People don't particularly care about the BIOS so much because while they may not be free, they don't lock you in.. It's still possible to boot whatever OS you want from it, and there are at least several BIOS makers... That said, the traditional x86 BIOS is pretty awful, and is only still around because MS have been extremely slow to support EFI.
If saving money is your goal, buy a bunch of obsolete components from ebay and build your own machine using only the parts you want... You could put together a reasonable machine based on tech from a couple of years ago for virtually nothing.
There should be a Linux driver for the webcam too, if you ever feel the need to use it... A few friends of mine used to run linux on macbook pro models and i believe the same camera is used on the imacs.
While Mozilla does depend on Google for revenue, and Google are technically a competitor, they are not MS...
Google, like MS are not terribly interested in the browser market and don't make any money from it... The difference is that while MS want to control the browser, stifle the move to web based platform independent applications and lock people in to their platform... Google want to promote their web based applications, and couldn't really care less what you use to access them. The reason Chrome exists is largely as a competitive push for faster javascript handling and better standards support, with the primary goal being to push every browser maker forwards and thus making Google's webapps more attractive. Prior to Chrome, browser makers weren't really interested in javascript performance.
I have 2 sites with sitemaps, but they were not the ones i was looking at as there are many more sites on the server. That also wouldn't explain why search engines other than msn don't hammer the site.
How would you operate multiple HTTPS hosts on a single ip?
As i understand it, you either need to run it on multiple ports (and thus most proxies will block connections to your site) or by using SNI (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3546.txt) for which there is a lack of client support, nothing that uses the microsoft ssl libs (ie, chrome, safari) on xp, will support it for example.
You can encrypt from server to server too, i have postfix configured to negotiate TLS if possible, but 99% of mailservers that communicate with it don't try to negotiate TLS.
The iphone can do https webmail too, and the rendering probably works a lot better. But that's not the point, its about what the dedicated email client can do.
The real solution is not open source browsers specifically...
The real solution is diversity. All software will have bugs, but they are a lot more difficult to exploit if there are a handful of different browsers running on a handful of different platforms and hardware architectures that your targets could be running. Also, having an even split in the market would force all the different software makers to compete on quality... If one vendors drags their feet they will face losing lots of market share... MS can drag their feet without risk of losing anything right now because people are locked in to them.
The attacks recently succeeded proved the dangers of monoculture, if your a hacker looking to target any large corporation or government you can be sure that your target will be running windows/ie/msoffice so one exploit, trojan and skillset will suffice against any number of targets.
Because the backwards compatibility doesn't always work... Lots of vendors followed microsoft's pushing and made apps which were locked in to IE, intended to lock out other browsers... But these apps also don't always work with current versions of IE, forcing users to run older versions or configure the latest version in a less than ideal manner.
Why was google running ie6 on xp anyway? The only reason to be running an old version like this, is if they were tied in to proprietary apps that don't work in newer versions or anything else, and it is microsoft who worked very hard to get third parties to write apps that were tied to ie6... Had these apps been standards compliant from the start, then there would be no reason for anyone to still be running ie6...
This should be a lesson to everyone, follow standards and don't buy in to proprietary non standard crap... Getting locked in may be convenient in the short term, but long term it will always hurt you.
Firefox is not sandboxed, but chrome is even in older versions of windows...
The current exploit doesn't work against IE8, but the vulnerability is there so another version could be written. DEP just make exploitation harder, as does the sandboxing.
The current exploit doesn't work against firefox, chrome or safari either... And all of these browsers will benefit from DEP (and the equivalents on other platforms) if the host has it enabled.
A lot of these companies are using IE because they are locked in to various intranet apps which don't work on any standards compliant browser, some of these apps don't work with IE8 (or 7 in some cases) and sometimes require you to turn features like sandboxing off in order to make them run. Microsoft's legacy of shoddily written apps designed to lock people in is still causing all kinds of damage.
Had MS not pursued this strategy, and made IE a standards compliant browser from the start, users would be free to upgrade to the latest version or switch to another browser... If there was diversity and standards among corporate desktops, these attacks would have been a lot harder, the fact that 99% of corporate targets run windows+ie+msoffice massively increases the value of an exploit for any of those, and makes it much easier to attack (no need for multiple exploits or multiple attack methods).
I don't think many other phones can do encrypted email out of the box either, tho third party apps are available for some.
Nobody cares, large companies, even companies working in the security market don't use encrypted email and often don't even understand how to use it... Then you have mail setups which stamp disclaimers or signatures on mail (thus breaking signatures), not to mention exchange that likes to create an html counterpart to your (encrypted) plaintext mail, thus breaking PGP completely...
What's holding back HTTPS is the lack of IP addresses combined with the lack of support for modern versions of TLS... As it stands, you need 1 IP address per HTTPS site.
What's holding back SSH and causing people to continue using telnet is a number of factors: 1, windows doesn't have an ssh client by default, only telnet 2, some networking vendors (eg cisco) charge extra for ssh support on their devices 3, lots of lower end networking devices only support telnet
What's holding back FTPS and the like is much the same, lack of client support and lack of user knowledge, FTP as a protocol pretty much needs to die anyway, it doesn't work well with NAT... Encrypted FTP is even more broken on NAT because the nat device cannot watch for the ftp commands and open up the appropriate data ports. When you offer hosting, customers demand to use FTP and often refuse to even consider more secure alternatives.
Also, most email being sent is still completely unencrypted.
I have noticed the microsoft crawlers (msnbot) being fairly inefficient on many of my sites... In contrast to googlebot and spiders from other search engines msnbot is far more aggressive, ignores robots.txt and will frequently re-request the same files repeatedly, even if those files haven't changed... Looking at my monthly stats (awstats) which groups traffic from bots, msnbot will frequently have consumed 10 times more bandwidth than googlebot, but is responsible for far less incoming traffic based on referrer headers (typically 1-2% of the traffic generated by google on my sites).
Other small search engines don't bring much traffic either, but their bots don't hammer my site as hard as msnbot does.
Cheap players are more likely to support it, for the same reason cheap dvd players tend to have more support for vcd formats especially the extended vcd formats popular in china... Most of these players and/or their components are made in china, for the chinese market.
I have a Dreambox DM800, it can do h.264 and MPEG2 in hardware, it can theoretically do divx/xvid in software but the cpu isn't fast enough. I can plug in a USB stick containing h.264 video (including high definition content) and it will play just fine on my TV.
Actors are pretty much made by the movie companies, in future you will see the movie companies creating virtual actors (ie artificially created characters) that get reused in multiple movies...
This already happens, but only with cartoon characters because the level of realism hasn't been there.
What ethical line? It's all business, actors are very expensive and often behave like divas so removing the actors and replacing them with rendered models can increase the profit margins for the movie studios.
Using rendered models not only saves you the millions that big name actors typically demand, but you no longer need to hire filming locations, stage stunts etc... Actors face becoming obsolete sooner or later. Movie production of the future will be done in third world countries, where hundreds of poorly paid workers beaver away in a callcenter like environment constructing and animating digital models.
Democracy may theoretically give the citizens a voice, but in all reality it is the ruling class who hold all the cards. Your chance of getting elected without a massive budget and control of the media are effectively zero, the only people who do have sufficient financial resources and control over the media are the current ruling classes. You will find that in every "democratic" company, the ruling class will be split into 2 "parties", but these parties exist not to compete with each other but to fool the population into thinking there is competition and they have a choice. In reality, both parties are much the same and both exist merely to maintain the current status quo.
What happens when this program stumbles across text written in a language other than english? Or how about random nonsensical text? How does it know that the text it learns from is genuine english text?
Attacks breed robustness in a competitive environment, that's how nature works... MS have ensured that they exist in a non competitive environment, in such an environment a dominant creature (ms) can prosper because it has no predators, despite being a relatively weak creature. Look at the rabbit problems they had in australia a few years back.
Having horrendously insecure products and widespread highly publicised breaches would kill most vendors, ms can get away with it because most of their customers have nowhere else to go....
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People don't particularly care about the BIOS so much because while they may not be free, they don't lock you in.. It's still possible to boot whatever OS you want from it, and there are at least several BIOS makers...
That said, the traditional x86 BIOS is pretty awful, and is only still around because MS have been extremely slow to support EFI.
If saving money is your goal, buy a bunch of obsolete components from ebay and build your own machine using only the parts you want... You could put together a reasonable machine based on tech from a couple of years ago for virtually nothing.
There should be a Linux driver for the webcam too, if you ever feel the need to use it... A few friends of mine used to run linux on macbook pro models and i believe the same camera is used on the imacs.
While Mozilla does depend on Google for revenue, and Google are technically a competitor, they are not MS...
Google, like MS are not terribly interested in the browser market and don't make any money from it... The difference is that while MS want to control the browser, stifle the move to web based platform independent applications and lock people in to their platform...
Google want to promote their web based applications, and couldn't really care less what you use to access them. The reason Chrome exists is largely as a competitive push for faster javascript handling and better standards support, with the primary goal being to push every browser maker forwards and thus making Google's webapps more attractive. Prior to Chrome, browser makers weren't really interested in javascript performance.
I have 2 sites with sitemaps, but they were not the ones i was looking at as there are many more sites on the server.
That also wouldn't explain why search engines other than msn don't hammer the site.
How would you operate multiple HTTPS hosts on a single ip?
As i understand it, you either need to run it on multiple ports (and thus most proxies will block connections to your site) or by using SNI (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3546.txt) for which there is a lack of client support, nothing that uses the microsoft ssl libs (ie, chrome, safari) on xp, will support it for example.
You can encrypt from server to server too, i have postfix configured to negotiate TLS if possible, but 99% of mailservers that communicate with it don't try to negotiate TLS.
iphone does imap/smtp with tls too, my mail server requires tls and it works fine with iphones.
The iphone can do https webmail too, and the rendering probably works a lot better.
But that's not the point, its about what the dedicated email client can do.
The real solution is not open source browsers specifically...
The real solution is diversity.
All software will have bugs, but they are a lot more difficult to exploit if there are a handful of different browsers running on a handful of different platforms and hardware architectures that your targets could be running. Also, having an even split in the market would force all the different software makers to compete on quality... If one vendors drags their feet they will face losing lots of market share... MS can drag their feet without risk of losing anything right now because people are locked in to them.
The attacks recently succeeded proved the dangers of monoculture, if your a hacker looking to target any large corporation or government you can be sure that your target will be running windows/ie/msoffice so one exploit, trojan and skillset will suffice against any number of targets.
Nature has proven the importance of diversity...
Because the backwards compatibility doesn't always work...
Lots of vendors followed microsoft's pushing and made apps which were locked in to IE, intended to lock out other browsers...
But these apps also don't always work with current versions of IE, forcing users to run older versions or configure the latest version in a less than ideal manner.
Why was google running ie6 on xp anyway?
The only reason to be running an old version like this, is if they were tied in to proprietary apps that don't work in newer versions or anything else, and it is microsoft who worked very hard to get third parties to write apps that were tied to ie6...
Had these apps been standards compliant from the start, then there would be no reason for anyone to still be running ie6...
This should be a lesson to everyone, follow standards and don't buy in to proprietary non standard crap... Getting locked in may be convenient in the short term, but long term it will always hurt you.
Firefox is not sandboxed, but chrome is even in older versions of windows...
The current exploit doesn't work against IE8, but the vulnerability is there so another version could be written. DEP just make exploitation harder, as does the sandboxing.
The current exploit doesn't work against firefox, chrome or safari either... And all of these browsers will benefit from DEP (and the equivalents on other platforms) if the host has it enabled.
A lot of these companies are using IE because they are locked in to various intranet apps which don't work on any standards compliant browser, some of these apps don't work with IE8 (or 7 in some cases) and sometimes require you to turn features like sandboxing off in order to make them run. Microsoft's legacy of shoddily written apps designed to lock people in is still causing all kinds of damage.
Had MS not pursued this strategy, and made IE a standards compliant browser from the start, users would be free to upgrade to the latest version or switch to another browser...
If there was diversity and standards among corporate desktops, these attacks would have been a lot harder, the fact that 99% of corporate targets run windows+ie+msoffice massively increases the value of an exploit for any of those, and makes it much easier to attack (no need for multiple exploits or multiple attack methods).
I don't think many other phones can do encrypted email out of the box either, tho third party apps are available for some.
Nobody cares, large companies, even companies working in the security market don't use encrypted email and often don't even understand how to use it... Then you have mail setups which stamp disclaimers or signatures on mail (thus breaking signatures), not to mention exchange that likes to create an html counterpart to your (encrypted) plaintext mail, thus breaking PGP completely...
What's holding back HTTPS is the lack of IP addresses combined with the lack of support for modern versions of TLS...
As it stands, you need 1 IP address per HTTPS site.
What's holding back SSH and causing people to continue using telnet is a number of factors:
1, windows doesn't have an ssh client by default, only telnet
2, some networking vendors (eg cisco) charge extra for ssh support on their devices
3, lots of lower end networking devices only support telnet
What's holding back FTPS and the like is much the same, lack of client support and lack of user knowledge, FTP as a protocol pretty much needs to die anyway, it doesn't work well with NAT... Encrypted FTP is even more broken on NAT because the nat device cannot watch for the ftp commands and open up the appropriate data ports.
When you offer hosting, customers demand to use FTP and often refuse to even consider more secure alternatives.
Also, most email being sent is still completely unencrypted.
I have noticed the microsoft crawlers (msnbot) being fairly inefficient on many of my sites...
In contrast to googlebot and spiders from other search engines msnbot is far more aggressive, ignores robots.txt and will frequently re-request the same files repeatedly, even if those files haven't changed... Looking at my monthly stats (awstats) which groups traffic from bots, msnbot will frequently have consumed 10 times more bandwidth than googlebot, but is responsible for far less incoming traffic based on referrer headers (typically 1-2% of the traffic generated by google on my sites).
Other small search engines don't bring much traffic either, but their bots don't hammer my site as hard as msnbot does.
Cheap players are more likely to support it, for the same reason cheap dvd players tend to have more support for vcd formats especially the extended vcd formats popular in china...
Most of these players and/or their components are made in china, for the chinese market.
Probably less than there are embedded devices which support h.264 but don't support divx/xvid...
To counter your example:
I have a Dreambox DM800, it can do h.264 and MPEG2 in hardware, it can theoretically do divx/xvid in software but the cpu isn't fast enough. I can plug in a USB stick containing h.264 video (including high definition content) and it will play just fine on my TV.
Your DVD player doesn't play VHS either...
Old formats die, new formats replace them and this usually requires getting new equipment.
Actors are pretty much made by the movie companies, in future you will see the movie companies creating virtual actors (ie artificially created characters) that get reused in multiple movies...
This already happens, but only with cartoon characters because the level of realism hasn't been there.
What ethical line? It's all business, actors are very expensive and often behave like divas so removing the actors and replacing them with rendered models can increase the profit margins for the movie studios.
Using rendered models not only saves you the millions that big name actors typically demand, but you no longer need to hire filming locations, stage stunts etc... Actors face becoming obsolete sooner or later.
Movie production of the future will be done in third world countries, where hundreds of poorly paid workers beaver away in a callcenter like environment constructing and animating digital models.
Democracy may theoretically give the citizens a voice, but in all reality it is the ruling class who hold all the cards.
Your chance of getting elected without a massive budget and control of the media are effectively zero, the only people who do have sufficient financial resources and control over the media are the current ruling classes.
You will find that in every "democratic" company, the ruling class will be split into 2 "parties", but these parties exist not to compete with each other but to fool the population into thinking there is competition and they have a choice. In reality, both parties are much the same and both exist merely to maintain the current status quo.
What happens when this program stumbles across text written in a language other than english? Or how about random nonsensical text? How does it know that the text it learns from is genuine english text?
Attacks breed robustness in a competitive environment, that's how nature works...
MS have ensured that they exist in a non competitive environment, in such an environment a dominant creature (ms) can prosper because it has no predators, despite being a relatively weak creature. Look at the rabbit problems they had in australia a few years back.
Having horrendously insecure products and widespread highly publicised breaches would kill most vendors, ms can get away with it because most of their customers have nowhere else to go....