There are plenty of talented people out there willing to mod popular games, who would be perfect for making artwork for open source game engines... The problem is getting the two groups of people together, as they typically wont become interested in a game in the first place unless it's playable and has some reasonable artwork as a base.
In the case of licensed engines tho, all it takes is for the original authors to port it to linux and it becomes a lot easier for any licensees to produce linux versions...
What i always thought would be useful, would be a linux based livecd for playing games... Boot the CD/DVD and it loads straight into the game with no fuss. Or a stripped down variant of linux solely designed for playing games, which behaves something like the menu screen on a ps3 for instance...
Could a crash be related to the power system? There could be fluctuations caused by spikes in usage, or perhaps suppliers switching sources as contracts end on the calendar year etc.. On the other hand, none of my servers suffered any ill effects... But my macbook pro was acting very strange this morning, programs were spuriously crashing (both safari and firefox, randomly crashing while browsing different sites including slashdot), turned it off for a few minutes, booted it back and everything is back to normal.
Except that Chrome has much better compliance with published standards, and the source code for it is available for anyone to read even if they did do something non standard.
Have you considered ies4linux and it's macos equivalent? Run ie6 under wine... It also installs in a self contained dir so it's easy to overwrite, and you can modify the wine configuration to give it extremely limited access to the rest of the filesystem.
Part of the problem here is shared hosting boxes... Thousands of sites on one box, all it takes is for one user to install a buggy app... And then you have the same apache process serving all the sites, so even if you can't root the box, you can still mess with the other sites too.
But in terms of spreading this kind of malware, i have predominantly seen iis servers spreading it...
Can you guarantee that nothing in the filesystem driver code will cause malware to be executed? How about the preview function of explorer which has been exploited to execute code in the past... And then AV scanners have also had exploitable vulnerabilities...
Be careful and minimize the risks... Of course the best option is always a clean format and reinstall.
They may have keylogged you, and got your password to the hosting machine... Or they could have exploited vulnerable webapps on it... Unusual for a linux hosted website to get hit by something like this, but not unheard of. You need to make sure the machine wasn't rooted tho, and reinstall if it was.
Doesn't evolution do that? Zimbra desktop is meant to be good too, tho i think it requires the server to go with it. I never saw why email and calendar had to be integrated into one app, they are separate functions, and there are already standard ways to connect the two.
Infecting users through third party plugins (java, acrobat etc) is actually a fairly effective technique... windows update only updates its core system files, it doesn't update third party apps at all, not sure if it even updates non default microsoft apps either.
Indeed, the browser should be totally sandboxed...
But then look at some of the "ssl vpn" products currently being sold, which try to install a kernel level driver via the web browser... The mere idea is insane.
Yes... What's wrong with having a mail/browser that you can run on a games console, and which boots from readonly media and doesn't store any executable code on writable media...
Someone should make a simplified linux livecd distro that's trivially bootable on a PS3 and can be used for basic browsing and email (mount the hd under/home with the noexec option)...
I uploaded a few parts of this malware to virustotal.com a few weeks ago, it was picked up by 11% of the av engines tested, ie a very small percentage... I got it from a machine that had mcafee installed, it didn't detect anything...
They seem to update this malware regularly to avoid detection, and there are typically several versions circulating at any one time. This particular machine had several versions installed which all pointed back to the same bunch of sites...
I've seen that site a fair few times too... Tho it's obviously harmless to mac users, their site actually breaks safari by somehow obscuring the tab bar.
The websites which distribute antivirus 2009 are irritating too... If you visit them from a mac or linux box, they do the same fake scan in javascript followed by "your infected by all this malware"... The javascript makes a mess of safari by half covering the tab bar somehow, requiring you to close the window.
Which is entirely going about it the wrong way... You don't want to try and eliminate malware while running a system that may be susceptible to it... You want to boot something else that won't be affected by the malware. There are plenty of cases where something could get executed from a mounted drive, even if you boot from readonly media... It will still sit resident in memory and could hide itself.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
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No, you're not. Most motherboards won't boot without a video card so there is almost certainly a video card installed in the hardware you're using. What you're doing is running the system headless and redirecting the video output to serial. This only works well with CLI operating systems like Unix/Linux. You can install Windows through a serial console. I've done it. It's just a PITA. Windows Server 2008 also has a CLI-only mode. It's also a PITA. This doesn't mean you can't remote-install Windows. Far from it. PXE works GREAT with Windows and I install this way all the time.
You shouldn't be using serial console anyway because it's too limited. Now that they're widely available, you should be using IP KVMs. What will you do if you need to break into the BIOS on that system you're connecting to through serial? You have to walk over to it and hook up a monitor and keyboard. I support Linux systems all the time and it annoys me that admins don't realize that if there's a disk error the serial console won't do them any good.
x86 servers with lights out capability will give you bios access over serial (and serial over ssh on more modern ones), i have an HP DL145 which does exactly this. Non x86 machines will frequently boot without any kind of video hardware whatsoever, i have several sparc servers and RS/6000 machines with absolutely no video capability onboard, buy a cheap sunfire v100 or netra t1 on ebay for an example. Serial console, on hardware which supports it, gets you access to the firmware, ssh or remote desktop can't do that.
An IP KVM consumes a lot more bandwidth than serial, making it fairly useless over a slow (eg cellular) connection, and harder to script.
The "CLI only" mode of windows 2008 is actually a cli in a window with nothing else loaded, similar to "Safe mode with command prompt" on earlier versions, it's not a pure fullscreen text only interface, the video drivers and support infrastructure for window management etc is still loaded.
It's called.MSI. And package management works great in Linux right up to the point where you install a badly formed package that screws up dependences or you have to manually install something and handle all the dependencies yourself. I've had more problems dealing with library version conflicts in Linux than I have in Windows. A LOT more.
Does MSI even have dependency handling, or handle it's own uninstalls cleanly? The reason you have less library dependencies on windows are twofold... For one there is only one "distribution" to target, and thus the set of expected libraries always remains the same, and second (building on the first) a lot of applications which require non standard libs will typically install them within their own directories... MacOS behaves in a very similar manner.
I'd also point out that this customization comes at the expense of consistency. Many GUI Linux apps (GIMP, FireFox, OpenOffice, etc.) have radically divergent UIs that won't integrate seamlessly with your desktop. Windows apps have very standardized dialogs, widgets, etc. so users know what to expect. Many Linux vendors, the ones using KDE, agree with me on this.
There is a lot of interface inconsistency among windows apps too, not least of all things like msoffice 2007, and how cut+paste is ctrl+c/v in everything but the command prompt?
Not having a real multiuser mode is one of the things that pisses me off the most about desktop Windows. I really wish they would have let people run just 2 simultaneous users in Vista. This is a licensing limitation, not a technical limitation. Run Windows Server and you can have all the instances you want.
chroot is not about multiuser, which as you pointed out windows is capable of if you buy the more expensive versions of, it's about having multiple copies of the userland installed with a single kernel, invaluable for testing....
The differences from a user perspective between msoffice 2003 and 2007 are actually bigger than between msoffice 2003 and openoffice 2/3... If it only takes a few hours for the average office assistant to get used to some changes, then the cost of migration to openoffice would be pretty small.
There's probably some better way to do it, but you can edit the kdm configuration where it starts X and add -dpi 129 to the command line... Is it detecting the DPI incorrectly on your laptop?
You can also specify the DisplaySize in xorg.conf, see here:
X11 will try to work out the physical size of the screen, but some laptop panels don't report the information correctly and so the dpi calculation goes wrong.
Yes, trivially easy because almost all of the policies are implemented in userland programs rather than being enforced at the kernel level...
Two simple examples....
cmd.exe will bring up a message saying the command prompt is disabled, but the cmd.exe process is actually running and displaying that message, the kernel has not prevented execution but rather the cmd.exe program itself is checking... try running command.com instead because it doesn't implement that check. You can also modify cmd.exe to not perform the check and achieve the same result, the kernel will do nothing to stop you.
Registry editing is similar, the graphical regedit tools won't run but the commandline reg.exe will, you can again modify the regedit binaries or use a third party editing tool.
Some more info can be found with a quick google search, eg:
What's to stop the IRS producing tax software and open sourcing it? Surely it's in their interest for peoples taxes to be calculated and submitted as accurately and consistently as possible, and for as many people as possible to be able to do it electronically.
Netscape stopped improving their product (and in fact kept making it slower and buggier), while MS made something that worked fairly fast and didn't crash as much.
For a while at least, once Netscape were out of the way MS didn't make any serious updates to their browser for years, and dropped all the non windows versions.
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There are plenty of talented people out there willing to mod popular games, who would be perfect for making artwork for open source game engines... The problem is getting the two groups of people together, as they typically wont become interested in a game in the first place unless it's playable and has some reasonable artwork as a base.
In the case of licensed engines tho, all it takes is for the original authors to port it to linux and it becomes a lot easier for any licensees to produce linux versions...
What i always thought would be useful, would be a linux based livecd for playing games... Boot the CD/DVD and it loads straight into the game with no fuss.
Or a stripped down variant of linux solely designed for playing games, which behaves something like the menu screen on a ps3 for instance...
Could a crash be related to the power system? There could be fluctuations caused by spikes in usage, or perhaps suppliers switching sources as contracts end on the calendar year etc..
On the other hand, none of my servers suffered any ill effects... But my macbook pro was acting very strange this morning, programs were spuriously crashing (both safari and firefox, randomly crashing while browsing different sites including slashdot), turned it off for a few minutes, booted it back and everything is back to normal.
Except that Chrome has much better compliance with published standards, and the source code for it is available for anyone to read even if they did do something non standard.
What about mobile users and lowend netbooks? Many of them may have lower resolutions than 800x600, and their numbers are increasing.
Have you considered ies4linux and it's macos equivalent? Run ie6 under wine... It also installs in a self contained dir so it's easy to overwrite, and you can modify the wine configuration to give it extremely limited access to the rest of the filesystem.
They are targeting IE6 users, who by definition must be running windows...
Part of the problem here is shared hosting boxes... Thousands of sites on one box, all it takes is for one user to install a buggy app...
And then you have the same apache process serving all the sites, so even if you can't root the box, you can still mess with the other sites too.
But in terms of spreading this kind of malware, i have predominantly seen iis servers spreading it...
Can you guarantee that nothing in the filesystem driver code will cause malware to be executed?
How about the preview function of explorer which has been exploited to execute code in the past...
And then AV scanners have also had exploitable vulnerabilities...
Be careful and minimize the risks...
Of course the best option is always a clean format and reinstall.
They may have keylogged you, and got your password to the hosting machine...
Or they could have exploited vulnerable webapps on it...
Unusual for a linux hosted website to get hit by something like this, but not unheard of. You need to make sure the machine wasn't rooted tho, and reinstall if it was.
Doesn't evolution do that? Zimbra desktop is meant to be good too, tho i think it requires the server to go with it.
I never saw why email and calendar had to be integrated into one app, they are separate functions, and there are already standard ways to connect the two.
Infecting users through third party plugins (java, acrobat etc) is actually a fairly effective technique...
windows update only updates its core system files, it doesn't update third party apps at all, not sure if it even updates non default microsoft apps either.
Indeed, the browser should be totally sandboxed...
But then look at some of the "ssl vpn" products currently being sold, which try to install a kernel level driver via the web browser... The mere idea is insane.
Yes...
What's wrong with having a mail/browser that you can run on a games console, and which boots from readonly media and doesn't store any executable code on writable media...
Someone should make a simplified linux livecd distro that's trivially bootable on a PS3 and can be used for basic browsing and email (mount the hd under /home with the noexec option)...
I uploaded a few parts of this malware to virustotal.com a few weeks ago, it was picked up by 11% of the av engines tested, ie a very small percentage...
I got it from a machine that had mcafee installed, it didn't detect anything...
They seem to update this malware regularly to avoid detection, and there are typically several versions circulating at any one time. This particular machine had several versions installed which all pointed back to the same bunch of sites...
I've seen that site a fair few times too...
Tho it's obviously harmless to mac users, their site actually breaks safari by somehow obscuring the tab bar.
The websites which distribute antivirus 2009 are irritating too...
If you visit them from a mac or linux box, they do the same fake scan in javascript followed by "your infected by all this malware"... The javascript makes a mess of safari by half covering the tab bar somehow, requiring you to close the window.
Which is entirely going about it the wrong way...
You don't want to try and eliminate malware while running a system that may be susceptible to it... You want to boot something else that won't be affected by the malware.
There are plenty of cases where something could get executed from a mounted drive, even if you boot from readonly media... It will still sit resident in memory and could hide itself.
No, you're not. Most motherboards won't boot without a video card so there is almost certainly a video card installed in the hardware you're using. What you're doing is running the system headless and redirecting the video output to serial. This only works well with CLI operating systems like Unix/Linux. You can install Windows through a serial console. I've done it. It's just a PITA. Windows Server 2008 also has a CLI-only mode. It's also a PITA. This doesn't mean you can't remote-install Windows. Far from it. PXE works GREAT with Windows and I install this way all the time.
You shouldn't be using serial console anyway because it's too limited. Now that they're widely available, you should be using IP KVMs. What will you do if you need to break into the BIOS on that system you're connecting to through serial? You have to walk over to it and hook up a monitor and keyboard. I support Linux systems all the time and it annoys me that admins don't realize that if there's a disk error the serial console won't do them any good.
x86 servers with lights out capability will give you bios access over serial (and serial over ssh on more modern ones), i have an HP DL145 which does exactly this.
Non x86 machines will frequently boot without any kind of video hardware whatsoever, i have several sparc servers and RS/6000 machines with absolutely no video capability onboard, buy a cheap sunfire v100 or netra t1 on ebay for an example.
Serial console, on hardware which supports it, gets you access to the firmware, ssh or remote desktop can't do that.
An IP KVM consumes a lot more bandwidth than serial, making it fairly useless over a slow (eg cellular) connection, and harder to script.
The "CLI only" mode of windows 2008 is actually a cli in a window with nothing else loaded, similar to "Safe mode with command prompt" on earlier versions, it's not a pure fullscreen text only interface, the video drivers and support infrastructure for window management etc is still loaded.
It's called .MSI. And package management works great in Linux right up to the point where you install a badly formed package that screws up dependences or you have to manually install something and handle all the dependencies yourself. I've had more problems dealing with library version conflicts in Linux than I have in Windows. A LOT more.
Does MSI even have dependency handling, or handle it's own uninstalls cleanly?
The reason you have less library dependencies on windows are twofold... For one there is only one "distribution" to target, and thus the set of expected libraries always remains the same, and second (building on the first) a lot of applications which require non standard libs will typically install them within their own directories... MacOS behaves in a very similar manner.
I'd also point out that this customization comes at the expense of consistency. Many GUI Linux apps (GIMP, FireFox, OpenOffice, etc.) have radically divergent UIs that won't integrate seamlessly with your desktop. Windows apps have very standardized dialogs, widgets, etc. so users know what to expect. Many Linux vendors, the ones using KDE, agree with me on this.
There is a lot of interface inconsistency among windows apps too, not least of all things like msoffice 2007, and how cut+paste is ctrl+c/v in everything but the command prompt?
Not having a real multiuser mode is one of the things that pisses me off the most about desktop Windows. I really wish they would have let people run just 2 simultaneous users in Vista. This is a licensing limitation, not a technical limitation. Run Windows Server and you can have all the instances you want.
chroot is not about multiuser, which as you pointed out windows is capable of if you buy the more expensive versions of, it's about having multiple copies of the userland installed with a single kernel, invaluable for testing....
The differences from a user perspective between msoffice 2003 and 2007 are actually bigger than between msoffice 2003 and openoffice 2/3... If it only takes a few hours for the average office assistant to get used to some changes, then the cost of migration to openoffice would be pretty small.
The commies are creating their own CA!! PANIC!!!
There's probably some better way to do it, but you can edit the kdm configuration where it starts X and add -dpi 129 to the command line...
Is it detecting the DPI incorrectly on your laptop?
You can also specify the DisplaySize in xorg.conf, see here:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Display_Size
X11 will try to work out the physical size of the screen, but some laptop panels don't report the information correctly and so the dpi calculation goes wrong.
Yes, trivially easy because almost all of the policies are implemented in userland programs rather than being enforced at the kernel level...
Two simple examples....
cmd.exe will bring up a message saying the command prompt is disabled, but the cmd.exe process is actually running and displaying that message, the kernel has not prevented execution but rather the cmd.exe program itself is checking... try running command.com instead because it doesn't implement that check. You can also modify cmd.exe to not perform the check and achieve the same result, the kernel will do nothing to stop you.
Registry editing is similar, the graphical regedit tools won't run but the commandline reg.exe will, you can again modify the regedit binaries or use a third party editing tool.
Some more info can be found with a quick google search, eg:
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/12/12/circumventing-group-policy-as-a-limited-user.aspx
What's to stop the IRS producing tax software and open sourcing it?
Surely it's in their interest for peoples taxes to be calculated and submitted as accurately and consistently as possible, and for as many people as possible to be able to do it electronically.
Netscape stopped improving their product (and in fact kept making it slower and buggier), while MS made something that worked fairly fast and didn't crash as much.
For a while at least, once Netscape were out of the way MS didn't make any serious updates to their browser for years, and dropped all the non windows versions.