Security is about dissuading people from doing things, not preventing them.
That's true to some extent. Theoretically, many government sites are vulnerable to nuclear attack. However, the difficulty (politically and physically) of constructing one, and the likelyhood of counterattacks, mean that it's exceedingly unlikely to happen, despite the technical possibility.
If it takes 50 solder points and a week of effort, 99.9% of your users won't modify their consoles and your software sales won't be negatively impacted.
If it takes 50 solder points, somebody in China will figure out a way to make the work go quickly, and people will import them from Lik-sang. And we're nowhere near the 50-solder-point mark yet. And granted, if it got to the point where modifying it took more than $50-100 of work, people would just buy the nearest-priced open media portal device instead.
Ultimately, technical security is completely different from physical security. Developers can do things in their home that's not detectable anywhere, and once things are broken once, they can easily be broken everywhere.
We're talking about a bog standard AC/DC converter
I don't think it's standard in any way.
1) it's designed for a modern 3x CPU and GPU that don't ever run on a battery. Most external bricks are designed for laptops, which are inherently designed to draw much less current so they can sometimes run on a battery.
2) It outputs two different voltages (12v and 5v), whereas most brick PSU's output only one voltage, and usually a higher voltage. More generally, because the device it's powering generates quite a bit of its own heat, a greater percentage of the power supply has been moved to the external unit, to increase the total disapation of heat while minimizing noise. So most high-power laptops take in higher voltages from their bricks (eg. 20v) and convert that to lower ones inside the laptop, the XBox 360 brick outputs at 12v, which is why it has a HUGE output cable to handle all the amps.
3) it has two fans in the PSU brick, obviously it's unique
we're not talking about a design decision taken because they were trying to revolutionize the console world
We're talking about breaking into the Japanese market, which requires extra effort. I think the Japanese will wise up to the slight-of-hand and realize that the total size makes the XBox 360 no smaller than the original XBox, though I do think we'll have to wait and see how big the PSU is for the PS3 and its 8 processors.
it is very clearly another console.
It's more forward-looking than the PS3 is though. Most people, unless they've actually tried it out, underestimate how important the centralized online aspect of the 360 is. The Gamercard and Gamerscore 1) encourage you to put more time into games, because your buddies are watching, 2) encourages you to bring up the 360 more often in conversation, because they can see what you're doing, and 3) if there are games that show up on both the PS3 and the 360, you may want to play it on the 360 because the PS3 doesn't give you a Gamerscore for the time you put in.
Simply adding support for extra codecs, and better/configurable upscaling of DVD or 720p content would be a wonderful place to start. Though the PS3 supposedly has more horsepower and 1080p output, so it may be preferable for use as a software scaler.
It could easily have been a management problem too... As frickin' huge as the thing is, it's possible it was even larger during development, and the management word came down "the PSU must be smaller! Otherwise the japanese won't buy it. Consequences be damned!", and it turns out this was the smallest they could get it.
no self-preservation: I don't matter, there are millions of other people. Yeah, it's logical to some extent, but it goes against every atom in your body unless you have a medical condition.
no preservation for your family: just try to threaten somebody's kid sometime
no preservation for your friends: just ask soldiers how important their comrades are
Yeah, maybe it's logical to say that preservation of yourself or kin is dumb. But that's not remotely how our brains tick, on ANY level. Yeah, there are threats out there, but we have some capability for predicting what might happen in the future, and changing our plans to address that. We have a fighting chance.
On the upside, it's stretched out with interview comments of actual people in the industry.
On the downside, most of the interviewees are thinking "we don't want to tell you any of our remotely good ideas until we get them to market", so it's less useful than it could otherwise be.
How can you "prove a negative" without ever having your hands on one? I'm not a Nintendo fanboy, but I do see that it's way too easy for people to say "X is a bad idea" before having any experience with it. Based on that, 99.999% of the population could justifiably say Nintendo Revolution is crap. How is this kind of comment useful?
From what I've heard, there's a fair bit of multimedia allowed with a normal Samba/SMB connection (eg. no Windows Media Center). However, the video options are limited until you upgrade to PC-based Media Center. (which, I think, is similar to the original XBox, right?)
And even when you buy the PC-based Media Center, you still can't get the full breadth of video codecs allowed on the hacked XBox Media Center. So you still really want to go with the hackers.
Well, considering 1) you don't get the full XBox 360 networked functionality unless you pay for the PC-based Media Center, 2) in terms of number of formats supported, the open source Xbox1 media center has more functionality (except for HD), 3) not many media companies are selling content over the 'net yet, and 4) the Apple with its iPod Video is going further in convincing content creators than anyone else is. Sure, the XBox 360 is useful for the Long Tail, but only once it's been hacked, which means that it's the usual story: the Long Tail is here, but it's not the companies bringing it to you, it's the hackers.
Perhaps reading available information and studying a bit of statistics before you post will help you to understand a bit more than you currently appear to.
I would say the other guy is spot-on. The Long Tail is an great concept, but when you overuse it in places where it doesn't belong, you devalue the term in general.
Mobile providers aren't a cartel per-se. In the US though, there are two things that make consumer choice with cell phones worse:
1) Cell phones have the same problem as broadband... somebody has to install all the last-mile equipment. It's a pretty big investment, so only a handful of companies do it. And ultimately those companies are able to throw their weight around, even when they resell their traffic to other carriers.
2) In the US, consumers buy their cell phones from the carriers, instead of directly from the manufacturer. They do this because carriers give them a big discount in exchange for a longer service contract. However, this means that the relationship between the carrier and the manufacturer is very strong, so the carriers have a lot of influence over what features the manufactuers build into phones. It's kind of like what would happen if the cable company were able to tell the TV manufacturers what to do, or if broadband ISP's were able to tell computer manufacturers what to do.
(my point was basically that, in terms of legal or technical issues, Sony perhaps should go one or two steps further... but in the court of public opinion, people who aren't familiar with rootkits may well think that Sony has done everything they could do, especially since nothing spectacular like SUV rollovers occured)
Aren't product recalls a more or less accepted ultimate form of saying "sorry, we screwed up", other than losing a lawsuit? I understand and agree that this case is different from a seatbelt that could come lose, or a tire that could cause a rollover, but even in those cases, since the damage can be variable (eg. anywhere from no additional loss, to a bruised nose, to death), I thought it was up to individual people to address any additional costs on an individual basis, possibly in court?
At least in this case, the rootkit clearly poses an ongoing risk to users, the "no additional loss" scenario is already gone, so it may be appropriate for users to file a class-action lawsuit.
Only if the journey is a good one. 90% of the paragraphs are simply repetitions of "OMG, this has never been done before". From people's reactions to the technical merits, it sounds like it is a great new innovation, but the writing style is still very excessively gushing and fannish. People have also written similarly gushy pieces about Einstein, but I still really dislike the writing style.
Yes, "one paragraph" was an exageration. But it's spread over 11 pages, and most of the paragraphs are simply gush with no content. For those who just want the meat, the whole story can basically be boiled down to:
Kehoe made a bubble like that when he was 26, after only two years of trashed countertops and chemical fires. He showed it to toy-company executives, who called it a "holy grail." And then it broke, as bubbles always do. And when it did, the dye inside escaped onto clothes and carpets and walls and skin, staining everything it touched. The execs told him to come back with a bubble they could wash off their boardroom table.
The breakthrough finally happened in an empty lab in Minneapolis on a Sunday this past February. As with Kehoe's first bubble, it arose from the slow, subtle refinement of a process over thousands of experiments. But Sabnis could re-create it. He synthesized a dye that would bond to the surfactants in a bubble to give it bright, vivid color but would also lose its color with friction, water or exposure to air--not fade, not transfer to something else, but go away completely, as though it had never been there. When one of these bubbles breaks on your hand, rub your hands together a few times and look: Poof. Magic. No more color. If the bubble breaks on your shirt or the carpet or the dog, you have two choices: Dab it with a touch of plain water to remove it immediately, or forget about it for half an hour. Either way, the color will soon be gone.
Sabnis's solution was to build a dye molecule from an unstable base structure called a lactone ring that functions much like a box. When the ring is open, the molecule absorbs all visible light save for one color--the color of the bubble. But add air, water or pressure, and the box closes, changing the molecule's structure so that it lets visible light pass straight through. Sabnis builds each hue by adding different chemical groups onto this base.
We have a number of kinds of molecules that change color when heated... eg. mood rings or thermal printers. Are the colored bubbles different in that the process is irreversible? Or, what is the new development?
The rootkit wasn't necessarily the worst part of the problem though...
One issue was lack of disclosure. Parts of the program were uninstallable, staying in the background, constantly eating a little CPU. The program "phoned home", and neither the EULA or any normal documentation let the user know that would happen.
The other problem was stability. Because the program was meant to filter the audio CD driver information, and generally do low-level stuff, and it was poorly coded, it caused a computer system to be less stable.
These problems were only discovered because of skilled people at Sysinternals. In the future though, if programs can be more protected by the NGSCB, they will have greater free reign to do this type of activity without scrutiny. Certainly it will be easier if simply processes and files aren't hidden anymore, since that, combined with seeing TCP data being sent out whenever you play a CD, will be a large tip-off. However, we all benefit if skilled people can expose spyware wherever it occurs, and ultimately, if NGSCB helps cloak some activity, then that may ultimately make it harder for peoplpe like Mark Russinovich to do their work for the public good.
What happens when Sony's rootkit hides under the protection of Windows Vista's NGSCB? Will antivirus vendors be able to remove bad code that ends up in the NGSCB? Given that Window's kernel in insecure enough to allow itself to be rootkitted, what is the chance that NGSCB itself will be subverted? Doesn't the fact that NGSCB is designed to hide code from normal users and knowledgable debuggers alike mean that it's somewhat similar to what the Sony rootkit tries to do?
Do you have a computer monitor or something? In that case, VGA should work semi-well.
Yeah, DVI/HDMI is a little better quality than component connections, but most consumer equipment these days is still hooked up with component, especially since everyone is waiting for HDMI to fully catch on.
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If it takes 50 solder points, somebody in China will figure out a way to make the work go quickly, and people will import them from Lik-sang. And we're nowhere near the 50-solder-point mark yet. And granted, if it got to the point where modifying it took more than $50-100 of work, people would just buy the nearest-priced open media portal device instead.
Ultimately, technical security is completely different from physical security. Developers can do things in their home that's not detectable anywhere, and once things are broken once, they can easily be broken everywhere.
Yeah, it's mostly an ATX PSU in a separate box. Yeah, they should have gotten it right.
I don't think it's standard in any way.
1) it's designed for a modern 3x CPU and GPU that don't ever run on a battery. Most external bricks are designed for laptops, which are inherently designed to draw much less current so they can sometimes run on a battery.
2) It outputs two different voltages (12v and 5v), whereas most brick PSU's output only one voltage, and usually a higher voltage. More generally, because the device it's powering generates quite a bit of its own heat, a greater percentage of the power supply has been moved to the external unit, to increase the total disapation of heat while minimizing noise. So most high-power laptops take in higher voltages from their bricks (eg. 20v) and convert that to lower ones inside the laptop, the XBox 360 brick outputs at 12v, which is why it has a HUGE output cable to handle all the amps.
3) it has two fans in the PSU brick, obviously it's unique
We're talking about breaking into the Japanese market, which requires extra effort. I think the Japanese will wise up to the slight-of-hand and realize that the total size makes the XBox 360 no smaller than the original XBox, though I do think we'll have to wait and see how big the PSU is for the PS3 and its 8 processors.
It's more forward-looking than the PS3 is though. Most people, unless they've actually tried it out, underestimate how important the centralized online aspect of the 360 is. The Gamercard and Gamerscore 1) encourage you to put more time into games, because your buddies are watching, 2) encourages you to bring up the 360 more often in conversation, because they can see what you're doing, and 3) if there are games that show up on both the PS3 and the 360, you may want to play it on the 360 because the PS3 doesn't give you a Gamerscore for the time you put in.Simply adding support for extra codecs, and better/configurable upscaling of DVD or 720p content would be a wonderful place to start. Though the PS3 supposedly has more horsepower and 1080p output, so it may be preferable for use as a software scaler.
Made in China.
It could easily have been a management problem too... As frickin' huge as the thing is, it's possible it was even larger during development, and the management word came down "the PSU must be smaller! Otherwise the japanese won't buy it. Consequences be damned!", and it turns out this was the smallest they could get it.
Okay, seriously... how long until I have one to use when travelling to Q'onoS?
Or, if you live near the Mississippi Embayment, the ocean will come right up to your back door. Yay.
Yeah, maybe it's logical to say that preservation of yourself or kin is dumb. But that's not remotely how our brains tick, on ANY level. Yeah, there are threats out there, but we have some capability for predicting what might happen in the future, and changing our plans to address that. We have a fighting chance.
1. Bitch and complain about China
2. ???
3. Profit!
Where are my PIC and Scenix chips, eh?
On the downside, most of the interviewees are thinking "we don't want to tell you any of our remotely good ideas until we get them to market", so it's less useful than it could otherwise be.
How can you "prove a negative" without ever having your hands on one? I'm not a Nintendo fanboy, but I do see that it's way too easy for people to say "X is a bad idea" before having any experience with it. Based on that, 99.999% of the population could justifiably say Nintendo Revolution is crap. How is this kind of comment useful?
And even when you buy the PC-based Media Center, you still can't get the full breadth of video codecs allowed on the hacked XBox Media Center. So you still really want to go with the hackers.
Perhaps reading available information and studying a bit of statistics before you post will help you to understand a bit more than you currently appear to.
I would say the other guy is spot-on. The Long Tail is an great concept, but when you overuse it in places where it doesn't belong, you devalue the term in general.
1) Cell phones have the same problem as broadband... somebody has to install all the last-mile equipment. It's a pretty big investment, so only a handful of companies do it. And ultimately those companies are able to throw their weight around, even when they resell their traffic to other carriers.
2) In the US, consumers buy their cell phones from the carriers, instead of directly from the manufacturer. They do this because carriers give them a big discount in exchange for a longer service contract. However, this means that the relationship between the carrier and the manufacturer is very strong, so the carriers have a lot of influence over what features the manufactuers build into phones. It's kind of like what would happen if the cable company were able to tell the TV manufacturers what to do, or if broadband ISP's were able to tell computer manufacturers what to do.
(my point was basically that, in terms of legal or technical issues, Sony perhaps should go one or two steps further... but in the court of public opinion, people who aren't familiar with rootkits may well think that Sony has done everything they could do, especially since nothing spectacular like SUV rollovers occured)
At least in this case, the rootkit clearly poses an ongoing risk to users, the "no additional loss" scenario is already gone, so it may be appropriate for users to file a class-action lawsuit.
Only if the journey is a good one. 90% of the paragraphs are simply repetitions of "OMG, this has never been done before". From people's reactions to the technical merits, it sounds like it is a great new innovation, but the writing style is still very excessively gushing and fannish. People have also written similarly gushy pieces about Einstein, but I still really dislike the writing style.
We have a number of kinds of molecules that change color when heated... eg. mood rings or thermal printers. Are the colored bubbles different in that the process is irreversible? Or, what is the new development?
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One issue was lack of disclosure. Parts of the program were uninstallable, staying in the background, constantly eating a little CPU. The program "phoned home", and neither the EULA or any normal documentation let the user know that would happen.
The other problem was stability. Because the program was meant to filter the audio CD driver information, and generally do low-level stuff, and it was poorly coded, it caused a computer system to be less stable.
These problems were only discovered because of skilled people at Sysinternals. In the future though, if programs can be more protected by the NGSCB, they will have greater free reign to do this type of activity without scrutiny. Certainly it will be easier if simply processes and files aren't hidden anymore, since that, combined with seeing TCP data being sent out whenever you play a CD, will be a large tip-off. However, we all benefit if skilled people can expose spyware wherever it occurs, and ultimately, if NGSCB helps cloak some activity, then that may ultimately make it harder for peoplpe like Mark Russinovich to do their work for the public good.
What happens when Sony's rootkit hides under the protection of Windows Vista's NGSCB? Will antivirus vendors be able to remove bad code that ends up in the NGSCB? Given that Window's kernel in insecure enough to allow itself to be rootkitted, what is the chance that NGSCB itself will be subverted? Doesn't the fact that NGSCB is designed to hide code from normal users and knowledgable debuggers alike mean that it's somewhat similar to what the Sony rootkit tries to do?
Yeah, DVI/HDMI is a little better quality than component connections, but most consumer equipment these days is still hooked up with component, especially since everyone is waiting for HDMI to fully catch on.