debugging low level software problems would become a LOT faster. Add some software the utilitizes debugging information to map addresses to line numbers/variable names and I think source level debugging would become faster too. At last, I could have that zen level connection with my machine that I've dreamed about since I read neuromancer all those years ago.
That said, there is absolutely no reason why we should have to live in a world where a random piece of software that I download can go and fuck around with the dlls in my FireFox directory! Just as we these days don't accept that it is a-ok for any old app I download to open any port it wants to the Internet. We all use network firewalls. Where are the firewalls for the harddrive?
and so we see the real problem. All the current OSs fail to seperate programs from each other. We're required to trust all the code or none of the code. This is truely a sad state of affairs. It's been like this for a long time. It's been like this for too long. Let's do something about it.
Absolutely. If only we didn't have people yelling to anyone who will listen that FireFox is some magically charmed spyware-proofed divination.
but really it is true.. cause a plugin is unrestrained native code.. it can modify the browser to prohibit uninstalling. It can modify other plugins to do its dirty work. It can do anything.
Say I go download the source code for the FireFox search bar extension. Say I'm an ad company and I really wanna target my ads at FireFox users, so I'd like to know what they search for using the search bar extension. So all I do is put in some code that once a month sends the list of everything they searched for to my web site (say I have a really big web site cause I get lots of money from ad companies for doing evil things like this). How oh how will I get these unwitting FireFox users to download my search bar extension from me instead of downloading it from the official site? Well I could just offer it and see how many people download it from my site once Google indexes it. That would work. But more likely what I would do is put it in some random program that lots and lots of people download (say, Kazza) and enter into agreements with shareware web sites to embed it into all the junk people download from them (say, Download.com). When the user downloads the spyware infected shareware it will silently replace the official FireFox search bar extension with my evil snooping search bar extension. But won't someone notice?!! Well no, because the extensions are not signed are they?
I don't get your point. Once native code runs on your machine it can do just about anything. For example, it could change one the extensions you already have installed to do its nasty work.. or Mozilla itself. People can do the same with IE (and do) but that's not the point here. Five times over the last two days I've heard people shouting from the rooftops that everyone should use FireFox cause you don't get spyware. This is so stupid. The reason you don't get spyware is because it's a waste of freakin' time for the spyware makers to target 5% of users instead of 95% of users. If 95% of people were using FireFox there would be just as much spyware for FireFox as there is for IE. So shut the hell up about spyware already.
I doubt that a single site that wanted to install a spyware plugin for mozilla would go about it via the front door. I recently completed making a plugin for Mozilla on win32 to display some 3d graphics files in a web page. To get your plugin installed all you have to do is copy the dll and the xpt to the components/plugins directory of Mozilla. Every time Mozilla starts up it scans for new plugins and it doesn't alert the user if it finds more. Even if it did, it would be trivial to replace a currently installed plugin with your own plugin which has the same behaviour + the spy ware. This is really easy to do with Firefox because there are open source plugins which ship with Firefox that could easily be hijacked for spyware purposes. Mozilla/Firefox need to do some signature checking using a strong crypto algorithm and quick smart before we all start claiming we're immune to spyware.
"Won't someone please think of the children!?" The degredation of the human mind caused by having children.
The power of statistics.. just think for 5 little seconds. Done? Ok, now how many people run linux desktops who don't also run windows desktops? hmmm? What's that? Oh yes, about 0.1% of PC users. Brilliant isn't it?
I'm reminded of Linux vs Mac market share arguments.
Linux has 1% of the desktop market, so nah!
Mac has 1.1% of the market, so nah!
Meanwhile Microsoft sits there with 98.9% of the market saying "yes, and?" Even if you include games, movies and books, it doesn't even add up to 1% of the GDP of the US.
I really don't get this attitude. FireFox also has plugins (in fact, that's one of its biggest selling features) and you even get a nice little pop up box when you click on them that says "do you want to install this?" much like you get when installing an ActiveX control. There's nothing stopping a user from pressing no in both cases, and there's nothing stopping a user from pressing yes in both cases. Both can do the same amount of damage (as they're just binaries).
Ya know, there's another word for "plugins" that those wonderful people over at Microsoft thought were such a great idea: ActiveX.
Hmm.. I know that signature. That wouldn't be my old friend from UQ whose name I wont post here would it?
and more importantly, they actively moderate the content that people submit to them to ensure it *is* warez.
In the future we might have to deal with Slashdot gaining some journalistic integrity, but for some reason I don't think talking about it today is going to make any difference to the color of the snow in hell when it happens.
Blah, SuprNova has a moderator system where actual people check to ensure that the data in the torrent is what it claims to be. Those people are responsible for ensuring that the person injecting the torrent has a legal right to do so.
Now read the rest of the page...
"How can I add a torrent to SuprNova library?
It's all quite simple.. you fill in the form on this page, attach the torrent file and when a moderator approves of the submission, it gets added to the next listing after the moderation (torrent listings are generated every 30 minutes)."
"What? Moderation? Don't you trust me? :)
Well this is the internet afterall...
Though if you want to do without that moderation, upload a few good torrents with good descriptions / links.
When an admin sees your good work, he can grant you the officious status of 'Unmoderated Submitter', which gives you a neat green nickname! (and who doesn't want that, eh?)
Progressing from that point, if you really want to help out, you can request to become a 'Moderator', who.. you guessed it.. moderates incoming torrents! (plus this one gives you a cool blue nick)"
So even if it were the case that warez were put onto SuprNova solely by these "Unmoderated Submitters" SuprNova is still responsible for their actions because they are responsible for who gets unmoderated submitter status.
If you don't like copyright law (and I don't) just stand up and say so, don't hide behind decisions like Betamax.
Don't hide behind the Betamax decision, say what you mean: Copyright is wrong and no longer makes sense.
Which is why the upgrade cycle is not a smart way to buy software. If you really truely want to spend money on software and get everything you want, just hire a developer to tune open source software to your particular needs. If what you want is more expensive than you personally can afford to pay a developer then find the 1000 other people out there who want that same thing and split the costs. Microsoft isn't dumb, but their business strategy is, and the only reason they're still making money with it is because people don't know that they are getting ripped off.
Yeah, I think you're really belittling this engineering.. The point is Google is doing all this with a straight-jacket (also known as a web browser) on. It's kinda like minimalist composition. I can imagine that next year some time when The Matrix Online comes out everyone will be saying "yeah, so, it's just kungfu fighting in a game.. the only really it's impressive is because it's a MMORPG, we've had kungfu in video games since Street Fighter." or something equally silly. The point is that twitch games a really really had to do over the wild wild internet (which is why FPS games are SOOO much better on a LAN) and close combat twitch games that involve kungfu style fighting are even harder. If TMO pulls it off I'd expect the same geek response as we've had over Google Suggest, cause it's just a bitch to do with the technology available.
Ya know, as soon as they release a Microsoft branded spyware removal tool will be the day they draw the line in the sand defining exactly what apps are welcome on the Microsoft platform and what apps are not. If Microsoft gets the final say of what runs on your machine, what makes you think they're only going to be removing spyware?
Yeah, cause I've got a LOT of bombs that need disposing. The ultimate intent of ASIMO is to be a perfect little slave. Maybe your life is hard but I've pretty much got no slavin' jobs that need doing. Maybe I need to get me a cotton field or something.