If you use amazon hosting or vps type solutions it is easy to tell. If you are using google sites or google app engine, you have no idea where your data is being served from.
A Google employee confirmed that support for Google Apps is coming. I think the more interesting point is that it sounds like Google Apps users will be able to send G+ messages to people only within their Apps domain. So it sounds it will be a service sort of like Yammer for Google Apps users.
An attack like this could have a few purposes. The 2 that come to mind for me are: (1) growing a botnet to steal information from unsuspecting users (and other botnet type uses), or (2) having a specific target in-mind and using broad attacks and hope you penetrate the target.
The virus that hit the nuclear material processing plant in Iran was a piece of Malware that infected thousands and thousands of systems, but its ultimate goal was just a few machines. If these tainted components that enter the US have final targets that are "secure sites" in the US, this seems like a good attack medium.
The US relies heavily in component manufacturing overseas. There are multiple factories a blackhat could inject their malware into, and hope it gets to the final target.
This is especially true if its a government (China comes to mind) that wants information from US sites. The government could walk into a factory in China and tell the manufacturer to inject malware into their production.
As I've gotten older (and now have money to buy stuff), I'm fine with a way for copyright owners to shutdown pirates after repeated offenses. (When I first got a cable modem in 1997 or so, I got internet shutoff due to some involvement in pirating. A call to my ISP got my internet turned back on.)
BUT, there has to be some type of appeals process. If an arm of the MPAA can just say "these 1000 IP addresses were downloading my movie", and you have no recourse to protest the claim, this will be farm to easy to abuse and people not involved will get sucked into the mess.
But I'm not sure what alternatives there are? You could have the provider monitor "trouble" users after X number of complaints, but then the cost is pushed to the providers and they don't want that (and consumers wouldn't be too happy either).
There's a reason the court system is nice (well, nice in theory). Accused are given a chance to defend themselves and it's up to the accuser to prove that the defendant is guilty. The system that these providers are getting into probably doesn't have this sort of checks in place.
Before the iPhone or even the existence of Google, Microsoft was developing and selling millions of mobile devices and created many patents on them. Sure, most were nonstarters or even lame, but they showed a lot of people, including Steve Jobs, what might work and what to avoid. If Microsoft tries to recoup their investment, can you really blame them?
Not really. Part of me understands that capitalism needs this. But at the same time, the holders of the patents aren't sharing their technology, or charge absurd prices for simple ideas.
We really just need to reduce the length of software patents.
Embedding an entire OS (WindRiver VXWorks) costs around $15 per system. Putting Java on a Blu-ray player or phone costs in a similar range ($5-15 I believe).
Microsoft contributed nothing to the development of this phone, except being the first ones to patent specific ideas. I'm all for protecting processes, but our patent system really needs to be fixed.
So Skype allows group of text-only for their free accounts. Group video chat requires that everyone be a Skype subscriber to get access. Will this limitation continue?
Google+ allows group video chat (Hangouts) up to 10 people for free, though there is no mobile support yet.
Also, I'm uncertain of what Google's back-end architecture is (looks like it's P2P also, using XMPP Jingle, but I don't know the details of this tech). Skype uses supernodes to connect people together, which is really a P2P technology. Since any person running a skype client that is not behind NAT can act as a supernode, connection quality on skype calls can easily vary.
Oh, I know. I ran a site on Wordpress for a little over a year (fan site for a video game). My top traffic in a day was 20,000 unique visitors and 150k page views. During that peak day I was getting 6-7 hits a second, and without caching I would have been dead in the water.
Having a simple theme that could apply across an entire site is amazingly nice. I really like CMSes and will use them again for future endeavors. But not understanding the tools (wordpress) you use when hosting a site yourself is just asking for trouble.
Like all content management systems, what could be static content is stored in a database (I'm looking at you Wordpress). Many people running these type of sites don't go through the steps of setting up some type of caching.
Someone posted about working as a TSA employee on here a few days ago. He said he worked there for a few months. Most of the TSA employees don't enjoy their jobs and get no pleasure out of screwing with passengers.
A job is a job. It's unskilled work that will pay the bills, so people are going to take it if they can get it. If you understand that TSA employees probably hate their job as much as you hate them doing it, show them some respect and they'll be nice to you.
Then you get a single company (Apple) dictating the APIs that developers can use. Some of my fun OSX apps can't be added to the Apple App Store since they use private APIs.
After spending a few years in Kansas, I'd wouldn't object. But a lot of airplanes are produces in Wichita, KS, so the government would have to move those operations out first.
For those interested, Wichita is the home to Boeing, Spirit, Bombardier/Learjet, Cessna, and Raytheon,
I just started using their service a few months back and was rather amazed with how awful their web interface is. I'm almost willing to pay for a cert so I don't have to use it.
I noticed this a few days ago when I was trying to generate some new certs. I also noticed there was almost no news coverage on it. At least nothing bad happened.
1) Deep packet inspect for gets to specific sites. 2) DNS hijacking. 3) IP address blocking of known sites.
1) All 3 of these have workarounds. Deep inspection of traffic can be overridden with the use of HTTPS. 2) DNS hijacking could be bypassed by using DNS servers from outside the country (or setting up your own). Of course, they could filter traffic on the DNS port outside of their network and force you to resolve everything through your ISP. 3) IP address blocking can only be worked around if you route through another IP. This means using a proxy or VPN.
I can tell you if my country did this, I would setup a VPS in another contry, install OpenVPN on it and use OpenVPN when I wanted to get access to more questionable sites.
There are workarounds to any type of blocking they do. Unless they completely lock down the internet for their customers (forced proxy servers or something), people will work around it.
abstraction layers on top? JQuery type implementations. Remember the days of yore where Javascript behavior was wildly different between all the browsers (and it still somewhat is). Well, other people came around and created abstraction libraries on top of it to make it easier and more consistent across all the browsers. there are people out there that will continue to do this. HTML implementation and specs have been changing rather rapidly, so it may still be a little while before we get abstractions, but it will happen.
Actually, I would say it is patents. If you have a PS3 or Blu-Ray player in the house, go look on it and notice all the fun vendor symbols on the back/bottom. Once you'll notice is "Java". The menu structure for all BluRay disks is java based, which means they have to pay java royalties on every system sold (last time I looked into the cost of embedding Java, it was around $5 per device).
With all the patents and copyrighted software/hardware required to play blu-ray disks, I bet it would cost at a minimum of $25 per system to add blu-ray support (at this is at the manufacturing level). They probably didn't want to deal with those licensing costs.
I think the better comment is "DCVS is super amazing!!"
Many people forget that there ware 2 other decent implementations of distributed source control out there (Mercurial and Bazaar), both of which function rather closely to Git. Though, from what I've seen, Git is currently the fastest and most efficient when it comes to processing various commands, but they all do everything rather quickly.
Git I would say is popular in the open source world for 2 reasons: Linus uses it and Github. My gripes still stand with it requiring Cygwin on Windows and its weird terminology (which is backwards from many of its predecessors). It's a great tool and I'm happy that its pushing people away from CVS and SVN, but it's not perfect and it's not the only DVCS on the block.
A few years back I worked for a hardware company that was looking to partner with MS for their storage software stack. We were doing some pretty crazy things to integrate their OS into our hardware and were working off promises of specific features and deadlines.
After being 8 months+ into the project, MS starts missing software drops and stops communicating release status with us. We eventually discover they didn't like their product as was and was going back to the drawing board, which basically screwed our release.
I don't expect a lot out of MS when it comes top products that arent their main line revenue makers.
If you want real graphics performance out of a browser, you should be using WebGL (assuming Flash is not an option). WebGL lets you execute OpenGL code on the video card of the machine, which will be a ton faster than Canvas.
You have to remember that Canvas is just an image rendering platform. From my understand of Canvas in Firefox, it actually renders every frame as a PNG and displays it to the screen. There is no GPU acceleration. That's what WebGL is fore.
Why does it rely on flash? It has Chrome which comes with WebGL and Canvas support. Did you notice that Angry Birds is running on Chrome now? Did know know it uses WebGL?
Also, you should check out ForPlay, it's a gaming library that compiles to WebGL, Canvas, Flash, or Java (with Objective-C in the works). That'll allow programming of games that works across the web and mobile platforms. With that, game developers for mobile/web apps can push games that work on Chrome OS with little issue.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use amazon hosting or vps type solutions it is easy to tell. If you are using google sites or google app engine, you have no idea where your data is being served from.
A Google employee confirmed that support for Google Apps is coming. I think the more interesting point is that it sounds like Google Apps users will be able to send G+ messages to people only within their Apps domain. So it sounds it will be a service sort of like Yammer for Google Apps users.
"Doing it for the Lulz."
I'd imagine it's the same reason many others publicize their work, for the notoriety and as a symbol of proof that they did it.
Oops, I thought the summary linked elsewhere (had another article open), and linked to the wrong one. Just ignore me please.
This is on the front page of wired.com right now:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1.
And it's all on 1 page!
An attack like this could have a few purposes. The 2 that come to mind for me are: (1) growing a botnet to steal information from unsuspecting users (and other botnet type uses), or (2) having a specific target in-mind and using broad attacks and hope you penetrate the target.
The virus that hit the nuclear material processing plant in Iran was a piece of Malware that infected thousands and thousands of systems, but its ultimate goal was just a few machines. If these tainted components that enter the US have final targets that are "secure sites" in the US, this seems like a good attack medium.
The US relies heavily in component manufacturing overseas. There are multiple factories a blackhat could inject their malware into, and hope it gets to the final target.
This is especially true if its a government (China comes to mind) that wants information from US sites. The government could walk into a factory in China and tell the manufacturer to inject malware into their production.
As I've gotten older (and now have money to buy stuff), I'm fine with a way for copyright owners to shutdown pirates after repeated offenses. (When I first got a cable modem in 1997 or so, I got internet shutoff due to some involvement in pirating. A call to my ISP got my internet turned back on.)
BUT, there has to be some type of appeals process. If an arm of the MPAA can just say "these 1000 IP addresses were downloading my movie", and you have no recourse to protest the claim, this will be farm to easy to abuse and people not involved will get sucked into the mess.
But I'm not sure what alternatives there are? You could have the provider monitor "trouble" users after X number of complaints, but then the cost is pushed to the providers and they don't want that (and consumers wouldn't be too happy either).
There's a reason the court system is nice (well, nice in theory). Accused are given a chance to defend themselves and it's up to the accuser to prove that the defendant is guilty. The system that these providers are getting into probably doesn't have this sort of checks in place.
Before the iPhone or even the existence of Google, Microsoft was developing and selling millions of mobile devices and created many patents on them. Sure, most were nonstarters or even lame, but they showed a lot of people, including Steve Jobs, what might work and what to avoid. If Microsoft tries to recoup their investment, can you really blame them?
Not really. Part of me understands that capitalism needs this. But at the same time, the holders of the patents aren't sharing their technology, or charge absurd prices for simple ideas.
We really just need to reduce the length of software patents.
Embedding an entire OS (WindRiver VXWorks) costs around $15 per system. Putting Java on a Blu-ray player or phone costs in a similar range ($5-15 I believe).
Microsoft contributed nothing to the development of this phone, except being the first ones to patent specific ideas. I'm all for protecting processes, but our patent system really needs to be fixed.
So Skype allows group of text-only for their free accounts. Group video chat requires that everyone be a Skype subscriber to get access. Will this limitation continue?
Google+ allows group video chat (Hangouts) up to 10 people for free, though there is no mobile support yet.
Also, I'm uncertain of what Google's back-end architecture is (looks like it's P2P also, using XMPP Jingle, but I don't know the details of this tech). Skype uses supernodes to connect people together, which is really a P2P technology. Since any person running a skype client that is not behind NAT can act as a supernode, connection quality on skype calls can easily vary.
Oh, I know. I ran a site on Wordpress for a little over a year (fan site for a video game). My top traffic in a day was 20,000 unique visitors and 150k page views. During that peak day I was getting 6-7 hits a second, and without caching I would have been dead in the water.
Having a simple theme that could apply across an entire site is amazingly nice. I really like CMSes and will use them again for future endeavors. But not understanding the tools (wordpress) you use when hosting a site yourself is just asking for trouble.
Like all content management systems, what could be static content is stored in a database (I'm looking at you Wordpress). Many people running these type of sites don't go through the steps of setting up some type of caching.
Someone posted about working as a TSA employee on here a few days ago. He said he worked there for a few months. Most of the TSA employees don't enjoy their jobs and get no pleasure out of screwing with passengers.
A job is a job. It's unskilled work that will pay the bills, so people are going to take it if they can get it. If you understand that TSA employees probably hate their job as much as you hate them doing it, show them some respect and they'll be nice to you.
Then you get a single company (Apple) dictating the APIs that developers can use. Some of my fun OSX apps can't be added to the Apple App Store since they use private APIs.
After spending a few years in Kansas, I'd wouldn't object. But a lot of airplanes are produces in Wichita, KS, so the government would have to move those operations out first.
For those interested, Wichita is the home to Boeing, Spirit, Bombardier/Learjet, Cessna, and Raytheon,
It would stop the DEA from raiding medical pot shops in California.
I just started using their service a few months back and was rather amazed with how awful their web interface is. I'm almost willing to pay for a cert so I don't have to use it.
darn, just used up all my mode points.
I noticed this a few days ago when I was trying to generate some new certs. I also noticed there was almost no news coverage on it. At least nothing bad happened.
So the techniques I'm aware of:
1) Deep packet inspect for gets to specific sites.
2) DNS hijacking.
3) IP address blocking of known sites.
1) All 3 of these have workarounds. Deep inspection of traffic can be overridden with the use of HTTPS.
2) DNS hijacking could be bypassed by using DNS servers from outside the country (or setting up your own). Of course, they could filter traffic on the DNS port outside of their network and force you to resolve everything through your ISP.
3) IP address blocking can only be worked around if you route through another IP. This means using a proxy or VPN.
I can tell you if my country did this, I would setup a VPS in another contry, install OpenVPN on it and use OpenVPN when I wanted to get access to more questionable sites.
There are workarounds to any type of blocking they do. Unless they completely lock down the internet for their customers (forced proxy servers or something), people will work around it.
abstraction layers on top? JQuery type implementations. Remember the days of yore where Javascript behavior was wildly different between all the browsers (and it still somewhat is). Well, other people came around and created abstraction libraries on top of it to make it easier and more consistent across all the browsers. there are people out there that will continue to do this. HTML implementation and specs have been changing rather rapidly, so it may still be a little while before we get abstractions, but it will happen.
Actually, I would say it is patents. If you have a PS3 or Blu-Ray player in the house, go look on it and notice all the fun vendor symbols on the back/bottom. Once you'll notice is "Java". The menu structure for all BluRay disks is java based, which means they have to pay java royalties on every system sold (last time I looked into the cost of embedding Java, it was around $5 per device).
With all the patents and copyrighted software/hardware required to play blu-ray disks, I bet it would cost at a minimum of $25 per system to add blu-ray support (at this is at the manufacturing level). They probably didn't want to deal with those licensing costs.
I think the better comment is "DCVS is super amazing!!"
Many people forget that there ware 2 other decent implementations of distributed source control out there (Mercurial and Bazaar), both of which function rather closely to Git. Though, from what I've seen, Git is currently the fastest and most efficient when it comes to processing various commands, but they all do everything rather quickly.
Git I would say is popular in the open source world for 2 reasons: Linus uses it and Github. My gripes still stand with it requiring Cygwin on Windows and its weird terminology (which is backwards from many of its predecessors). It's a great tool and I'm happy that its pushing people away from CVS and SVN, but it's not perfect and it's not the only DVCS on the block.
I would upvote you but I have a story to share.
A few years back I worked for a hardware company that was looking to partner with MS for their storage software stack. We were doing some pretty crazy things to integrate their OS into our hardware and were working off promises of specific features and deadlines.
After being 8 months+ into the project, MS starts missing software drops and stops communicating release status with us. We eventually discover they didn't like their product as was and was going back to the drawing board, which basically screwed our release.
I don't expect a lot out of MS when it comes top products that arent their main line revenue makers.
If you want real graphics performance out of a browser, you should be using WebGL (assuming Flash is not an option). WebGL lets you execute OpenGL code on the video card of the machine, which will be a ton faster than Canvas.
You have to remember that Canvas is just an image rendering platform. From my understand of Canvas in Firefox, it actually renders every frame as a PNG and displays it to the screen. There is no GPU acceleration. That's what WebGL is fore.
Why does it rely on flash? It has Chrome which comes with WebGL and Canvas support. Did you notice that Angry Birds is running on Chrome now? Did know know it uses WebGL?
Also, you should check out ForPlay, it's a gaming library that compiles to WebGL, Canvas, Flash, or Java (with Objective-C in the works). That'll allow programming of games that works across the web and mobile platforms. With that, game developers for mobile/web apps can push games that work on Chrome OS with little issue.