I don't see how the fact that the OS is designed to be easy to use has anything to do with its security. Your logic is wanting.
I do agree that its growing popularity will encourage virus and malware authors to find exploits in the OS. But Mac OS X is pretty analogous to Linux, security-wise. I'm sure occasional exploits will be found, and some have already been discovered. But they are rare, and relatively hard to use. I haven't seen any that enable a script kiddy with a shell script to hack into 50 OS X machines and turn them into zombies like you can with Windows.
The fact is that OS X is, inherently and by design, more secure than Windows. Even if it had 90% user base and was made for use by monkeys, I daresay there would be more Windows viruses going around than OS X viruses (of which I have yet to hear even of the possibility, much less any real attacks).
I didn't say there were no _potential_ bugs or vulnerabilities in the system. I just think (and this is not a contradiction) that the system is very secure out of the box.
Try this experiment: install OS X and connect to the Internet. Leave it connected for a week. Now install Windows and connect to the Internet. Leave it connected for 30 minutes. Which one will be hacked? My point is that Windows needs special steps to be _protected_; Mac OS X requires special hacking and other circumstances to become _vulnerable_. The QuickTime ruse you refer to no doubt requires some social engineering to make work... that's just a guess on my part. Am I right?
Furthermore, the buffer overflows in quicktime do not afford an attacker root priviledges, do they? And when vulnerabilities are found, Apple, unlike Microsoft, so far anyway, has a great record of fixing them immediately. Apple has a great record on security in OS X. You are not going to see a flood of crippling, disabling OS X attacks like you see every couple of months with Windows viruses that take out our whole email system at work from time to time. Hacking an OS X box is HARD.
I agree this will be a good test of the out-of-the-box security of Apple. Actually, I believe that out of the box, Apples are ironclad secure. They start with no services turned on by default. There are no Microsoft-like ActiveX analogous components that allow viruses to replicate if you do something innocuous-sounding like read email or run a word-processor. About the only service that is password-free is Software Update, but that is a client, not a server. If users turn on sshd and choose a poor password, they may well be attacked. This will probably rarely happen, since most people enabling ssh will be aware of the risks of poor passwords, and not really complain if attacked. I think this is just FUD for marketing.
we are not necessarily that far away from a true lie detector. Yes there are some technical issues, but it is a realistic possibility, certainly within our lifetimes
You are speaking totally out of your ass here, sir. The "technical issues" you are glossing over? Would they include the ability to determine the semantic content of a detectic brain pattern, verify its veracity, and then determine whether any discrepancies might have been willful or not? Just a matter of time for that, eh?
Lie detection machines are purely an artistic endeavor, there is currently no science behind them and I see no reason to think that a machine that uses brainwaves to control movements leads to the invention of a lie detector machine.
I think it's hilarious that a company that won't issue multi-button mice with their computers because it will confuse users also sells Airport Base Stations, a wireless LAN device that is just ever so slightly more confusing than clicking with a different finger would be.
The most confusing thing I see for new users in OS X, time and time again, is finding your documents using the non-spatially oriented abstraction misleadingly called the "Finder" in OS X. Clicking a mouse button is easy compared to the abstraction known as a "path," apparently.
I am merely playing devil's advocate and pointing out the rather obvious fact that the majority of the people at Gitmo are hardly innocent citizens of friendly foreign nations.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the identities of those imprisoned there is secret. The problem I have with all of this is the secrecy. The question really boils down to how great a threat you think terrorism really poses to U.S. If it threatens our very existence, then yes, we have to sacrifice freedoms for survival. But short of that, I am very hesitant to allow government to secretly abduct citizens without a trial, no matter what they claim they were doing at the time. The whole point of due process is to prevent arbitrary punishment, including "detention," by our government without a PROVEN cause on an INDIVIDUAL basis. .
I'm guessing that the IDF pshrinks found that D&D gamers tend to be more indivualistic. Being in the military is, by necessity, to be part of a team
To repeat an earlier post of mine, the article does not say that the Israeli army does not want D&D players, so your argument is irrelevant. It says they are not granted security clearances as easily. This is a different issue. I don't see a good reason for it. It implies that D&D players are not as good at keeping secrets. Upon reflection, I wonder how you can really design a good test for this criterion?
Flamebaiting aside, the article does not say that the Israeli army does not want D&D players. It says they are not granted security clearances as easily. This is a different issue and one I agree with you about. I don't see a good reason for it. It implies that D&D players are not as good at keeping secrets. Upon reflection, I wonder how you can really design a good test for this criterion?
It's just another linux machine with that horrible X thing on it.:P
Troll-bait aside, as a Mac user running OS X at work and at home, I use X11 all the time. The only problem with OS X's windowing system, Aqua, is that it does not support remote windows. With "that horrible X thing," I can and routinely do open graphical windows spawned by applications on other machines running totally different operating systems. It is the only technology out there that does that that I have ever heard of. Even between macs, try opening iTunes on your home machine from your work machine. X11 is a useful application, not horrible at all.
Not meaning to be critical, but the article cited does not explain who these crazy people are. I don't exactly know whom the article is targeting at an audience, in fact. It publish a list of usernames with the number of submissions, along with brief snippets about two specific users. I was hoping to learn more about the actual type of person who is contributing, demographically.
I realize this would have taken a lot of work and might even be impossible, but would have made a hell of a lot better article.:-) Easy for me to say, from the comfort of my office.
I've yet to have the Keyspan remote miss a channel change (or any other command) on me.
Are you using this with a cable box? If you don't have a tuner card and are using a cable or satellite box, you have to set up the IR transmitter to change channels for you when you are not home. The IR transmitter does not know when the channel was successfully changed, it just transmits the "change" signal. Sometimes the signal doesn't get successfully received by the cable box. At least, that happened to me occasionally. About 1-5% of the time. Too often. That's why I went with DirectTV's DVR with built-in tuner; it never misses a channel change.
I don't think I'm interested in a UI that is "good enough" that I "only curse at it once or twice per day."
You probably don't have as high standards for a GUI as I, actually, so maybe number of times per day you curse is not a good measurement.:-) The TiVo interface does a pretty good job, but you have to type words using a "ouija board" interface that really sucks for that purpose. Disgusting piece of work. Also, resorting items in the wish lists takes forever. Those are my main gripes with TiVo.
Ah, yes, I note the Keyspan IR Remote. The problem with this solution is that it sometimes misses a channel change. That is, it thinks it has changed the channel but it hasn't. The DVR has no way to know this has happened, so the wrong show gets recorded. Right? This is the main reason I go with an integrated solution. IN my case, I love TiVo's features, so the DirectTivo units are perfect. They never miss a show, and they are good enough in the UI to where I only curse at it once or twice per day.
That said Apple could go x86 (say to AMD's Hammers) and lock down the OS and such so that it only runs on Apple motherboards.
What would be the advantage to that? Presumably what people are hoping for when they ask Apple to port to x86 is cheaper hardware. I'm not sure that Apple could do any better/cheaper on such a "locked down" x86 architecture. The mini is a good case in point that their current choice does not preclude inexpensive machines.
The article mentions that portable media players have "failed in the marketplace." It cites the reasons of a small screen coupled with a largish unit relative to the very portable iPod. It occurs to me that the small screen problem could be fixed with high-resolution glasses/goggles, but I don't know if high enough resolution is available in such units, and even if they are, they are probably very pricey. The portability issue is the remaining real problem, technologically speaking. But imagine a device the size of an iPod with such goggles... hmm. Cool!
The article states that Apple "hasn't seen much customer demand" for satellite radio + iPod integration. I wonder what metric they use? The term "demand" is usually used in a market sense to indicate consumer preference, measured by their willingness to buy (units sold relative to price). Since there are no such units available, I wonder what "demand" means to Apple. Not enough people have written asking for it? Focus groups not interested? Just curious...
Re:(reformatted) Apple better off on there own
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
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· Score: 1
Sorry for the bad formatting. Let me try again. (yes, I should have used the !$#$$ preview button!)
Really, why would Apple want Tivo? Last I heard tivo was starting to fall on hard times. Far better off just making their own PVR software. You can already hack together a pretty nice PVR using a Motorola DCT-6200 and a Mac. see here : http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C
BZZZT! You can NOT put together a TiVo replacement that RELIABLY records what you want, because there are no other systems that offer BUILT-IN satellite/cable tuners on the market that I'm aware of. Thus, the "just like Tivo" DVR's all have the flaw that sometimes, their IR channel changer thingies fail to actually change the channel. So you miss shows you need to watch. Apple needs the integrated hardware, i.e., the business agreements that TiVo has established with cable and satellite providers to put their tuners into TiVo boxes. That is where TiVo's real value lies. At least right now, for me.
Really, why would Apple want Tivo? Last I heard tivo was starting to fall on hard times.
Far better off just making their own PVR software. You can already hack together a pretty nice PVR using a Motorola DCT-6200 and a Mac. see here : http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C
BZZZT! You can NOT put together a TiVo replacement that RELIABLY records what you want, because there are no other systems that offer BUILT-IN satellite/cable tuners on the market that I'm aware of. Thus, the "just like Tivo" DVR's all have the flaw that sometimes, their IR channel changer thingies fail to actually change the channel. So you miss shows you need to watch. Apple needs the integrated hardware, i.e., the business agreements that TiVo has established with cable and satellite providers to put their tuners into TiVo boxes. That is where TiVo's real value lies. At least right now, for me.
The main win for TiVo for me is that the satellite receiver or cable receiver is integrated with the controller. This is a big deal, because those stupid IR blaster things do not work reliably. Being able to rely on the program you select actually being recorded as planned 100% of the time is a very important feature. No other solution can offer this very basic and important capability currently that I know of.
So what's my point? My point is I hope that Apple can cut the same deals with cable/satellite companies that TiVo does now, and put Apple branded DVR's with built-in satellite/cable tuners on store shelves. You can already put a TV tuner card in a Linux box and slap on an IR blaster, albeit with quite a bit of hassle. But I want it to work smoothly and flawlessly.
Because analytical continuous equations are impossible to make for climate systems. They often involve multiple, linked, simultaneous partial differential equations. Computers can solve these things iteratively.
The exact method you cite is how climate science looks to me to be progressing. I agree though that there is some hysteria about this, with lots of end-of-world predictions, but that's no reason to whistle past the graveyard, either.:-) (apologies for the horribly mixed metaphor)
Clearly we are contributing to weather to *some* degree. The question is, to what degree, and is the effect harmful? I don't think the jury is out yet.
I just wish all this wasn't tied to such limited technologies. I'm waiting for a TV that has an open interface for changing channels, so that anything plugged into its control port can do any operation on it. IR is unreliable, but look what has been done with universal remote controls. TiVo tries to use "IR blasters" to change TV channels, but it's unreliable. I would like to see some sort of open hardware communications standard emerge in TV's and stereos, so that anything (eg my computer) can connect to the unit's serial control port and do anything it wants to with it, reliably.
Why do they act fast in this instance, while they are so often famously lackadaisical and incompetent when it comes to their main task?
This underscores an important trait of all governmental organizations. Because they are of necessity and even by definition completely politically motivated, the thing they all must become very good at at is defending their budgets, which includes their payrolls. Results are never measured, because amazingly, that is not what their overseers (typically Congress or the military) want to see. Instead, they seek to generate "anecdotes of progress," for dog-and-pony shows put on for the public or for Generals or Congresspersons or other politically important folks.
So yes, the innocent must be fired, so that when people ask, "Is security better now?, LANL can say, "look, we did something!" There is no probably no real intrinsic driver to really make security top-priority, other than the patriotism and consciences of those involved. While many are patriotic and take their responsibilities seriously, this is not as urgent a pressure as getting a paycheck, and the best way to do keep doing this is to not get noticed. These poor people got noticed.
I wish there were tuners for Satellite/cable TV you could plug into your PCI slot. Then I would get one of the Linux interfaces, the names of all of which escape me and which I'm too lazy to look up.:-) Tivo is the best compromise, failing that. It has a pretty good interface, and great capabilities, compared to the crappy PVRs being sold everywhere that "compete" with TiVo.
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There is no defense against crap passwords. If you have a crappy password and ssh turned on, the box is very vulnerable.
I do agree that its growing popularity will encourage virus and malware authors to find exploits in the OS. But Mac OS X is pretty analogous to Linux, security-wise. I'm sure occasional exploits will be found, and some have already been discovered. But they are rare, and relatively hard to use. I haven't seen any that enable a script kiddy with a shell script to hack into 50 OS X machines and turn them into zombies like you can with Windows.
The fact is that OS X is, inherently and by design, more secure than Windows. Even if it had 90% user base and was made for use by monkeys, I daresay there would be more Windows viruses going around than OS X viruses (of which I have yet to hear even of the possibility, much less any real attacks).
Jesus Fucking Christ to you, too. :-)
Try this experiment: install OS X and connect to the Internet. Leave it connected for a week. Now install Windows and connect to the Internet. Leave it connected for 30 minutes. Which one will be hacked? My point is that Windows needs special steps to be _protected_; Mac OS X requires special hacking and other circumstances to become _vulnerable_. The QuickTime ruse you refer to no doubt requires some social engineering to make work... that's just a guess on my part. Am I right?
Furthermore, the buffer overflows in quicktime do not afford an attacker root priviledges, do they? And when vulnerabilities are found, Apple, unlike Microsoft, so far anyway, has a great record of fixing them immediately. Apple has a great record on security in OS X. You are not going to see a flood of crippling, disabling OS X attacks like you see every couple of months with Windows viruses that take out our whole email system at work from time to time. Hacking an OS X box is HARD.
I agree this will be a good test of the out-of-the-box security of Apple. Actually, I believe that out of the box, Apples are ironclad secure. They start with no services turned on by default. There are no Microsoft-like ActiveX analogous components that allow viruses to replicate if you do something innocuous-sounding like read email or run a word-processor. About the only service that is password-free is Software Update, but that is a client, not a server. If users turn on sshd and choose a poor password, they may well be attacked. This will probably rarely happen, since most people enabling ssh will be aware of the risks of poor passwords, and not really complain if attacked. I think this is just FUD for marketing.
You are speaking totally out of your ass here, sir. The "technical issues" you are glossing over? Would they include the ability to determine the semantic content of a detectic brain pattern, verify its veracity, and then determine whether any discrepancies might have been willful or not? Just a matter of time for that, eh?
Lie detection machines are purely an artistic endeavor, there is currently no science behind them and I see no reason to think that a machine that uses brainwaves to control movements leads to the invention of a lie detector machine.
The most confusing thing I see for new users in OS X, time and time again, is finding your documents using the non-spatially oriented abstraction misleadingly called the "Finder" in OS X. Clicking a mouse button is easy compared to the abstraction known as a "path," apparently.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the identities of those imprisoned there is secret. The problem I have with all of this is the secrecy. The question really boils down to how great a threat you think terrorism really poses to U.S. If it threatens our very existence, then yes, we have to sacrifice freedoms for survival. But short of that, I am very hesitant to allow government to secretly abduct citizens without a trial, no matter what they claim they were doing at the time. The whole point of due process is to prevent arbitrary punishment, including "detention," by our government without a PROVEN cause on an INDIVIDUAL basis. .
To repeat an earlier post of mine, the article does not say that the Israeli army does not want D&D players, so your argument is irrelevant. It says they are not granted security clearances as easily. This is a different issue. I don't see a good reason for it. It implies that D&D players are not as good at keeping secrets. Upon reflection, I wonder how you can really design a good test for this criterion?
Flamebaiting aside, the article does not say that the Israeli army does not want D&D players. It says they are not granted security clearances as easily. This is a different issue and one I agree with you about. I don't see a good reason for it. It implies that D&D players are not as good at keeping secrets. Upon reflection, I wonder how you can really design a good test for this criterion?
Troll-bait aside, as a Mac user running OS X at work and at home, I use X11 all the time. The only problem with OS X's windowing system, Aqua, is that it does not support remote windows. With "that horrible X thing," I can and routinely do open graphical windows spawned by applications on other machines running totally different operating systems. It is the only technology out there that does that that I have ever heard of. Even between macs, try opening iTunes on your home machine from your work machine. X11 is a useful application, not horrible at all.
Not meaning to be critical, but the article cited does not explain who these crazy people are. I don't exactly know whom the article is targeting at an audience, in fact. It publish a list of usernames with the number of submissions, along with brief snippets about two specific users. I was hoping to learn more about the actual type of person who is contributing, demographically.
I realize this would have taken a lot of work and might even be impossible, but would have made a hell of a lot better article. :-) Easy for me to say, from the comfort of my office.
Are you using this with a cable box? If you don't have a tuner card and are using a cable or satellite box, you have to set up the IR transmitter to change channels for you when you are not home. The IR transmitter does not know when the channel was successfully changed, it just transmits the "change" signal. Sometimes the signal doesn't get successfully received by the cable box. At least, that happened to me occasionally. About 1-5% of the time. Too often. That's why I went with DirectTV's DVR with built-in tuner; it never misses a channel change.
I don't think I'm interested in a UI that is "good enough" that I "only curse at it once or twice per day."
You probably don't have as high standards for a GUI as I, actually, so maybe number of times per day you curse is not a good measurement. :-) The TiVo interface does a pretty good job, but you have to type words using a "ouija board" interface that really sucks for that purpose. Disgusting piece of work. Also, resorting items in the wish lists takes forever. Those are my main gripes with TiVo.
Ah, yes, I note the Keyspan IR Remote. The problem with this solution is that it sometimes misses a channel change. That is, it thinks it has changed the channel but it hasn't. The DVR has no way to know this has happened, so the wrong show gets recorded. Right? This is the main reason I go with an integrated solution. IN my case, I love TiVo's features, so the DirectTivo units are perfect. They never miss a show, and they are good enough in the UI to where I only curse at it once or twice per day.
Interesting looking film, but no hint of it being available as DVD or anywhere in theatres in the US. ?
What would be the advantage to that? Presumably what people are hoping for when they ask Apple to port to x86 is cheaper hardware. I'm not sure that Apple could do any better/cheaper on such a "locked down" x86 architecture. The mini is a good case in point that their current choice does not preclude inexpensive machines.
The article mentions that portable media players have "failed in the marketplace." It cites the reasons of a small screen coupled with a largish unit relative to the very portable iPod. It occurs to me that the small screen problem could be fixed with high-resolution glasses/goggles, but I don't know if high enough resolution is available in such units, and even if they are, they are probably very pricey. The portability issue is the remaining real problem, technologically speaking. But imagine a device the size of an iPod with such goggles... hmm. Cool!
The article states that Apple "hasn't seen much customer demand" for satellite radio + iPod integration. I wonder what metric they use? The term "demand" is usually used in a market sense to indicate consumer preference, measured by their willingness to buy (units sold relative to price). Since there are no such units available, I wonder what "demand" means to Apple. Not enough people have written asking for it? Focus groups not interested? Just curious...
Sorry for the bad formatting. Let me try again. (yes, I should have used the !$#$$ preview button!)
Really, why would Apple want Tivo? Last I heard tivo was starting to fall on hard times. Far better off just making their own PVR software. You can already hack together a pretty nice PVR using a Motorola DCT-6200 and a Mac. see here : http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C
BZZZT! You can NOT put together a TiVo replacement that RELIABLY records what you want, because there are no other systems that offer BUILT-IN satellite/cable tuners on the market that I'm aware of. Thus, the "just like Tivo" DVR's all have the flaw that sometimes, their IR channel changer thingies fail to actually change the channel. So you miss shows you need to watch. Apple needs the integrated hardware, i.e., the business agreements that TiVo has established with cable and satellite providers to put their tuners into TiVo boxes. That is where TiVo's real value lies. At least right now, for me.
Really, why would Apple want Tivo? Last I heard tivo was starting to fall on hard times. Far better off just making their own PVR software. You can already hack together a pretty nice PVR using a Motorola DCT-6200 and a Mac. see here : http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C BZZZT! You can NOT put together a TiVo replacement that RELIABLY records what you want, because there are no other systems that offer BUILT-IN satellite/cable tuners on the market that I'm aware of. Thus, the "just like Tivo" DVR's all have the flaw that sometimes, their IR channel changer thingies fail to actually change the channel. So you miss shows you need to watch. Apple needs the integrated hardware, i.e., the business agreements that TiVo has established with cable and satellite providers to put their tuners into TiVo boxes. That is where TiVo's real value lies. At least right now, for me.
So what's my point? My point is I hope that Apple can cut the same deals with cable/satellite companies that TiVo does now, and put Apple branded DVR's with built-in satellite/cable tuners on store shelves. You can already put a TV tuner card in a Linux box and slap on an IR blaster, albeit with quite a bit of hassle. But I want it to work smoothly and flawlessly.
The exact method you cite is how climate science looks to me to be progressing. I agree though that there is some hysteria about this, with lots of end-of-world predictions, but that's no reason to whistle past the graveyard, either. :-) (apologies for the horribly mixed metaphor)
Clearly we are contributing to weather to *some* degree. The question is, to what degree, and is the effect harmful? I don't think the jury is out yet.
I just wish all this wasn't tied to such limited technologies. I'm waiting for a TV that has an open interface for changing channels, so that anything plugged into its control port can do any operation on it. IR is unreliable, but look what has been done with universal remote controls. TiVo tries to use "IR blasters" to change TV channels, but it's unreliable. I would like to see some sort of open hardware communications standard emerge in TV's and stereos, so that anything (eg my computer) can connect to the unit's serial control port and do anything it wants to with it, reliably.
I think the point to the parent was that Apple seems interested in competing in this arena, not that MS was going to use Apple's technolgy.
This underscores an important trait of all governmental organizations. Because they are of necessity and even by definition completely politically motivated, the thing they all must become very good at at is defending their budgets, which includes their payrolls. Results are never measured, because amazingly, that is not what their overseers (typically Congress or the military) want to see. Instead, they seek to generate "anecdotes of progress," for dog-and-pony shows put on for the public or for Generals or Congresspersons or other politically important folks.
So yes, the innocent must be fired, so that when people ask, "Is security better now?, LANL can say, "look, we did something!" There is no probably no real intrinsic driver to really make security top-priority, other than the patriotism and consciences of those involved. While many are patriotic and take their responsibilities seriously, this is not as urgent a pressure as getting a paycheck, and the best way to do keep doing this is to not get noticed. These poor people got noticed.
I wish there were tuners for Satellite/cable TV you could plug into your PCI slot. Then I would get one of the Linux interfaces, the names of all of which escape me and which I'm too lazy to look up. :-) Tivo is the best compromise, failing that. It has a pretty good interface, and great capabilities, compared to the crappy PVRs being sold everywhere that "compete" with TiVo.