Seeing something is active is one thing, being able to control it is something else...
As for the 'green virus', the problem is that in order to be successful, the green virus needs to spread as fast as possible too in order to prevent the red one from taking over all the machines. Hence creating A LOT of traffic that might cause collateral damage to entire systems and networks (think DDOS). In the end, the cure is just as bad as the illness... Although I probably would prefer my computer to be infected with the green one versus the red one as the latter will do all kind of nasty stuff on top of the 'trying to replicate' effect.
I wouldn't be all that certain about that. If I'd be placing PV cells on otherwise unoccupied land, then yes, solar-thermal comes out as a better investment, but I VERY MUCH doubt that those systems will be even close to the 'ease of use' that PV cells have today. So to speak you can simply bolt them onto your roof and they just work. Putting even the most modest form of this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SolarStirlingEngine.jpg on top of my roof would require quite a bit of extra strengthening and engineering, let alone maintenance. Solar-thermal may be quite more efficient, but that does not mean it will replace PV any time soon.. all IMHO off course.
I seem to remember that electrolysis actually works better in a compressed environment, probably there's a sweet spot somewhere.
It actually makes sense too as the 'bubbles' will be smaller and hence they 'cloud' less surface of the electrodes, right ? I guess a fully-compressed system would be less practical to keep 'filled up' with water, but pressurizing a liquid upfront is likely to be more efficient than pressurizing hydrogen afterwards, especially given it's Houdini-like-behavior.
Apart from being 'cool', why would you use electrolysis in the first place ?
* To split H20 you need electricity, eg from solar panels. Sadly, some energy is lost in the process, albeit much less thanks to this 'breakthrough' in the article * When running an engine on the produced H & O2 (+ additional fuel or stuff as mentioned to get past some technical hurdles) you get mechanical power. Sadly, some energy is lost due to the poor efficiency of most engine types * The mechanical power is then put into electricity using generators. Sadly, some energy is lost due non-perfect efficiency.
So in the end, we've gone from a perfectly stable electric current (PV-cell = DC) into a rectified current (generators are AC AFAIK) in 3 steps that each cause quite a bit of loss. Where's the added value ? Why not simply use the PV-electricity to power what you need, store any excess in batteries for the 'dark times' and whatever might be left after that can be sold to the power-company. => no losses along the way (except for the battery charing) => less complexity & much safer (think Hindenburg)
I am not a chemist, but couldn't we make carbon-based fuels from the generated Hydrogen & Oxygen ? Not sure if it's easy to get 'clean-enough' Carbon 'easily' nor if there are any (known) useful reactions for this that don't take up too much energy on themselves. Part of that 'extra energy' needed might in fact be recuperated again upon combustion ??!! I know, ICE's tend to have a low efficiency, so quite a bit will be lost anyway, but it might make the transition less painful. In theory the test-case here says we have 'abundant' of solar energy available, we just need a way to store & transport it.
The problem is : while everyone seems to be keen on 'build your own!', I'd rather simply shop for one. However, the only ones I can find on the internet eothere are 'demonstration models' that run on the heat of your hand, or are vaporware-ish real-soon-this-technology-will-hit-the-market-now-ish websites that haven't been updated in 2 years.
Anyone has any links to actual products (preferably EU shipping) or even better : any experiences with them ? I've been musing about buying a not too expensive one and trying to get it producing electricity or pumping water using solar-power only using a combination of Fresnel lenses / mirrors
Why would the cars in question need to be powered by petrol ? Many municipal services here are switching to battery-powered vehicles for things like keeping the streets clean. Works just fine as they usually operate in a 'smallish' area a day, and the added bonus is that they make one hell of lot less noise when they collect the garbage from at 6 o'clock in the morning.
but the 'crowd' I'm thinking of would simply cry out because *potentially* AVG *might* keep track of such information, sell it to the bad guys and become rich overnight.
Off course, I very much doubt they would abuse the information (not) obtained, but then again I know I'm overly naive =)
grin, but if they'd do that the 'privacy-crowd' will start yelling that AVG is 'illegally observering' their browsing habits...
Although I don't like the current implementation too much either, it IS a lot safer to have only safe sites listed in a search result. The problem isn't quite with AVG if you think about it, the problem is with malware sites managing to wiggle themselves in google-results...
The way AVG included this in their latest release might have been more 'transparent' indeed : * give users the option to turn it on/off "easily" * give users an option to use an AVG repository for checking * make the installer clearly ask whether you want this on or off by default
As for the 'they do it in a hidden way, pretending to be a genuine user-agent instead of a bot' : DUHUH, if a webserver can tell the difference, then they will return something honky-dory whenever the AV comes by and drop their malicious payload when "it's for real".
I wouldn't be all that surprised if it turns out that the INCREASED need for cooling caused the wicked results of this test. => SSD is faster at delivering info from 'disk' => CPU spents less time in 'kernel wait mode' due to I/O bottleneck => CPU heats up more because it does more work / time => fan(s) draws more power to exhaust the extra generated heat from the cpu
Anyway, what about ticking off all the check-boxes in the options so that when you accidentally hit the OK button, the default settings are that nothing really gets deleted ?
Somehow doesn't always work. I can't explain it, but I do KNOW that it can be circumvented :
Some time back I was a consultant at a (largish) bank. They too had 'locked out' USB devices that way. And hold & behold, it worked on any randomly available USB-stick, no external drives were mounted.
Some days later I was 'confused' and tried to copy something using my (very) old 64Mb stick. Worked like a charm. Realizing that this was 'impossible', we tried with other USB sticks, but mine was the only one that worked. The stick was a gift at some conference and has the word "Microsoft" stamped on it. Ever since I call it 'my precious' =)
Anyway, once you have physical access to a machine, there's very little to stop you getting any data you want imho... => simply hook up an Ethernet cable between your portable computer and given machine, a bit of fiddling with tcp-ip settings on the laptop, starting an ftp server or something and off you go...
ps: gluing both usb & the internet connector might work =)
Although I wouldn't make it a requirement to be able to have a character being able to run around fully naked, on the contrary some (clean =) underwear is fine by me : less polygons wasted on something I'm not interested in anyway (**). It's a matter of priorities I guess, I rather see people spend some time on customizing their facial looks than having to decide whether to go for a B, C or D cup. Worse, assuming the -if ever present- genitals would be customizable too it's going to be heaps of stress when starting up a male character : "if I make it too small, people will make fun that it looks just like me, but if I make it too big, people will say I overcompensate... My oh my, what should I do, what should I do... "
**: inside a computer game that is, in reality I find myself being hardwired to (unconsciously ?) consider those skin-covered balls of fat more interesting than they technically should be, sadly I'm only (hu)man...
According to Google : 60 miles per gallon = 3.92024306 liter per 100 km
My car (Citroen C4 Grand Picasso, 1.6 hdi, 110hp, 5 man) does about 5.7 liter/100 km. For that 'little' more I get a roof above my head, plenty of storage space, air-conditioning, comfortable seating, room for 7 people (in theory, in practice the car hardly ever carries more than 4), a pretty sound-proof interior (with a great stereo) etc... etc... I admit I can't 'meander' through heavy traffic, but OTOH I do can transport 2 portables, a sports-bag and my lunchbox without breaking a sweat, and when I arrive 'wherever' I don't have to wonder where to store my helmet and gear.
Heck, as I currently am cruising around at 105 km/h, I'm doing less than 4.5 l / 100 km ! (=> there's a 'dent' in my rear-tire (probably due to a manufacturing fault) which causes some vibration when I go above ca 115 km/h, surprisingly it takes over a week to order two new tires of given model, sigh... )
But I agree with your reasoning that a bike can be practical in some case and has a (VERY) slight edge efficiency-wise, I just don't see it work out for me. Having to have BOTH a bike & car would end up being even more costly here in Belgium I fear... (lots of regulations & taxes, don't take my word for it though, I haven't really looked into it...)
Although I agree that bikes are cheaper to buy than cars, and take less space to "operate" & park, they are far from an ideal solution IMHO. * consumption isn't all THAT low from what I hear from my 2-wheeled-colleagues * it might be nice in warm / dryish countries, I for one don't look forward to arriving all drenched at work * I for one feel quite a bit more safe being surrounded by a steel cage & airbags-combination * it's just not practical to strap 2 kids, a wife and a bag full of groceries on top of it
IMHO : bikes is more about 'that sense of freedom' than transport, cars are more about convenience than play. That said, it's always a blurry line off course...
I had not considered the idea of creating an actual random key and sending it to a 'central' database for retrieval by the evil-doer.
In my scenario the key would be either * hard-coded (silly, because one key would unlock all victims) * based upon a combination of hardware parameters (which MIGHT be reversed-engineered from the decryptor)
Having the key somewhere centrally would indeed be very hard to break unless, like you said, there is a flaw in the program, which seems unlikely to me.
Because the ads are making the websites I like 'richer' and (hopefully) keep them in the air, not a penny goes to my ISP (**).
IMHO Ads aren't that bad when applied properly... but I agree that some sites overdo things.. guess those sites simply lose me as a customer from that point on...
**: unless off course my ISP replaces the original adds with adds of his own... think I read something on/. about that recently...
Then again, if the encryption key is 'random', how does the decryptor know ?
(yes, reading the rest of the comments asap... likely someone will point me to the solution...)
Anyway, IF someone was willing to pay for the decryptor and he actually received said piece of software, and it actually works (if...if...if... ), I surely hope he will send a copy to the major anti-virus companies and relevant OSS forums so they can reverse-engineer the thing.
PS: unless the decryptor is brute-force-ing too and hence has a typical Windows9x progress bar... you know the one showing : "Copying files, 287436473939034 minutes remaining..."
In theory, worms simply don't have 'months' to spread, because, in theory, a vulnerability is detected and fixed within a short time-span, hence, the worm needs to abuse it as much as possible in the shortest time possible, right !?
In practice off course : * there are vulnerabilities that nobody (except the abuser) knows about and hence 'spreading slowly' is fine too * exploits are only created AFTER they have been identified (see "script kiddies") and rely upon people that are too uneducated/lazy/slow/dumb/paranoid/... to keep there system (more or less) secure, so again, 'spreading slowly' is fine again... the target audience will be smaller, but is still there.
So yes, it think it WILL help to have this kind of system in place (**), but indeed it sounds like it will simply be a matter of 'knowing the magic value' and making sure once's worm stays right below that threshold.
FTA : "An infected machine would reach this value very quickly, while a regular machine would not," Shroff explained. "A worm has to hit so many IP addresses so quickly in order to survive."
The main question here is IMHO : what do they mean with SCANS ? Are those (failed) connections that do not get ACK's back ? I'm pretty sure most P2P traffic would be able to cause false alerts, and although the network admin wouldn't be too happy to have bittorrent or emule on a machine (different from his own =), I can tell you that eg Skype can't be missed anymore where I work.
** remember MS already did something similar when SQL SLAMMER hit IIRC, and look where that got us : major cry-out that MS limited the number of new outward connections per second.
When Folding@Home runs in the background my cpu is 100% all of the time (well, one core is in each case). When it's not running, I average around 10% I guess. The difference is that in the latter case the cpu runs pretty much idle for 90% of the time and needs some electricity to keep going, while the former situation has it working at full throttle all the time, consuming so much more energy that the generated heat needs to be actively removed from the portable. I'm not saying it draws 10 times the amount of power, but it's going to be considerably more !
All that said, I often wonder what would be more efficient : 10.000 specialized cpu's in some server-farm / data-center churning away on a given problem, being mostly limited to that single problem and costing heaps of money and energy, or 10.000.000 versatile grid-clients that more or less produce the same output, probably eating just as much energy, if not more.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing something is active is one thing, being able to control it is something else...
As for the 'green virus', the problem is that in order to be successful, the green virus needs to spread as fast as possible too in order to prevent the red one from taking over all the machines. Hence creating A LOT of traffic that might cause collateral damage to entire systems and networks (think DDOS).
In the end, the cure is just as bad as the illness... Although I probably would prefer my computer to be infected with the green one versus the red one as the latter will do all kind of nasty stuff on top of the 'trying to replicate' effect.
I wouldn't be all that certain about that. If I'd be placing PV cells on otherwise unoccupied land, then yes, solar-thermal comes out as a better investment, but I VERY MUCH doubt that those systems will be even close to the 'ease of use' that PV cells have today. So to speak you can simply bolt them onto your roof and they just work. .. all IMHO off course.
Putting even the most modest form of this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SolarStirlingEngine.jpg on top of my roof would require quite a bit of extra strengthening and engineering, let alone maintenance.
Solar-thermal may be quite more efficient, but that does not mean it will replace PV any time soon
I seem to remember that electrolysis actually works better in a compressed environment, probably there's a sweet spot somewhere.
It actually makes sense too as the 'bubbles' will be smaller and hence they 'cloud' less surface of the electrodes, right ? I guess a fully-compressed system would be less practical to keep 'filled up' with water, but pressurizing a liquid upfront is likely to be more efficient than pressurizing hydrogen afterwards, especially given it's Houdini-like-behavior.
Apart from being 'cool', why would you use electrolysis in the first place ?
* To split H20 you need electricity, eg from solar panels. Sadly, some energy is lost in the process, albeit much less thanks to this 'breakthrough' in the article
* When running an engine on the produced H & O2 (+ additional fuel or stuff as mentioned to get past some technical hurdles) you get mechanical power. Sadly, some energy is lost due to the poor efficiency of most engine types
* The mechanical power is then put into electricity using generators. Sadly, some energy is lost due non-perfect efficiency.
So in the end, we've gone from a perfectly stable electric current (PV-cell = DC) into a rectified current (generators are AC AFAIK) in 3 steps that each cause quite a bit of loss.
Where's the added value ? Why not simply use the PV-electricity to power what you need, store any excess in batteries for the 'dark times' and whatever might be left after that can be sold to the power-company.
=> no losses along the way (except for the battery charing)
=> less complexity & much safer (think Hindenburg)
I am not a chemist, but couldn't we make carbon-based fuels from the generated Hydrogen & Oxygen ? Not sure if it's easy to get 'clean-enough' Carbon 'easily' nor if there are any (known) useful reactions for this that don't take up too much energy on themselves. Part of that 'extra energy' needed might in fact be recuperated again upon combustion ??!!
I know, ICE's tend to have a low efficiency, so quite a bit will be lost anyway, but it might make the transition less painful. In theory the test-case here says we have 'abundant' of solar energy available, we just need a way to store & transport it.
The problem is : while everyone seems to be keen on 'build your own!', I'd rather simply shop for one. However, the only ones I can find on the internet eothere are 'demonstration models' that run on the heat of your hand, or are vaporware-ish real-soon-this-technology-will-hit-the-market-now-ish websites that haven't been updated in 2 years.
Anyone has any links to actual products (preferably EU shipping) or even better : any experiences with them ? I've been musing about buying a not too expensive one and trying to get it producing electricity or pumping water using solar-power only using a combination of Fresnel lenses / mirrors
Why would the cars in question need to be powered by petrol ? Many municipal services here are switching to battery-powered vehicles for things like keeping the streets clean.
Works just fine as they usually operate in a 'smallish' area a day, and the added bonus is that they make one hell of lot less noise when they collect the garbage from at 6 o'clock in the morning.
True,
but the 'crowd' I'm thinking of would simply cry out because *potentially* AVG *might* keep track of such information, sell it to the bad guys and become rich overnight.
Off course, I very much doubt they would abuse the information (not) obtained, but then again I know I'm overly naive =)
grin, but if they'd do that the 'privacy-crowd' will start yelling that AVG is 'illegally observering' their browsing habits...
Although I don't like the current implementation too much either, it IS a lot safer to have only safe sites listed in a search result.
The problem isn't quite with AVG if you think about it, the problem is with malware sites managing to wiggle themselves in google-results...
The way AVG included this in their latest release might have been more 'transparent' indeed :
* give users the option to turn it on/off "easily"
* give users an option to use an AVG repository for checking
* make the installer clearly ask whether you want this on or off by default
As for the 'they do it in a hidden way, pretending to be a genuine user-agent instead of a bot' : DUHUH, if a webserver can tell the difference, then they will return something honky-dory whenever the AV comes by and drop their malicious payload when "it's for real".
I wouldn't be all that surprised if it turns out that the INCREASED need for cooling caused the wicked results of this test.
=> SSD is faster at delivering info from 'disk'
=> CPU spents less time in 'kernel wait mode' due to I/O bottleneck
=> CPU heats up more because it does more work / time
=> fan(s) draws more power to exhaust the extra generated heat from the cpu
Interesting thought, wonder if I'll recognize anyone in Adult Finder when they target my localhost...
eggs and omelets I presume =)
Anyway, what about ticking off all the check-boxes in the options so that when you accidentally hit the OK button, the default settings are that nothing really gets deleted ?
(Tools / Options / Privacy / Settings)
ctrl-shift-del is your friend ?
Somehow doesn't always work. I can't explain it, but I do KNOW that it can be circumvented :
Some time back I was a consultant at a (largish) bank. They too had 'locked out' USB devices that way. And hold & behold, it worked on any randomly available USB-stick, no external drives were mounted.
Some days later I was 'confused' and tried to copy something using my (very) old 64Mb stick. Worked like a charm. Realizing that this was 'impossible', we tried with other USB sticks, but mine was the only one that worked.
The stick was a gift at some conference and has the word "Microsoft" stamped on it.
Ever since I call it 'my precious' =)
Anyway, once you have physical access to a machine, there's very little to stop you getting any data you want imho...
=> simply hook up an Ethernet cable between your portable computer and given machine, a bit of fiddling with tcp-ip settings on the laptop, starting an ftp server or something and off you go...
ps: gluing both usb & the internet connector might work =)
Hear, hear.
Although I wouldn't make it a requirement to be able to have a character being able to run around fully naked, on the contrary some (clean =) underwear is fine by me : less polygons wasted on something I'm not interested in anyway (**).
It's a matter of priorities I guess, I rather see people spend some time on customizing their facial looks than having to decide whether to go for a B, C or D cup. Worse, assuming the -if ever present- genitals would be customizable too it's going to be heaps of stress when starting up a male character : "if I make it too small, people will make fun that it looks just like me, but if I make it too big, people will say I overcompensate... My oh my, what should I do, what should I do... "
**: inside a computer game that is, in reality I find myself being hardwired to (unconsciously ?) consider those skin-covered balls of fat more interesting than they technically should be, sadly I'm only (hu)man...
According to Google : 60 miles per gallon = 3.92024306 liter per 100 km
/100 km. For that 'little' more I get a roof above my head, plenty of storage space, air-conditioning, comfortable seating, room for 7 people (in theory, in practice the car hardly ever carries more than 4), a pretty sound-proof interior (with a great stereo) etc... etc... I admit I can't 'meander' through heavy traffic, but OTOH I do can transport 2 portables, a sports-bag and my lunchbox without breaking a sweat, and when I arrive 'wherever' I don't have to wonder where to store my helmet and gear.
My car (Citroen C4 Grand Picasso, 1.6 hdi, 110hp, 5 man) does about 5.7 liter
Heck, as I currently am cruising around at 105 km/h, I'm doing less than 4.5 l / 100 km !
(=> there's a 'dent' in my rear-tire (probably due to a manufacturing fault) which causes some vibration when I go above ca 115 km/h, surprisingly it takes over a week to order two new tires of given model, sigh... )
But I agree with your reasoning that a bike can be practical in some case and has a (VERY) slight edge efficiency-wise, I just don't see it work out for me. Having to have BOTH a bike & car would end up being even more costly here in Belgium I fear... (lots of regulations & taxes, don't take my word for it though, I haven't really looked into it...)
Although I agree that bikes are cheaper to buy than cars, and take less space to "operate" & park, they are far from an ideal solution IMHO.
* consumption isn't all THAT low from what I hear from my 2-wheeled-colleagues
* it might be nice in warm / dryish countries, I for one don't look forward to arriving all drenched at work
* I for one feel quite a bit more safe being surrounded by a steel cage & airbags-combination
* it's just not practical to strap 2 kids, a wife and a bag full of groceries on top of it
IMHO : bikes is more about 'that sense of freedom' than transport, cars are more about convenience than play. That said, it's always a blurry line off course...
I had not considered the idea of creating an actual random key and sending it to a 'central' database for retrieval by the evil-doer.
In my scenario the key would be either
* hard-coded (silly, because one key would unlock all victims)
* based upon a combination of hardware parameters (which MIGHT be reversed-engineered from the decryptor)
Having the key somewhere centrally would indeed be very hard to break unless, like you said, there is a flaw in the program, which seems unlikely to me.
Sigh, think I'll need to backup more often...
Because the ads are making the websites I like 'richer' and (hopefully) keep them in the air, not a penny goes to my ISP (**).
/. about that recently...
IMHO Ads aren't that bad when applied properly... but I agree that some sites overdo things.. guess those sites simply lose me as a customer from that point on...
**: unless off course my ISP replaces the original adds with adds of his own... think I read something on
Then again, if the encryption key is 'random', how does the decryptor know ?
... you know the one showing : "Copying files, 287436473939034 minutes remaining..."
(yes, reading the rest of the comments asap... likely someone will point me to the solution...)
Anyway, IF someone was willing to pay for the decryptor and he actually received said piece of software, and it actually works (if...if...if... ), I surely hope he will send a copy to the major anti-virus companies and relevant OSS forums so they can reverse-engineer the thing.
PS: unless the decryptor is brute-force-ing too and hence has a typical Windows9x progress bar
Why ? Mac's can't encrypt ? tssskkkk
In theory, worms simply don't have 'months' to spread, because, in theory, a vulnerability is detected and fixed within a short time-span, hence, the worm needs to abuse it as much as possible in the shortest time possible, right !?
In practice off course :
* there are vulnerabilities that nobody (except the abuser) knows about and hence 'spreading slowly' is fine too
* exploits are only created AFTER they have been identified (see "script kiddies") and rely upon people that are too uneducated/lazy/slow/dumb/paranoid/... to keep there system (more or less) secure, so again, 'spreading slowly' is fine again... the target audience will be smaller, but is still there.
So yes, it think it WILL help to have this kind of system in place (**), but indeed it sounds like it will simply be a matter of 'knowing the magic value' and making sure once's worm stays right below that threshold.
FTA : "An infected machine would reach this value very quickly, while a regular machine would not," Shroff explained. "A worm has to hit so many IP addresses so quickly in order to survive."
The main question here is IMHO : what do they mean with SCANS ? Are those (failed) connections that do not get ACK's back ? I'm pretty sure most P2P traffic would be able to cause false alerts, and although the network admin wouldn't be too happy to have bittorrent or emule on a machine (different from his own =), I can tell you that eg Skype can't be missed anymore where I work.
** remember MS already did something similar when SQL SLAMMER hit IIRC, and look where that got us : major cry-out that MS limited the number of new outward connections per second.
Wouldn't he rather say something along the lines of : damnedideloodi neighbour !
Errr, yes they are !
When Folding@Home runs in the background my cpu is 100% all of the time (well, one core is in each case). When it's not running, I average around 10% I guess.
The difference is that in the latter case the cpu runs pretty much idle for 90% of the time and needs some electricity to keep going, while the former situation has it working at full throttle all the time, consuming so much more energy that the generated heat needs to be actively removed from the portable. I'm not saying it draws 10 times the amount of power, but it's going to be considerably more !
All that said, I often wonder what would be more efficient : 10.000 specialized cpu's in some server-farm / data-center churning away on a given problem, being mostly limited to that single problem and costing heaps of money and energy, or 10.000.000 versatile grid-clients that more or less produce the same output, probably eating just as much energy, if not more.
Hmm, and in 50 odd years when we find a cheap and convenient way to get there, will we be greeted by the locals with "g'day mate" ?