Infinium Labs is way ahead of Bill and Schwartz. But as we, all know the Phantom was built "By Gamers, For Gamers(c)", so this is not wholly unexpected.:)
How I understand it, watermarks create slight variations in the encoding of the movie (color, in this case) that are invisible to the eye, but detectable by computers. I wonder, though, whether these watermarks actually make it through to a camcorder rip of a movie, seeing as the quality is so degraded, and the color is so washed out.
Maybe it would make more sense, i think, to flash the serial number of the film print for a frame or two at random points in the film. At 24 fps, the human eye would not notice, especially if the number is simply super-imposed on the video, possibly in a section of the current frame that attracts the least attention of the viewer's eyes. I went to a research talk once of an algorithm to automatically detect the point of high interest in every frame of video, so this could be done automatically.
My upstairs neighbor (apt. building) has an unencrypted Wireless Linksys router hooked up to his Broadband connection. If I wasn't hosting my domain's e-mail from one of my home machines, I would have cancelled my broadband a long time ago.
IPods are overpriced. Plain and simple. They are fantastic little machines, and sleek as all hell, but they are a good $50-$100 above what they should be. But that's pretty much always been Apples modus-operandi. All their hardware is fantastic, but a good 10-20% above what they should be charging. (Good thing they aren't MS, otherwise people would complain!:} [mod -1,troll])
It's good to see other companies jump into the fray, it will improve the field, if by only dropping Apple's prices.
People seem to be missing a major point here. This file doesn't do anything fancy, it just reads files and 'infects them'. There are no indications that this 'virus' is bypassing any kind of system security.
From the article: "The SfcIsFileProtected() function of SFC_OS.DLL is used to avoid infecting executables that are protected by SFC (the System File Checker)."
Any sensible XP64 installation would not allow system files to be write accessible to anyone but the Administrator.
It's as if I wrote a c program that used fopen() and write() to destroy files, then declared I wrote a virus for linux. Whoo hoo.
I think the XNA may just be the key for indie developers to break into the console and portable market. Yes, one can develop games now-a-days for free using OpenGL/DX, but they can't run on any console.
I actually tried to lay the groundwork for a small console game company with a few friends, and we got shot down once we realized the massive price of the console SDK (in any platform), which not only required their costly development libraries, but also neccessitated a hardware kit.
The two logical options are either (a) For a system like XNA, somewhat of a write-once, run everywhere type system. Where you can scale your game's visuals and depth to the platform. (b) For linux to be ported onto consoles, not just by people looking to see a boot screen and run apache, but by people willing to optimize the hell out of the OpenGL subsystem to get the same performance (or better?) than if it were running on it's own custom OS.
Assert also exists in VC++, and Java, and can be quite useful.
I believe the instrumentation shown in the article is intended to be read in by an analysis tool, which should, in theory, find errors/inefficiencies that you as a programmer may not have noticed, and hence wouldn't have represented within asserts. But, as has been mentioned before in another comment, such errors are rare enough to not justify having to migrate to Ada and write so much extra instrumentation.
I would have been interested if all this instrumentation had been grafted onto a language like Java, or C++. But to have to switch to Ada just to be able to add in instrumentation that helps in code analysis?
It's also funny that he WOW's at the idea of no dynamic memory allocation... Why not just use a type safe language?
Once again, all those issues are bing addressed. Your original post stated that windows wasn't addressing the problem. It is. Their existing design decisions (out in the market) are horrid, like the ones you mentioned. But they are working on fixing it. Will they succeed? Who knows.
BTW - The admin requirements for running user programs isn't a fault of Microsoft. Run any of their apps, and you'll see they graciously handle limited priviledge account. The real offenders are 3rd party vendors. Microsoft can hardly be held accountable for that.
Microsoft takes the approach of fighting the symptom (malware,...etc.), and not the root cause (flawed security design,...etc.).
I hate it when uninformed people make blanket statements like this.
For the past year Microsoft's main focus has been security. They stopped development in many major products, Windows in particular, for a month so that people could attend seminars on writing secure code, and ramp up to the company wide security initiative.
Say what you want about the current state of the code, but in the near future we will start seeing some serious improvements.
A few years back when I worked tech support at Harvard, a collegue of mine found a cache of kiddy porn when fixing some trivial issue on the Dean of the Divinity School's computer. The dean was asked to resign shortly thereafter.
http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m10 58/is_17_116/ai_54950849
Windows has the "Run As..." capability (right click any app, select Run As... and enter the administrator account), so that somewhat simulates doing a 'su' in linux.
But I totally agree that many application developers don't understand the concept of running at the least priviledge necessary. So many apps write their config to C:\Program File\APP\ and HKLM, which requires elevated access, instead of writing to C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings and HKLU. Hopefully more people will read 'Writing Secure Code' (from MS, ironically), and windows apps will improve.
I'd say 75% of spyware issues come from users running as part of the Administrator group. All day-to-day use windows accounts should be a regular user, with the least priviledges as possible. Without being part of the Admin group, the spyware would not be able to write to HKLM registry, C:\ or C:\WINDOWS. Some spyware could still infect the user's directory, but at least a simple re-log on to Administrator could be done to clean up the machine.
Sounds like VMWare, but with less OS support... I run Gentoo as my base system, and then run multiple VMWare VMs for whatever OS I need (98/2k/XP/other linux flavors). It's quite useful, and with ver. 3 performance is quite snappy, even on my 866mhz system.
Looking at the descriptions, I have a bad feeling about the DS. I know I'm not the first one to say it, but it reeks of another nice system, much like the black-and-red '3d' system that flopped years ago.
So we have a nice two screen system by nintendo, vs a simple (and elegant, if anything like the VIAO systems) PS2 portable. The sony system will win hands down.
While in undergrad, I though the Math requirements were useless. Programming != Math. But... in Grad School, in order to do any kind of research of consequence, you must characterize a lot of what you do Mathematically. I was amazed at the amount of Math that permeated all tasks. It is amazingly useful to be mathematically skilled when having to deal with real problems, past the simple building of an application.
Sorry, I forgot to account for the kneejerk reaction to anything Microsoft related.
Bill Gates himself denies he ever said it, and there are no documented occurences. As far as any rational, non conspiracy-theorist, person is concerned -- it never happend.
I will gladly eat crow if you can find me the quote.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, wrong story!!
Infinium Labs is way ahead of Bill and Schwartz. But as we, all know the Phantom was built "By Gamers, For Gamers(c)", so this is not wholly unexpected. :)
How I understand it, watermarks create slight variations in the encoding of the movie (color, in this case) that are invisible to the eye, but detectable by computers. I wonder, though, whether these watermarks actually make it through to a camcorder rip of a movie, seeing as the quality is so degraded, and the color is so washed out.
Maybe it would make more sense, i think, to flash the serial number of the film print for a frame or two at random points in the film. At 24 fps, the human eye would not notice, especially if the number is simply super-imposed on the video, possibly in a section of the current frame that attracts the least attention of the viewer's eyes. I went to a research talk once of an algorithm to automatically detect the point of high interest in every frame of video, so this could be done automatically.
My upstairs neighbor (apt. building) has an unencrypted Wireless Linksys router hooked up to his Broadband connection. If I wasn't hosting my domain's e-mail from one of my home machines, I would have cancelled my broadband a long time ago.
IPods are overpriced. Plain and simple. They are fantastic little machines, and sleek as all hell, but they are a good $50-$100 above what they should be. But that's pretty much always been Apples modus-operandi. All their hardware is fantastic, but a good 10-20% above what they should be charging. (Good thing they aren't MS, otherwise people would complain! :} [mod -1,troll])
It's good to see other companies jump into the fray, it will improve the field, if by only dropping Apple's prices.
People seem to be missing a major point here. This file doesn't do anything fancy, it just reads files and 'infects them'. There are no indications that this 'virus' is bypassing any kind of system security.
From the article:
"The SfcIsFileProtected() function of SFC_OS.DLL is used to avoid infecting executables that are protected by SFC (the System File Checker)."
Any sensible XP64 installation would not allow system files to be write accessible to anyone but the Administrator.
It's as if I wrote a c program that used fopen() and write() to destroy files, then declared I wrote a virus for linux. Whoo hoo.
just in case... I was joking. The duplicate post a few days ago asked what people would do with the router. :)
I like how you think.
s ho ld=-1&commentsort=0&tid=126&tid=95&mode=thread&cid =9246638
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108808&thre
What would people do with such a device???
... does the router have DRM?
I think the XNA may just be the key for indie developers to break into the console and portable market. Yes, one can develop games now-a-days for free using OpenGL/DX, but they can't run on any console.
I actually tried to lay the groundwork for a small console game company with a few friends, and we got shot down once we realized the massive price of the console SDK (in any platform), which not only required their costly development libraries, but also neccessitated a hardware kit.
The two logical options are either
(a) For a system like XNA, somewhat of a write-once, run everywhere type system. Where you can scale your game's visuals and depth to the platform.
(b) For linux to be ported onto consoles, not just by people looking to see a boot screen and run apache, but by people willing to optimize the hell out of the OpenGL subsystem to get the same performance (or better?) than if it were running on it's own custom OS.
Assert also exists in VC++, and Java, and can be quite useful.
I believe the instrumentation shown in the article is intended to be read in by an analysis tool, which should, in theory, find errors/inefficiencies that you as a programmer may not have noticed, and hence wouldn't have represented within asserts. But, as has been mentioned before in another comment, such errors are rare enough to not justify having to migrate to Ada and write so much extra instrumentation.
I would have been interested if all this instrumentation had been grafted onto a language like Java, or C++. But to have to switch to Ada just to be able to add in instrumentation that helps in code analysis? It's also funny that he WOW's at the idea of no dynamic memory allocation... Why not just use a type safe language?
Once again, all those issues are bing addressed. Your original post stated that windows wasn't addressing the problem. It is. Their existing design decisions (out in the market) are horrid, like the ones you mentioned. But they are working on fixing it. Will they succeed? Who knows.
BTW - The admin requirements for running user programs isn't a fault of Microsoft. Run any of their apps, and you'll see they graciously handle limited priviledge account. The real offenders are 3rd party vendors. Microsoft can hardly be held accountable for that.
Microsoft takes the approach of fighting the symptom (malware, ...etc.), and not the root cause (flawed security design, ...etc.).
I hate it when uninformed people make blanket statements like this.
For the past year Microsoft's main focus has been security. They stopped development in many major products, Windows in particular, for a month so that people could attend seminars on writing secure code, and ramp up to the company wide security initiative.
Say what you want about the current state of the code, but in the near future we will start seeing some serious improvements.
It was kiddy porn. I imagine was downgraded to normal porn for the media, so as not to completely destroy the life of the guy.
A few years back when I worked tech support at Harvard, a collegue of mine found a cache of kiddy porn when fixing some trivial issue on the Dean of the Divinity School's computer. The dean was asked to resign shortly thereafter. http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m10 58/is_17_116/ai_54950849
All these discussions really freaked me out. The few adult porn movies I had on my comp are now deleted.
Windows has the "Run As..." capability (right click any app, select Run As... and enter the administrator account), so that somewhat simulates doing a 'su' in linux.
But I totally agree that many application developers don't understand the concept of running at the least priviledge necessary. So many apps write their config to C:\Program File\APP\ and HKLM, which requires elevated access, instead of writing to C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings and HKLU. Hopefully more people will read 'Writing Secure Code' (from MS, ironically), and windows apps will improve.
I'd say 75% of spyware issues come from users running as part of the Administrator group. All day-to-day use windows accounts should be a regular user, with the least priviledges as possible. Without being part of the Admin group, the spyware would not be able to write to HKLM registry, C:\ or C:\WINDOWS. Some spyware could still infect the user's directory, but at least a simple re-log on to Administrator could be done to clean up the machine.
Sounds like VMWare, but with less OS support... I run Gentoo as my base system, and then run multiple VMWare VMs for whatever OS I need (98/2k/XP/other linux flavors). It's quite useful, and with ver. 3 performance is quite snappy, even on my 866mhz system.
nice = niche. doh!
Looking at the descriptions, I have a bad feeling about the DS. I know I'm not the first one to say it, but it reeks of another nice system, much like the black-and-red '3d' system that flopped years ago.
So we have a nice two screen system by nintendo, vs a simple (and elegant, if anything like the VIAO systems) PS2 portable. The sony system will win hands down.
While in undergrad, I though the Math requirements were useless. Programming != Math. But... in Grad School, in order to do any kind of research of consequence, you must characterize a lot of what you do Mathematically. I was amazed at the amount of Math that permeated all tasks. It is amazingly useful to be mathematically skilled when having to deal with real problems, past the simple building of an application.
Sorry, I forgot to account for the kneejerk reaction to anything Microsoft related.
Bill Gates himself denies he ever said it, and there are no documented occurences. As far as any rational, non conspiracy-theorist, person is concerned -- it never happend.
I will gladly eat crow if you can find me the quote.