There could be, for example, a law that required all commercial software be sold in source form (with binaries optional). This would make a lot of sense from an economic perspective - it would prevent vendor lock-in and all the damage that it causes to the economy. It would also be completely distinct from copyright.
I would wholeheartedly support such a law.
Keeping the Source Code hidden has caused untold misery for thousands if not millions of people.
Even if you don't get permission to redistribute, the Source Code is still vital; because without it, you can't use your own property in ways that you think fit. And withholding Source Code hasn't done much to deter unauthorised copying of Windows.
KDE4 isn't in Sid yet (it's a credit to Debian that "unstable" is actually so stable, that they have to have an "experimental" distribution). I'd grab a Kubuntu liveCD and try that, but it wouldn't necessarily prove anything: crashing in Kubuntu is hardly news.
Interesting. The "new" version of Konqueror also claims to be 3.5.8.
This time, it asks me what to do with a file it is trying to download, then crashes (with a different-looking requester; maybe that also changed between versions).
It's possible to boot up from a USB storage device.
An ISO image is just a filesystem which you can mount. All you need to do then is copy all the files and folder structure from a downloaded installation CD image onto a USB stick of 1GB or larger, and make the USB stick bootable using the bootloader configurator thoughtfully provided. You now have a rescue "disc", albeit a USB one.
The "Insert" key is useful. If you have been using shift+cursor keys rather than the mouse to select text, then Ctrl+Insert = copy and Shift+Insert = paste. (Of course, if you have been using the mouse, then you can just push the middle button to paste whatever is highlit.) Insert also scrolls up by line in Links.
By the way, this technique does NOT work on all systems. I'm not entirely sure about the last time I tried it on Ubuntu, but on at least some systems, the initrd will also respond to init=foo, thus you'll get the initrd environment. That's not to say that you couldn't do similar damage from there (including running a root shell on the "real" system)
Ubuntu have been experimenting with upstart as a replacement for the traditional init lately, and I don't know for sure how compatible this is with the existing syntax.
It's possible to continue the boot process manually if you somehow find yourself within the initrd environment, including launching a root shell. The only times I've ever managed to get a machine in that state have been while I was mucking around trying to build my own distro (actually by modifying someone else's distro, but isn't that how everyone does it?) and missed out some important file or other.
I'm just stressing that there is no one way to attack all Linux systems.
Which is a good thing in and of itself. Biodiversity in ecosystems, and all that.
"init 6" is not what you want -- you don't have init running at all at this point. What you want is to manually unmount, or "mount -o remount,ro", every filesystem, then sync, then either physically reboot or mess with/sbin/poweroff and such.
It doesn't really matter about init not running. The command as given will launch init, going straight into runlevel 6 (i.e. reboot). You're right that it would be possible to remount / read-only and # exec/sbin/init with no need for a reboot -- I hadn't thought of that. Must be some vestiges of Windows badness still glooping around in my brain!
No, he's right. Don't you remember OIL RIG? Oxidation Is Loss (of electrons), Reduction Is Gain. By which reckoning H -> H+ + e- is an oxidation reaction.
Bear in mind also that among the three million lines that make up the Linux kernel are many that in real life, will never be compiled into actual kernels; or will only be compiled as modules which will never be loaded. A bug in a driver for a piece of hardware you haven't got might as well be considered a false positive.
The DHS are a Government department. The Government are the ones responsible for the law that prevents ordinary citizens from seeing Source Code if companies don't want to show it -- and also for the law that permits those companies to sell their Caged binaries. Capisce?
The biggest "security problem" in PHP is related to file upload by HTTP and the way Windows handles permissions. And it's not a problem with PHP per se, but with the way some people (mis)use it. Blaming PHP for insecure scripts is a bit like blaming Severn Trent for drownings!
Every file on a Windows box has execute permission set. This appears to be a designed behaviour of Windows. If you do not perform a chmod on it after upload, it keeps its execute bit. This is entirely to be expected, and any other behaviour would violate the Principle of Least Surprise. And if you transfer the uploaded file to a directory from which the web server can serve pages directly to the outside world, it becomes a CGI script. This is a designed behaviour of the web server: on a UNIX system, files with execute set are executed and their STDOUT stream is served up. In short, by uploading a crafted script from a Windows host using a badly-written PHP script on a webserver, you can execute arbitrary code.
A naïve developer testing PHP scripts on a Linux desktop machine with Apache + PHP installed (a very common environment for pre-deployment testing; always used to be a Windows desktop with Apache + PHP, but it's easier nowadays to get Linux up and running than it is to get Apache + PHP on Windows up and running) probably will not spot this, because files uploaded from Linux hosts usually do not have the execute bit set.
One possible fix would be to add a third parameter to move_uploaded_file() allowing you to set the permissions on the destination file, and make this default to 644 if absent. Until then, don't forget to chmod() uploaded files -- and it probably wouldn't hurt to put a.htaccess file in your upload directory, blocking all HTTP transfers from there.
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
on
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
·
· Score: 1
Don't forget that it's got even worse with the privatisation of the matriculation boards. Examinations are now set by competing private companies, who earn money depending on how many pupils are entered for examinations. Schools choose a matriculation board based on pass rates, so boards set examinations that are easy to pass.
In the "bad" old days, you sent your kids to the school you were told to send them to (so you couldn't get social climbers skewing the statistics for the worse by withdrawing their little darlings from schools perceived as "bad"), and the matriculation boards were answerable to the universities (so passing grades really did mean you were able to go to uni). The abolition of the eleven-plus could never possibly have led to the stated aim of grammar school education for all. Instead, it has led to secondary-modern education for all. The chronic underinvestment {which was the real reason for the problems with the tripartite system: not enough money was spent on technical and sec.mod. schools} has not gone away. And it's even worse today with school buildings nearing the ends of their designed lifetimes and nobody wanting to become a teacher for fear of being branded a paedophile.
If you can get hold of the underlying.flv file, then you should be able to view this using ffplay (which is part of the ffmpeg package). With a bit of luck, this will be visible in the source code view. In the worst case, you may need a Linux box you don't mind temporarily polluting with Caged software, just to run the Flash player and tcpflow together so you can see where the.flv file is being picked up from.
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
on
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
·
· Score: 1
Gah! I invented solid-state tube emulation so long ago, if I'd thought to get a patent, it would have run out by today! Lowpass filter, A-to-D converter, data latch, bank of EPROMs, D-to-A converter. A-D provides low-order address bits for memory (which contains digitised transfer functions), data lines drive D-to-A converter. High-order address bits come from manually-operated switches allowing selection of different transfer characteristics.
You can actually get hold of the Flash player Source Code. However, before doing so, you have to attend the kind of interview that makes the interview for a bank loan look like a pleasant afternoon chit-chat, and then sign -- in blood -- a document offering your soul to Adobe, including promising never to breathe a word of it to another living soul and never to program anything again.
Disabling the root account is simply done by having no entry, or an invalid entry (i.e. containing a character in the "scrambled password" field which cannot be generated by the scrambling algorithm, i.e. matching [^A-Za-z0-9./] and thus preventing any rescrambled password from ever matching it), for "root" in the file/etc/shadow.
Booting with "init=/bin/sh" means that instead of starting the process scheduler init (which would then run several instances of getty; each of which runs login, which checks that you entered a valid login that appears in/etc/passwd, a password which when scrambled matches the corresponding one in/etc/shadow and, if so, launches a program specified in/etc/passwd -- usually a shell -- in the name of the user whose login you typed), you start the shell directly, without having your login checked. You can only have one process going on at once, but that's still enough to have some phun with. And the shell just conveniently assumes your userid number is 0, which is root, so you get all the powers and none of the responsibilities.
Once you've done the passwd step, you have now created a valid/etc/shadow entry for root; and thus even if the root account was disabled before, you've enabled it. Later, you will restore the old (possibly bogus or non-existent) entry to the/etc/shadow file. You really should fix the timestamp on this; but you already left a big enough clue that you'd been mucking around when you rebooted the box. If the sysadmin doesn't notice that, hell, you might as well just pick the machine up and wander out the front door with it. (Probably doesn't even look suspicious if you have a pair of coveralls and an ID badge.)
Yeah, there's that. Carry a boot CD (maybe with several kernels) on an actual disc (in case you can't use a USB key..... maybe better to use a cheap MP3 player preloaded with a repetitive techno track that can be played to anyone who asks), and a minimal tool kit (screwdriver handle with interchangeable bits, needle nose pliers, wire cutters, tweezers, a few motherboard jumpers, a few known good 13 Amp plug fuses, powerfinder screwdriver..... I'd say a cordless soldering iron, solder and a canister of fuel if I didn't think that I really meant minimal..... weigh the probability of needing a tool against the drawbacks of having to carry it) with you. You can then reset the BIOS password, fix the boot order, boot a kernel that works, mount the drives and chroot into the system, if you have to.
"The worst case? Well..... let's see. Have you got any CD burners in there?"
"Yes, in the management suite, behind digital door locks. Or in the IT department. Digital locks again."
"And do those management machines have a high-speed internet connection as well?"
"Oh, yes."
"Well, in that case..... I reckon, in the absolute worst case, your friend could be doing whatever he wanted with your computer systems in about one hour."
"One hour? That's not so bad. That gives us something. You say that's the worst case, right?"
"Oh, yeah, from his point of view, one hour is the worst case. But if he's smart, he's probably already been and gone."
"Voter verification" is a non-issue. You can see your name, address and who you voted for on some screen. But that doesn't mean jack shit. You can't be sure that the totals are correct without looking at everybody's vote. But the majority of those people are strangers to you. You don't even know that they exist, let alone how they voted.
Just displaying the person's vote you asked for and a row of "final totals" across the bottom of the screen would probably get past most people -- even if the "final totals" displayed were not the amounts you would get adding up the actual votes for each candidate. If you had some database of "who knows who" then you could even, based on the voter's ID, display their vote and the votes of anyone in their Wider Social Network correctly but alter the votes of strangers as necessary to match the "final totals".
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Coarse-grained security that people actually bother to use is better than fine-grained security that is turned off because it annoys people.
Most people don't need powerful and flexible ACLs. They just need "Ordinary users can't modify this" and "This is not meant to be executable".
Keeping the Source Code hidden has caused untold misery for thousands if not millions of people.
Even if you don't get permission to redistribute, the Source Code is still vital; because without it, you can't use your own property in ways that you think fit. And withholding Source Code hasn't done much to deter unauthorised copying of Windows.
Tits. Missed something important.
KDE4 isn't in Sid yet (it's a credit to Debian that "unstable" is actually so stable, that they have to have an "experimental" distribution). I'd grab a Kubuntu liveCD and try that, but it wouldn't necessarily prove anything: crashing in Kubuntu is hardly news.
Interesting. The "new" version of Konqueror also claims to be 3.5.8.
This time, it asks me what to do with a file it is trying to download, then crashes (with a different-looking requester; maybe that also changed between versions).
Konqueror 3.5.8 on KDE 3.5.8 (Debian Sid, AMD64; packages from Debian repository) fails with a segmentation fault.
But there's a newer version in the repository, so I'm going to upgrade and see what happens.
It's possible to boot up from a USB storage device.
An ISO image is just a filesystem which you can mount. All you need to do then is copy all the files and folder structure from a downloaded installation CD image onto a USB stick of 1GB or larger, and make the USB stick bootable using the bootloader configurator thoughtfully provided. You now have a rescue "disc", albeit a USB one.
The "Insert" key is useful. If you have been using shift+cursor keys rather than the mouse to select text, then Ctrl+Insert = copy and Shift+Insert = paste. (Of course, if you have been using the mouse, then you can just push the middle button to paste whatever is highlit.) Insert also scrolls up by line in Links.
It's possible to continue the boot process manually if you somehow find yourself within the initrd environment, including launching a root shell. The only times I've ever managed to get a machine in that state have been while I was mucking around trying to build my own distro (actually by modifying someone else's distro, but isn't that how everyone does it?) and missed out some important file or other.Which is a good thing in and of itself. Biodiversity in ecosystems, and all that.It doesn't really matter about init not running. The command as given will launch init, going straight into runlevel 6 (i.e. reboot). You're right that it would be possible to remount / read-only and # exec
No, he's right. Don't you remember OIL RIG? Oxidation Is Loss (of electrons), Reduction Is Gain. By which reckoning H -> H+ + e- is an oxidation reaction.
I thought it was because the computer was in the engine room, and no packets could get through the firewall.
Try using them both. You'll see what the difference is :)
Bear in mind also that among the three million lines that make up the Linux kernel are many that in real life, will never be compiled into actual kernels; or will only be compiled as modules which will never be loaded. A bug in a driver for a piece of hardware you haven't got might as well be considered a false positive.
The DHS are a Government department. The Government are the ones responsible for the law that prevents ordinary citizens from seeing Source Code if companies don't want to show it -- and also for the law that permits those companies to sell their Caged binaries. Capisce?
The biggest "security problem" in PHP is related to file upload by HTTP and the way Windows handles permissions. And it's not a problem with PHP per se, but with the way some people (mis)use it. Blaming PHP for insecure scripts is a bit like blaming Severn Trent for drownings!
.htaccess file in your upload directory, blocking all HTTP transfers from there.
Every file on a Windows box has execute permission set. This appears to be a designed behaviour of Windows. If you do not perform a chmod on it after upload, it keeps its execute bit. This is entirely to be expected, and any other behaviour would violate the Principle of Least Surprise. And if you transfer the uploaded file to a directory from which the web server can serve pages directly to the outside world, it becomes a CGI script. This is a designed behaviour of the web server: on a UNIX system, files with execute set are executed and their STDOUT stream is served up. In short, by uploading a crafted script from a Windows host using a badly-written PHP script on a webserver, you can execute arbitrary code.
A naïve developer testing PHP scripts on a Linux desktop machine with Apache + PHP installed (a very common environment for pre-deployment testing; always used to be a Windows desktop with Apache + PHP, but it's easier nowadays to get Linux up and running than it is to get Apache + PHP on Windows up and running) probably will not spot this, because files uploaded from Linux hosts usually do not have the execute bit set.
One possible fix would be to add a third parameter to move_uploaded_file() allowing you to set the permissions on the destination file, and make this default to 644 if absent. Until then, don't forget to chmod() uploaded files -- and it probably wouldn't hurt to put a
Don't forget that it's got even worse with the privatisation of the matriculation boards. Examinations are now set by competing private companies, who earn money depending on how many pupils are entered for examinations. Schools choose a matriculation board based on pass rates, so boards set examinations that are easy to pass.
In the "bad" old days, you sent your kids to the school you were told to send them to (so you couldn't get social climbers skewing the statistics for the worse by withdrawing their little darlings from schools perceived as "bad"), and the matriculation boards were answerable to the universities (so passing grades really did mean you were able to go to uni). The abolition of the eleven-plus could never possibly have led to the stated aim of grammar school education for all. Instead, it has led to secondary-modern education for all. The chronic underinvestment {which was the real reason for the problems with the tripartite system: not enough money was spent on technical and sec.mod. schools} has not gone away. And it's even worse today with school buildings nearing the ends of their designed lifetimes and nobody wanting to become a teacher for fear of being branded a paedophile.
If you can get hold of the underlying .flv file, then you should be able to view this using ffplay (which is part of the ffmpeg package). With a bit of luck, this will be visible in the source code view. In the worst case, you may need a Linux box you don't mind temporarily polluting with Caged software, just to run the Flash player and tcpflow together so you can see where the .flv file is being picked up from.
Oh noes! 26 337 827 tons per square mile! We're doomed!
Gah! I invented solid-state tube emulation so long ago, if I'd thought to get a patent, it would have run out by today! Lowpass filter, A-to-D converter, data latch, bank of EPROMs, D-to-A converter. A-D provides low-order address bits for memory (which contains digitised transfer functions), data lines drive D-to-A converter. High-order address bits come from manually-operated switches allowing selection of different transfer characteristics.
You can actually get hold of the Flash player Source Code. However, before doing so, you have to attend the kind of interview that makes the interview for a bank loan look like a pleasant afternoon chit-chat, and then sign -- in blood -- a document offering your soul to Adobe, including promising never to breathe a word of it to another living soul and never to program anything again.
Disabling the root account is simply done by having no entry, or an invalid entry (i.e. containing a character in the "scrambled password" field which cannot be generated by the scrambling algorithm, i.e. matching [^A-Za-z0-9./] and thus preventing any rescrambled password from ever matching it), for "root" in the file /etc/shadow.
/etc/passwd, a password which when scrambled matches the corresponding one in /etc/shadow and, if so, launches a program specified in /etc/passwd -- usually a shell -- in the name of the user whose login you typed), you start the shell directly, without having your login checked. You can only have one process going on at once, but that's still enough to have some phun with. And the shell just conveniently assumes your userid number is 0, which is root, so you get all the powers and none of the responsibilities.
/etc/shadow entry for root; and thus even if the root account was disabled before, you've enabled it. Later, you will restore the old (possibly bogus or non-existent) entry to the /etc/shadow file. You really should fix the timestamp on this; but you already left a big enough clue that you'd been mucking around when you rebooted the box. If the sysadmin doesn't notice that, hell, you might as well just pick the machine up and wander out the front door with it. (Probably doesn't even look suspicious if you have a pair of coveralls and an ID badge.)
Booting with "init=/bin/sh" means that instead of starting the process scheduler init (which would then run several instances of getty; each of which runs login, which checks that you entered a valid login that appears in
Once you've done the passwd step, you have now created a valid
Yeah, there's that. Carry a boot CD (maybe with several kernels) on an actual disc (in case you can't use a USB key ..... maybe better to use a cheap MP3 player preloaded with a repetitive techno track that can be played to anyone who asks), and a minimal tool kit (screwdriver handle with interchangeable bits, needle nose pliers, wire cutters, tweezers, a few motherboard jumpers, a few known good 13 Amp plug fuses, powerfinder screwdriver ..... I'd say a cordless soldering iron, solder and a canister of fuel if I didn't think that I really meant minimal ..... weigh the probability of needing a tool against the drawbacks of having to carry it) with you. You can then reset the BIOS password, fix the boot order, boot a kernel that works, mount the drives and chroot into the system, if you have to.
..... let's see. Have you got any CD burners in there?"
..... I reckon, in the absolute worst case, your friend could be doing whatever he wanted with your computer systems in about one hour."
"The worst case? Well
"Yes, in the management suite, behind digital door locks. Or in the IT department. Digital locks again."
"And do those management machines have a high-speed internet connection as well?"
"Oh, yes."
"Well, in that case
"One hour? That's not so bad. That gives us something. You say that's the worst case, right?"
"Oh, yeah, from his point of view, one hour is the worst case. But if he's smart, he's probably already been and gone."
There are 625 lines, which are not subdivided into pixels, in the two fields which make up a standard analogue TV picture.
Surely all computer displays used to be curved, not so very long ago?
480i? Who would want such a picture? That's worse than ordinary low-definition TV, which has 625 lines interlaced.
"Voter verification" is a non-issue. You can see your name, address and who you voted for on some screen. But that doesn't mean jack shit. You can't be sure that the totals are correct without looking at everybody's vote. But the majority of those people are strangers to you. You don't even know that they exist, let alone how they voted.
Just displaying the person's vote you asked for and a row of "final totals" across the bottom of the screen would probably get past most people -- even if the "final totals" displayed were not the amounts you would get adding up the actual votes for each candidate. If you had some database of "who knows who" then you could even, based on the voter's ID, display their vote and the votes of anyone in their Wider Social Network correctly but alter the votes of strangers as necessary to match the "final totals".