If you're not using a Fedora-based OS then SELinux probably doesn't work, and any competent Unix user probably has a bunch of scripts in $HOME that they use to do random things; I certainly do. I could put them in/usr/local/bin instead but that's a pain in itself.
You also need to ensure that/tmp and/var/tmp are noexec, which Ubuntu, at least, seems to dislike. On the plus side,/tmp is normally a RAM disk so any malware installed there will vanish at the next reboot.
Frankly, in an enterprise setup I would be surprised if user home directories were not mounted with noexec (or whatever such an option would be called in Mac OS X), which would thwart this problem.
It would reduce the problem, not eliminate it. Just because you can't run $HOME/malware.sh directly doesn't mean you can't 'bash $HOME/malware.sh'.
So that means it's now running with only user privileges instead of admin rights, which seems like a slight improvement for those dumb enough to install it.
Not when it logs your banking passwords and sends them to the Russian Mafia. Most of the things that malware wants to do can be done in user mode as well as admin.
Does the principle apply to Linux? If yes, then it matters, for nerds, for real.;)
If you download and run random programs on any OS I've used you're vulnerable to malware. You could partially mitigate it by mounting/home as noexec, and you could probably use SELinux to prevent users from running any applications from/home, but that's a pain.
Even simple phrases like "And its fleece was white as snow" makes a decent passphrase due to length, changing it to "And) its( fleece* was6 white5 as4 snow3" makes it even better and still easy to remember.
And you're going to type that in every time you use your phone?
Coming up with a good passphrase is much easier than convincing people to go to the trouble of using one.
So why doesn't the fantastic mathematically complex encyption ever work? Why should I trust https? Or any other encrypted transmission?
Encryption does work: the flaw is normally in the key handling.
There's a fundamental incompatibility between security and convenience: people encrypt the data on their phone with 256-bit AES using a password of 'password' and are surprised that it can be broken. Or they rely on the phone to encrypt their data with a key that is... stored on the phone.
It does everything the status bar did that I cared about (i.e. everything except displaying "Document Done") without wasting the screen space all the time.
Which is great, if you're running Firefox on a phone. On a real PC it looks pretty clunky.
I haven't programmed SPARC in a decade, but one of the differences I remember between SPARC and x86 is that SPARC was big-endian; that didn't matter in most cases but if you had some manky C code doing weird things with pointers it could be a problem. It did cause a few issues when I was working on a mix of SPARC and Sun 386 workstations years before that.
Fuel is a huge cost for a modern launcher - not in the direct cost of buying the fuel, but in the impact on costs of the need to carry the fuel
Fuel is cheap, fuel tanks are cheap. Generally speaking, reusing the engines a few times will save you far more money than reducing the amount of fuel you require, and increasing the launch rate will dramatically reduce costs even if you have to throw them away every time.
The spaceflight industry would be celebrating if we'd actually reached the point where fuel was a significant part of their launch costs.
It's estimated that Lake Mead will go up ~30 feet this year due to the extreme amount of snowfall we had last winter. Nature will solve this problem for us!
Of course, at $1000 a kilo we're looking at $100,000 per person per flight, but possibly the low-orbit flights don't need as much fuel as satellite launching flights as they don't need to achieve such a high orbit.
A suborbital flight from London to Sydney requires going about 95% of the way to orbit, so the cost would be pretty much the same. If there was a viable market for suborbital transport we'd already have them, but the laws of physics prevent you from using it as a way to start small and build up to orbital flights over time... there's a big gap between suborbital tourism/science and orbital flight where costs increase significantly but the market doesn't.
The 10 or 20 kilometers that you can save by using this kind of design is really a small fraction of the distance to cross. It can make you save a few percents of fuel, which is interesting, but divide the price per 15 ? Quit dreaming. It will be 5% and you will be grateful for it !
Fuel is a negligible cost for any modern launcher. Skylon's benefit is not reduced fuel use but that it's a fully reusable SSTO, which means you don't need to build a new one for each flight and you don't need to assemble multiple stages before you can take off; you just fill it up and tow it to the runway.
I still think the development costs are way too high to justify, but the idea seems sound.
Falcon 9 heavy will be $1k per pound in 2013 ( ok, $2.2k per kg )
And that's before they start reusing the first stages.
Skylon's numbers used to look good, but if SpaceX can meet their claims then an SSTO needs to get down to more like $100 a pound to jusfify the development cost. Or find a big market for small payloads where SpaceX can't match the $1000 per kilo cost.
Not when implemented the way Firewire did, by allowing an arbitrary device to write an arbitrary addresses in memory.
Also, it made the host chipset significantly more complex; years ago we looked at putting Firewire (or rather, IEEE1394) into some of our low-cost chips and from what I understand it took so many more transistors than USB that it wasn't worth the die space at that time.
If your USB ports are on the back of your PC, on the floor, under your desk then it really is easier to just try it both ways.
Or on the side of a laptop. Am I really supposed to have to pick up the laptop and look at the side of it to figure out which way the USB connector is supposed to fit?
I often have to try two or three times to get a USB connector into my laptop; either it's upside down or I'm pushing it at a bad angle and it just won't go in. Since the connector looks almost the same on top and bottom there's no immediately obvious way to tell which way up it should go; at least firewire was an asymmetrical connector so the shape alone told you which way it connected.
I've never had such experience with my Windows box nor have millions of other Windows users.
Weird. I remember a co-worker doing a clean install of Windows XP on a PC a few years ago and it had been remotely infected by a worm before it even managed to install all the security updates from Windows Update.
And yes, giving it an unfirewalled network connection was probably a bad idea.
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How is that a pain?
If you're not using a Fedora-based OS then SELinux probably doesn't work, and any competent Unix user probably has a bunch of scripts in $HOME that they use to do random things; I certainly do. I could put them in /usr/local/bin instead but that's a pain in itself.
You also need to ensure that /tmp and /var/tmp are noexec, which Ubuntu, at least, seems to dislike. On the plus side, /tmp is normally a RAM disk so any malware installed there will vanish at the next reboot.
Frankly, in an enterprise setup I would be surprised if user home directories were not mounted with noexec (or whatever such an option would be called in Mac OS X), which would thwart this problem.
It would reduce the problem, not eliminate it. Just because you can't run $HOME/malware.sh directly doesn't mean you can't 'bash $HOME/malware.sh'.
So that means it's now running with only user privileges instead of admin rights, which seems like a slight improvement for those dumb enough to install it.
Not when it logs your banking passwords and sends them to the Russian Mafia. Most of the things that malware wants to do can be done in user mode as well as admin.
Does the principle apply to Linux? If yes, then it matters, for nerds, for real. ;)
If you download and run random programs on any OS I've used you're vulnerable to malware. You could partially mitigate it by mounting /home as noexec, and you could probably use SELinux to prevent users from running any applications from /home, but that's a pain.
Even simple phrases like "And its fleece was white as snow" makes a decent passphrase due to length, changing it to "And) its( fleece* was6 white5 as4 snow3" makes it even better and still easy to remember.
And you're going to type that in every time you use your phone?
Coming up with a good passphrase is much easier than convincing people to go to the trouble of using one.
So why doesn't the fantastic mathematically complex encyption ever work? Why should I trust https? Or any other encrypted transmission?
Encryption does work: the flaw is normally in the key handling.
There's a fundamental incompatibility between security and convenience: people encrypt the data on their phone with 256-bit AES using a password of 'password' and are surprised that it can be broken. Or they rely on the phone to encrypt their data with a key that is... stored on the phone.
It does everything the status bar did that I cared about (i.e. everything except displaying "Document Done") without wasting the screen space all the time.
Which is great, if you're running Firefox on a phone. On a real PC it looks pretty clunky.
And removing the URL bar is simply retarded.
Shouldn't that just be a compiler option?
I haven't programmed SPARC in a decade, but one of the differences I remember between SPARC and x86 is that SPARC was big-endian; that didn't matter in most cases but if you had some manky C code doing weird things with pointers it could be a problem. It did cause a few issues when I was working on a mix of SPARC and Sun 386 workstations years before that.
See, no mouse needed!
Yes, we're back to the glory days of DOS and command-line Unix.
If the fastest way to start a new program in your GUI is to guess the name and type it in, then you're doing something wrong.
Fuel is a huge cost for a modern launcher - not in the direct cost of buying the fuel, but in the impact on costs of the need to carry the fuel
Fuel is cheap, fuel tanks are cheap. Generally speaking, reusing the engines a few times will save you far more money than reducing the amount of fuel you require, and increasing the launch rate will dramatically reduce costs even if you have to throw them away every time.
The spaceflight industry would be celebrating if we'd actually reached the point where fuel was a significant part of their launch costs.
Why would a professional wrestling channel care about space flight?
Wrestling in Space! It's the new must-watch show!
It's a loan guarantee, meaning we cosigned with the bank for them. The taxpayers are only out if this thing can not pay back it's loan.
But if it made financial sense, it probably wouldn't need loan guarantees.
It's estimated that Lake Mead will go up ~30 feet this year due to the extreme amount of snowfall we had last winter. Nature will solve this problem for us!
Thank God for Global Warming(tm)!
Of course, at $1000 a kilo we're looking at $100,000 per person per flight, but possibly the low-orbit flights don't need as much fuel as satellite launching flights as they don't need to achieve such a high orbit.
A suborbital flight from London to Sydney requires going about 95% of the way to orbit, so the cost would be pretty much the same. If there was a viable market for suborbital transport we'd already have them, but the laws of physics prevent you from using it as a way to start small and build up to orbital flights over time... there's a big gap between suborbital tourism/science and orbital flight where costs increase significantly but the market doesn't.
The 10 or 20 kilometers that you can save by using this kind of design is really a small fraction of the distance to cross. It can make you save a few percents of fuel, which is interesting, but divide the price per 15 ? Quit dreaming. It will be 5% and you will be grateful for it !
Fuel is a negligible cost for any modern launcher. Skylon's benefit is not reduced fuel use but that it's a fully reusable SSTO, which means you don't need to build a new one for each flight and you don't need to assemble multiple stages before you can take off; you just fill it up and tow it to the runway.
I still think the development costs are way too high to justify, but the idea seems sound.
Falcon 9 heavy will be $1k per pound in 2013 ( ok, $2.2k per kg )
And that's before they start reusing the first stages.
Skylon's numbers used to look good, but if SpaceX can meet their claims then an SSTO needs to get down to more like $100 a pound to jusfify the development cost. Or find a big market for small payloads where SpaceX can't match the $1000 per kilo cost.
The CFL manufacturers had less money than the oil people. Sorry. I forgot...
Didn't the 'ozone hole' only become an OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE problem after the patent on CFCs in air conditioning expired?
DMA is a fine idea for external devices.
Not when implemented the way Firewire did, by allowing an arbitrary device to write an arbitrary addresses in memory.
Also, it made the host chipset significantly more complex; years ago we looked at putting Firewire (or rather, IEEE1394) into some of our low-cost chips and from what I understand it took so many more transistors than USB that it wasn't worth the die space at that time.
If your USB ports are on the back of your PC, on the floor, under your desk then it really is easier to just try it both ways.
Or on the side of a laptop. Am I really supposed to have to pick up the laptop and look at the side of it to figure out which way the USB connector is supposed to fit?
The USB logo goes "up", Brainiac.
Neither of my Flash drives have a USB logo on them. I've no idea about my other USB devices.
In any case, even if that was true it's a piss-poor substitute for a properly designed connector.
I often have to try two or three times to get a USB connector into my laptop; either it's upside down or I'm pushing it at a bad angle and it just won't go in. Since the connector looks almost the same on top and bottom there's no immediately obvious way to tell which way up it should go; at least firewire was an asymmetrical connector so the shape alone told you which way it connected.
If he designed pre-NGE Galaxies, his advice is valid.
I disagree: SWG was the most boring MMO I've ever played... I didn't even last the free trial week.
Firewire was the superior standard 10 years ago and USB killed it
Firewire was superior in some respects, but inferior in others. For example, wasn't there a dollar per port license fee?
I'm not sure I should listen to advice on game design from the designer of Star Wars Galaxies?
I've never had such experience with my Windows box nor have millions of other Windows users.
Weird. I remember a co-worker doing a clean install of Windows XP on a PC a few years ago and it had been remotely infected by a worm before it even managed to install all the security updates from Windows Update.
And yes, giving it an unfirewalled network connection was probably a bad idea.