I sold my first piece of software to a financial services company. It was a program designed to parse and reformat text files for printing. It was a custom program based on an earlier freeware program I wrote to do custom printout of text files (allowing multiple copies, inserting custom control codes at the end of each copy, page sorting options, etc). That was simply called Copier. It was distributed around BBSs at the time. Maintained it up into 1993 IIRC.
All of my work since then is purely commercial and targeted at industry verticals, as well as providing security consulting services to find and fix issues in in-house applications. If you are asking for stuff you may have heard of, I doubt it. I don't write consumer software. I don't think I've written anything in the past 15 years that has sold for less than $25K.
As for your app, please feel free to put out public challenge for how "Virus Proof" your software is. I dare you.
OK, that sucks but what exactly does it have to do with Denovo? Did you direct your customers to send them emails? If so why? They don't make HDCP standards or have anything to do with it. If your Jeep runs you over because of a dumb gearshift design do you call Audi and complain about it?
I didn't use your software, I extracted the archive and looked at the INI file. I'm not installing something I can't trust on my machine. You don't even bother with basic security like distributing hashes on the download site so I can know that someone else didn't tamper with it. No thought to security.
You keep talking about speed, so prove it. Show numbers for hosts vs local DNS (not internet based DNS). Put up or shut up.
Also you are the one stealing data, unless you claim to be the one who owns those lists? Not that lists of facts can be copyrighted anyway, but by your own definition you are the thief for stealing their block lists for your product. I'm just showing that my firewall can handle the same lists your software uses.
Also that bit about bypassing CDNs and going direct to site via hardcodes is bullshit. If the site assets are served off of the same CDN as their ads, there is nothing you can do. THEY ARE THE SAME SERVERS. Do you even know how the internet works?
You assume (you should really stop doing that) that 23% is from the lists. RAM actually didn't increase at all by adding those additional lists. ZERO. You fail. Again. Also you keep bringing up DNS redirect poisons, but those don't apply to either of our situations, since my router isn't vulnerable and the lookups go against the local block list FIRST, before checking external DNS. But I wouldn't expect someone with your obvious lack of knowledge to realize that, so consider that lesson free. See, you learned something today!
Yes, they can, if you contractually allow them to. It's not like they are claiming an EXCLUSIVE right, but you most certainly can do it. How do you think model releases work? Those don't expire. Also a slave, really? That's not a bit hyperbolic? They don't own YOU, they have the right to use your image as they stated in the contract. When a person takes your photo it does not, despite some beliefs to the contrary, steal your soul.
I'd like to see what they plan to do for all those people who get free games with a DOA graphics card.
And you think those people would keep the game but not return their DOA card for a replacement??? "Well my $600 graphics card doesn't work but I got my free copy of For Honor, that's all I really care about!"
Why do they care what they do with the supposedly "free" gift that they give me. The only reason to do this is to assert their power over me and make me do what they want. WHen someone gives me something then it no longer belongs to them and is none of their business what I do with it.
Because people where finding ways to steal them in bulk and reselling them on sites like G2A.
...not noticing in the fine print that it was permanent.
Then that is on you. It would be no difference that if you agreed to be in a commercial, but didn't read the fine print that the commercial or footage from it could be used in perpetuity and for anything the company wanted. There are also many uses that don't require your permission. I don't need your permission, for example, to take your photo on the street and sell it as part of a coffee table book or to sell prints in a gallery.
My first thought on reading this was "the hell??? Since when have computers been allowed in exams?" We weren't even allowed calculators in our exams at uni.
That reminds me of something my calc I prof told us before our first exam: "Bring any technology you want, I know the limits of your calculators and mathematics software. I write my exams accordingly." He wasn't kidding. If you knew the material you could finish his exams by hand easily. Try to slide by and use a graphing calculator or even something like Mathematica and you probably wouldn't finish the exam before the end of class, much less pass it. Really loved that class.
I guess what I'm not getting, and since you've taken them maybe you can shed some light on it, is why it's bring your own device. I've taken dozens of computer based exams before, but always on the testing companies equipment, never my own. That just seems like it's asking for trouble.
Yea but shouldn't the By The Lawyers want to make it as hard as possible for the For the Laywers to pass so they can keep all of the Of the Laywer to themselves?
Yea but how do they get their two dozen plugins loaded in WordPerfect? I was doing some work for a lawfirm and had to load up their default installs of word to read a doc. The screen was 70% toolbars. It was like trying to work on one of those old electronic word processors, one of the cheap ones with a 10 line display.
I'm amazed that people don't mind Microsoft having their facial data.
Seems to me just ONE company needs to have a breech, like the many companies that have password breeches...problem is, it's rather difficult to change your face, while passwords are easy.
There should be a new law that completely bankrupts a company if they somehow leak your biometric information, even unintentionally. That's about the only way it will discourage companies from doing this.
Doing what, storing and leaking a photo of your face? That's all this is, with some 3D mapping applied to it. As far as "biometrics" go, you could get those with any decent photo. Don't want them leaked? Don't go around flashing them in public all the time. Face, iris, even fingerprints can be lifted from photos now. Google and Facebook are more than happy to do facial recognition on any photos you feed them, no facial scanning required by the end user at all.
This entire lawsuit was bogus to begin with. There is nothing special about the way 2K did this. Hell, ever see one of those avatars? Most of them look like their owner after being run over with a cement mixer. There's probably less chance of using those for biometric identification than there is a regular photo.
That reminds me of Ron Wayne, who was the third founder of Apple with Steve and Woz, but pulled out and sold his stake for $800. He would be worth over 70 billion dollars today if he stayed in. That has got to sting a bit.
I'm still waiting for something that a host file can do that a firewall cannot. Fact is, there isn't anything and you can not answer. You keep going on and on about how a firewall can't handle millions of entries, yet they can. They do. I'm not sure how much RAM you think firewalls have these days, but it's probably more than is in most PCs. Hell even my home router can handle them. Don't believe me? Take a look: https://imgur.com/a/EFVRn Those lists look familiar? They should, I took them from your own INI file. All those loaded, and still over 87% RAM free. Must be magic. Or, you know, the people the wrote the firmware has some idea of what they were doing. And just like with your host files, if any client on my network does a lookup for any of the domains on those lists, they will get back 0.0.0.0. All while making no changes to the client devices. I don't need to worry about pushing out host files, don't need to worry about allowing an executable to run with elevation, don't need to worry about malware tampering with the hostfile entries. Every single device behind that firewall is protected, including those where the host file can't be accessed such as smart phones, tablets, gaming consoles, TV's, and IP cameras. And no, there are no backdoors in the firmware. It's not the stock crap from the manufacturer. It's also fully open source so I can (and have) verify this for myself.
And that's just what is possible with a home device. Enterprise level I can block no only hostnames, but specific URLs, use deep packet inspection to stop malware that is being served by hosts not on your list (you know it's easy to REGISTER a domain name as well, right?), rewrite web traffic to remove potential scripting threats and report them for review by the admins, and even use machine learning to detect aberrant traffic patterns and stop them, providing protection from unknown exploits. Like to see a host file do any of that.
But lets go back and look at plugins. You know all that memory you complained about them using? Your solution, by your own admission, does the same thing. Only you hide it by offloading it to the OS, which has to cache your giant hosts files in RAM. So while your app may not use as much, you are being deceitful by not counting the RAM used by the OS to cache the host files. Also your solution can't block page elements. A browser plugin can block ads sourced by the same CDN as the site they are on, your host files cannot without also breaking the website itself. They can not only block ads from outside CDNs, they can remove the formatting around them, cleaning up the presented webpage in addition to blocking the ads. Hrm. Seems I found something else host scan't do huh?
Hardware routers with those stock firmware have issues, that does not mean all hardware routers have issues. That's basic logic, something a programmer should understand. I AM NOT USING ANY FIRMWARE ON THOSE LISTS. And the firmware I am using is open sourced and fully vetted.
Most folks CAN protect iOS, by buying a firewall (that they already need), installing the proper open firmware, and configuring it (literally a checkbox). Done. And yes, apparently they can store those hostnames. Also, if it requires that much RAM, what does that say for your solution, putting them in PC RAM on EVERY PC? You said yourself it caches them to RAM
If you think depending on hardware over software is stupid you are an amature. Dedicated hardware trumps software every time. Maybe I was wrong, maybe your skills are even farther out of date than I though.
You are the one that moved the goalposts to using host files, not me. I said use ad block (not ABP btw, you don't even know the difference). Then you threw in hostfiles, and I put out blocking at the firewall. You moved the goalposts first.
You said you could protect iOS with a host file. I quoted your very words. To do that requires a jailbreak. There is no way to modify the host files otherwise, not even with the enterprise management tools.
I do not care, actually. A few random users and the "it doesn't look like malware" from a guy at Malware bytes is not very meaningful.
As for firewalls not being able to block host names, I guess you should call up Forcepoint, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point, Juniper, Cisco, Dell, and the others and let them know that their firewalls really can't block hostnames. And go talk to all the open source firmware devs that also added the feature, or support it via scripts, that they, too, are not really doing exactly what they say they are.
I NEVER talked about software firewalls. EVER. You assumed, and it made an ass out of you. The screenshot I showed you was from a HARDWARE firewall, not some useless client software firewall. You are the one lying.
You said that you can load hosts files on iOS: " I did answer how hosts can be migrated to iOS". The ONLY way to do that is to jailbreak. Period.
That list is cute, but it applies to stock firmwares. As I've said about 1000 times now, I don't use stock firmware, I use open firmware.
No one cares about your/. endorsements. NO ONE. The fact is at the enterprise level (and anyone who's smart enough to do it at home) no one uses hostfiles to do anything if they can do it centrally. It's amateurish and anyone who knows what they are doing will laugh you out of the room for suggesting it.
As for your DNS comment, no shit. Guess what most modern, dedicated hardware firewall do? They run DNS so they can control domain resolution. On a larger scale dedicated web filters, which are exponentially more advanced that your pitiful host files, can block not only based on host name but also using deep packet inspection and these certainly do perform hostname lookups and they can do so with no perceptible impact to the user's speed. You, again, show that your knowledge is at least a decade or more out of date. So keep peddling your out of date software, written with an out of date language, buy a guy with out of date skills, to people who don't know how to do things correctly.
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I sold my first piece of software to a financial services company. It was a program designed to parse and reformat text files for printing. It was a custom program based on an earlier freeware program I wrote to do custom printout of text files (allowing multiple copies, inserting custom control codes at the end of each copy, page sorting options, etc). That was simply called Copier. It was distributed around BBSs at the time. Maintained it up into 1993 IIRC.
All of my work since then is purely commercial and targeted at industry verticals, as well as providing security consulting services to find and fix issues in in-house applications. If you are asking for stuff you may have heard of, I doubt it. I don't write consumer software. I don't think I've written anything in the past 15 years that has sold for less than $25K.
As for your app, please feel free to put out public challenge for how "Virus Proof" your software is. I dare you.
I don't doubt it's faster, what I do doubt is that the delta is enough that it would make any sort of difference. So what is the lookup time delta?
I don't doubt it's faster, what I do doubt is that the delta is enough that it would make any sort of difference. So what is the delta?
Virus proof huh? You should put out a challenge for that. I'd LOVE to see those results.
*Denuvo
OK, that sucks but what exactly does it have to do with Denovo? Did you direct your customers to send them emails? If so why? They don't make HDCP standards or have anything to do with it. If your Jeep runs you over because of a dumb gearshift design do you call Audi and complain about it?
I said post numbers to prove your assertion. So, post some numbers boy! Or shut it. If you can't PROVE you are faster then you are just talking shit.
I didn't use your software, I extracted the archive and looked at the INI file. I'm not installing something I can't trust on my machine. You don't even bother with basic security like distributing hashes on the download site so I can know that someone else didn't tamper with it. No thought to security.
You keep talking about speed, so prove it. Show numbers for hosts vs local DNS (not internet based DNS). Put up or shut up.
Also you are the one stealing data, unless you claim to be the one who owns those lists? Not that lists of facts can be copyrighted anyway, but by your own definition you are the thief for stealing their block lists for your product. I'm just showing that my firewall can handle the same lists your software uses.
Also that bit about bypassing CDNs and going direct to site via hardcodes is bullshit. If the site assets are served off of the same CDN as their ads, there is nothing you can do. THEY ARE THE SAME SERVERS. Do you even know how the internet works?
You assume (you should really stop doing that) that 23% is from the lists. RAM actually didn't increase at all by adding those additional lists. ZERO. You fail. Again. Also you keep bringing up DNS redirect poisons, but those don't apply to either of our situations, since my router isn't vulnerable and the lookups go against the local block list FIRST, before checking external DNS. But I wouldn't expect someone with your obvious lack of knowledge to realize that, so consider that lesson free. See, you learned something today!
Well you know what they say about assuming.
Yes, they can, if you contractually allow them to. It's not like they are claiming an EXCLUSIVE right, but you most certainly can do it. How do you think model releases work? Those don't expire. Also a slave, really? That's not a bit hyperbolic? They don't own YOU, they have the right to use your image as they stated in the contract. When a person takes your photo it does not, despite some beliefs to the contrary, steal your soul.
I'd like to see what they plan to do for all those people who get free games with a DOA graphics card.
And you think those people would keep the game but not return their DOA card for a replacement??? "Well my $600 graphics card doesn't work but I got my free copy of For Honor, that's all I really care about!"
Why do they care what they do with the supposedly "free" gift that they give me. The only reason to do this is to assert their power over me and make me do what they want. WHen someone gives me something then it no longer belongs to them and is none of their business what I do with it.
Because people where finding ways to steal them in bulk and reselling them on sites like G2A.
...not noticing in the fine print that it was permanent.
Then that is on you. It would be no difference that if you agreed to be in a commercial, but didn't read the fine print that the commercial or footage from it could be used in perpetuity and for anything the company wanted. There are also many uses that don't require your permission. I don't need your permission, for example, to take your photo on the street and sell it as part of a coffee table book or to sell prints in a gallery.
My first thought on reading this was "the hell??? Since when have computers been allowed in exams?" We weren't even allowed calculators in our exams at uni.
That reminds me of something my calc I prof told us before our first exam: "Bring any technology you want, I know the limits of your calculators and mathematics software. I write my exams accordingly." He wasn't kidding. If you knew the material you could finish his exams by hand easily. Try to slide by and use a graphing calculator or even something like Mathematica and you probably wouldn't finish the exam before the end of class, much less pass it. Really loved that class.
I guess what I'm not getting, and since you've taken them maybe you can shed some light on it, is why it's bring your own device. I've taken dozens of computer based exams before, but always on the testing companies equipment, never my own. That just seems like it's asking for trouble.
Yea but shouldn't the By The Lawyers want to make it as hard as possible for the For the Laywers to pass so they can keep all of the Of the Laywer to themselves?
Yea but how do they get their two dozen plugins loaded in WordPerfect? I was doing some work for a lawfirm and had to load up their default installs of word to read a doc. The screen was 70% toolbars. It was like trying to work on one of those old electronic word processors, one of the cheap ones with a 10 line display.
I'm amazed that people don't mind Microsoft having their facial data.
Seems to me just ONE company needs to have a breech, like the many companies that have password breeches...problem is, it's rather difficult to change your face, while passwords are easy.
There should be a new law that completely bankrupts a company if they somehow leak your biometric information, even unintentionally. That's about the only way it will discourage companies from doing this.
Doing what, storing and leaking a photo of your face? That's all this is, with some 3D mapping applied to it. As far as "biometrics" go, you could get those with any decent photo. Don't want them leaked? Don't go around flashing them in public all the time. Face, iris, even fingerprints can be lifted from photos now. Google and Facebook are more than happy to do facial recognition on any photos you feed them, no facial scanning required by the end user at all.
This entire lawsuit was bogus to begin with. There is nothing special about the way 2K did this. Hell, ever see one of those avatars? Most of them look like their owner after being run over with a cement mixer. There's probably less chance of using those for biometric identification than there is a regular photo.
That reminds me of Ron Wayne, who was the third founder of Apple with Steve and Woz, but pulled out and sold his stake for $800. He would be worth over 70 billion dollars today if he stayed in. That has got to sting a bit.
Has anybody thought that maybe Samsung was trying to make a new form of Internal Combustion Engine?
Nah, pretty sure they are developing a new skin grafting technique and wanted to jump-start the market.
I'm still waiting for something that a host file can do that a firewall cannot. Fact is, there isn't anything and you can not answer. You keep going on and on about how a firewall can't handle millions of entries, yet they can. They do. I'm not sure how much RAM you think firewalls have these days, but it's probably more than is in most PCs. Hell even my home router can handle them. Don't believe me? Take a look: https://imgur.com/a/EFVRn Those lists look familiar? They should, I took them from your own INI file. All those loaded, and still over 87% RAM free. Must be magic. Or, you know, the people the wrote the firmware has some idea of what they were doing. And just like with your host files, if any client on my network does a lookup for any of the domains on those lists, they will get back 0.0.0.0. All while making no changes to the client devices. I don't need to worry about pushing out host files, don't need to worry about allowing an executable to run with elevation, don't need to worry about malware tampering with the hostfile entries. Every single device behind that firewall is protected, including those where the host file can't be accessed such as smart phones, tablets, gaming consoles, TV's, and IP cameras. And no, there are no backdoors in the firmware. It's not the stock crap from the manufacturer. It's also fully open source so I can (and have) verify this for myself.
And that's just what is possible with a home device. Enterprise level I can block no only hostnames, but specific URLs, use deep packet inspection to stop malware that is being served by hosts not on your list (you know it's easy to REGISTER a domain name as well, right?), rewrite web traffic to remove potential scripting threats and report them for review by the admins, and even use machine learning to detect aberrant traffic patterns and stop them, providing protection from unknown exploits. Like to see a host file do any of that.
But lets go back and look at plugins. You know all that memory you complained about them using? Your solution, by your own admission, does the same thing. Only you hide it by offloading it to the OS, which has to cache your giant hosts files in RAM. So while your app may not use as much, you are being deceitful by not counting the RAM used by the OS to cache the host files. Also your solution can't block page elements. A browser plugin can block ads sourced by the same CDN as the site they are on, your host files cannot without also breaking the website itself. They can not only block ads from outside CDNs, they can remove the formatting around them, cleaning up the presented webpage in addition to blocking the ads. Hrm. Seems I found something else host scan't do huh?
Name one thing a host file can do that I can't do blocking the EXACT SAME list of FQDNs at the firewall cannot. NAME ONE.
Hardware routers with those stock firmware have issues, that does not mean all hardware routers have issues. That's basic logic, something a programmer should understand. I AM NOT USING ANY FIRMWARE ON THOSE LISTS. And the firmware I am using is open sourced and fully vetted.
Most folks CAN protect iOS, by buying a firewall (that they already need), installing the proper open firmware, and configuring it (literally a checkbox). Done. And yes, apparently they can store those hostnames. Also, if it requires that much RAM, what does that say for your solution, putting them in PC RAM on EVERY PC? You said yourself it caches them to RAM
If you think depending on hardware over software is stupid you are an amature. Dedicated hardware trumps software every time. Maybe I was wrong, maybe your skills are even farther out of date than I though.
You are the one that moved the goalposts to using host files, not me. I said use ad block (not ABP btw, you don't even know the difference). Then you threw in hostfiles, and I put out blocking at the firewall. You moved the goalposts first.
You said you could protect iOS with a host file. I quoted your very words. To do that requires a jailbreak. There is no way to modify the host files otherwise, not even with the enterprise management tools.
I do not care, actually. A few random users and the "it doesn't look like malware" from a guy at Malware bytes is not very meaningful.
As for firewalls not being able to block host names, I guess you should call up Forcepoint, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point, Juniper, Cisco, Dell, and the others and let them know that their firewalls really can't block hostnames. And go talk to all the open source firmware devs that also added the feature, or support it via scripts, that they, too, are not really doing exactly what they say they are.
I NEVER talked about software firewalls. EVER. You assumed, and it made an ass out of you. The screenshot I showed you was from a HARDWARE firewall, not some useless client software firewall. You are the one lying.
/. endorsements. NO ONE. The fact is at the enterprise level (and anyone who's smart enough to do it at home) no one uses hostfiles to do anything if they can do it centrally. It's amateurish and anyone who knows what they are doing will laugh you out of the room for suggesting it.
You said that you can load hosts files on iOS: " I did answer how hosts can be migrated to iOS". The ONLY way to do that is to jailbreak. Period.
That list is cute, but it applies to stock firmwares. As I've said about 1000 times now, I don't use stock firmware, I use open firmware.
No one cares about your
As for your DNS comment, no shit. Guess what most modern, dedicated hardware firewall do? They run DNS so they can control domain resolution. On a larger scale dedicated web filters, which are exponentially more advanced that your pitiful host files, can block not only based on host name but also using deep packet inspection and these certainly do perform hostname lookups and they can do so with no perceptible impact to the user's speed. You, again, show that your knowledge is at least a decade or more out of date. So keep peddling your out of date software, written with an out of date language, buy a guy with out of date skills, to people who don't know how to do things correctly.