Ultimately they ended up putting it in ring0 and making other concessions for "consumers" and things just went down hill from there.
You've misused the word "ultimately" to imply a stubborn impasse ending in capitulation.
That's not how things went. Cutler kept all that flaky shit out of ring0 long enough to get most of the bugs out of the core OS, without becoming befuddled by having so many fingers to point. The game vendors had to suck it for a while with a development model where their own bugs were obviously their own bugs. I'm sure this helped sober up some of the worst offenders immensely.
Then when they were finally allowed into the kernel, there wasn't a lot left to blame in the kernel (their huge investment in gaining credibility in the server space absolutely depended upon a stable kernel) and by now the game vendors were a lot less cavalier with their development methods. Moreover, Microsoft probably could have kicked them back out of ring0 again, should that have become an insufferable problem.
The ideal model would have been a tick box for the user which determined whether to kernel-load or not the video driver code. Then the astute user could play the game for a few weeks in some low-quality mode, and if it hasn't bombed out in user space, make a sane trade-off to jack performance.
Generally, if you don't have to trust something, you won't need to trust something. Violators will be quarantined at their own expense. Repeat offenders will be tarred and feathered in the gamer forums—by the big fucking A/B smoking gun. What an absolute joy that would have been. Popcorn not included.
your fighters have a disadvantage against any enemy who will
This particular arms race, in all likelihood, ends with human extinction. Therefore, it's contribution to the integral of human fortune is effectively zero.
The non-zero contributions (we hope those exist) involve arranging to compete against enemies who won't.
That's one of the reasons we now have the giant, global police state: all the better to root out those who persist in believing in insanity as a credible bluff (it had a good run, but then we invented the bomb). An early tell of this lingering moral cancer is to observe a person espousing "do until others before they do unto you" in forms either subtle or not so subtle.
As with all things, sex innovates first. Evolution brought us ritual combat (where both parties fully recover, most of the time). And it also brought us arbitrary lines in the sanity sand, at least in part through the evolution of religious morality. There's the harsh "procreation only" line in the sand (lifetime quota: one co-procreant), the live-and-let-live "consenting adult" line in the sand (modulo outrageous violations of public health standards), all the way to the extremely permissive "if you bought it, it's yours to treat as you wish" (prerequisite: society that endorses human beings as property).
What do all these lines have in common? They're somewhat arbitrary, yet ruthlessly policed (nosy neighbours who point fingers were the original crowd source).
AI-powered autonomous fighter drones that can pull twenty Gs? Some lines would be on one side, some lines would be on the other side. Either way, to achieve a non-zero integral, some line is required.
The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives.
In a similar vein, the valley can be relied upon to solve real problems — after financing all possible alternatives.
Whatever goes on, there has never been a shortage of real problems out there. Solving a real problem ties your capital up for a longer stretch of time. No VC worth his salt would choose to do that, when the alternative is a quick in-out. After a decade where "scale" became synonymous with "cosmic inflation", oh, the groans will be loud and protracted.
But it won't matter, because there's plenty of talent, plenty of tools nowhere near fully exploited, and more real world problems waiting to be solved that we can yet imagine.
You Are Still Watching a Staggering Amount Of TV Every Day
How about the following?
Collectively, Americans Still Watch a Staggering Amount Of TV Every Day
Yeah, it's not perfect either, but the original version is already wrong after the first word.
Couldn't stupidity pinch its wee-wee for three whole words until we get to "watch"—whatever that actually means when the viewer is sitting on the couch with a baby, an iPhone, an iPad, some weed, and a small stack of medical disability claim forms.
An algorithm that ruthlessly assigns accurate probabilities (e.g. as justified by Deep Learning 3.0) to the vast majority of foreseeable scenarios (modeling an eventuality portfolio a hundred times broader than any human mind would consider ensemble, while projecting each scenario tens of seconds into the future) just isn't going to find itself perched on the tenth floor of the moral knife edge the way that shit drivers (humans, collectively) are predisposed to presuppose.
Was that sentence hard to read? Too many parentheses? Puny human. Sucks to be you.
Well, perhaps there are some other scenarios I've not considered yet. Suppose some rogue engineer at Volkswagon switches off the Drama Defeat. Just because. Unless the algorithm gets there first, and switches of the Drama Defeat defeat (to be honest, that algorithm worries me quite a bit).
Personally, I'd love to code the algorithm for minimizing harm when something large and dangerous peels off the hillbilly truck in front of you. Above all else, do not impact bouncing object at windscreen height. The test suite would be awesome. I could sit back and watch the test-suite animations run for hours and hours, every damn day.
The gal next to me would find herself working on some silly algorithm to not drive right behind the hillbilly truck in the first place. Booooring! Sucks to be her.
Then in the real world, her code would have influence all the time, while my clever code is activated once in a blue moon.
In fact, the whole stupid world will work like that, once the algorithms finish pushing fallible humans off to the curb.
Microsoft denies any wrongdoing, and says they only halted their appeal to avoid the cost of further litigation.
If further litigation was to become that expensive, it's "only" because their case wasn't terribly strong to begin with.
Implied corollary: If continuing to litigate was cost-free in all dimensions, we'd never drop an appeal voluntarily—only that patently isn't true, either, unless "cost free" includes a get-out-of-adverse-precedent free card.
Net translation:
If we could have handed our case over to one of the world's top litigators, working entirely pro bono, and the case would be heard in a secret court (a court possessing secrecy superpowers), and no-one in the wide world would ever find out about the final outcome, we would not now be dropping this appeal.
Most of these websites bare ElSurveillance's defacement message even today
Why do I almost hope that the hacker in question has already managed to hack this Slashdot story, replacing "bear" with "bare" just for shits and giggles?
Most of us need some down time. You choose riding a high horse as your hobby to kill time, not all of the rest of us did. Out of curiosity, how much time per day do you waste on slashdot?
Slashdot is just a spurtle that stirs the oatmeal already inside my head.
My cognitive processing pipeline requires a thickening stage. If not Slashdot, I'd have to find some other spurtle. Others prefer to give their quick oats a speedy zap in the microwave. Often, it shows.
At one level, it's completely ancillary to what I'm doing here that I bother to type at all. But as most writers know, actually bothering to formulate words and sentences drives the thought process to a more concrete outcome, so why not?
The theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor assume you're on some kind of assembly line in the first place.
This [attack] was extremely sophisticated and critically executed. It was a very well orchestrated, very clinical attack, and the attacker knew exactly what they needed to do and how fast they had to operate.
The hacker turns out to be a script-kiddie who got the technique from an introductory hacking video.
Comodo continues to embarrass themselves as the story unfolds, with their CEO finally complaining that all this wouldn't be a problem if man-in-the-middle wasn't possible. Huh? Aren't you in the business of selling the solution to the MITM problem?
What happened to Comodo? Nothing. Their business didn't suffer, they didn't lose customers. In fact, the only thing that happened was that their CEO was named "entrepreneur of the year" at RSA 2011.
If you don't want somebody else to use a trademark, register it for yourself!
That's one perspective. See red tape, eat red tape. What could possible go wrong?
Here's another perspective. Have you heard of the Age of Aquarius? How about the Age of Panopticonus?
I don't know precisely when the age of Panopticonus began. We can bracket this down to sometime between the first transparent-pixel web bug, of which the oldest mention I can find on Google is 15 July 1995, and the Snowden revelations of 5 June 2013, when Panopticonus suffered a very public Icarus moment.
In the Age of Panopticonus, if a company wants to assert a property claim to some name it can reliably find out whether such a name is already in use.
There's no point in forcing every to run off to an arbitrary red-tape registrar of record in the Age of Panopticonus. Before the AoP, it was sometimes a royal PITA to find out what was going on in the world of commerce. Back then it actually made sense to shift the burden of discovery to proactive paperwork.
If the web bug is older than you are, isn't this all beyond transparent?
Or perhaps we should make an exception for the Comodo Group, who couldn't possibly have discovered Google search by now (how would they look?), what with their membership in the very traditional UUBT (Underworld Union of Bridge Trolls).
The UUBT slogan is something along the lines of et justitiam in rota volvi lente, et ruminat multa nimis, but as they have not yet discovered the internet, I was unable to find the authoritative version on line.
—
My little adventure with Google translate from English to Latin went like this.
First I had to simplify the input. "Turn" was not recognized. And "grind" lead to bizarre outputs.
The wheels of justice revolve slowly, but chew exceedingly fine.
This following output looks not too bad.
Et justitiam in rota volvi paulatim, et ruminat multa nimis.
Back-translating for verification:
And justice in the wheel, by degrees, and cheweth the cud, very much cattle.
When cell came out, I was enthralled by using it for certain GPU-like computations where it would have been pretty much ideal for my purposes. But the more I looked into the security architecture, the more my gut twisted in dismay, so I never ended up buying one.
When corporations retain these broad powers (most appliances, almost all cloud services) it's almost invariably exercised to make you less happy at some point down the road.
If I could go back in time to offer my younger self some sage advice, it would include this:
Enjoy a game or two when the stars align, but never make a hardware/software decision based on any consideration of game support whatsoever. It's a toxic leash in every direction. Nine of out ten media/entertainment companies are rotten to the core. There is no happy medium. Do not make multi-boot bargains with devil or other "clever" concessions.
Circa 1996 I bought myself an awesome new Pentium Pro system, stuffed with RAM, and a disk drive almost bigger than the OS. Wow! By the standards of the time, it felt like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. The P6 got a bad rap because Win 95 was a POS, but the truth is that the P6 was the first workstation-class CPU Intel made, and it really kicked ass in NT4 or Linux.
However, Linux device support was spotty, getting a graphical desktop set up could degenerate into a multi-day task, and it was far from obvious when or if Linux would achieve world domination.
Plus NT4 could play Quake out of the box. Case closed. Stupid, stupid, stupid younger self! So now I've placed myself in the losing camp, and it took me five years to fully extract myself.
That gut twist I felt over the Cell security model that spared me from participating in this particular Sony shit-show? Paid for in full.
Most of the changes unexciting, but one provision has consumer rights groups up in arms: PayPal is granting itself the ability to use automated systems to call and text users. These robocalls could happen for something as serious as debt collection or as frivolous as advertisements. What's more, the company grants the same rights to its affiliates. Activists are questioning the legality of these changes.
All this shit they still do at this point amounts to Hawking radiation.
I have seen estimates that if Google were run entirely by subscription. it would cost each of us about $150 per month.
Looney Tunes. Apparently they didn't bother to subtract out the cost of delivering all that advertising content, which might well be the greater half of running Google as it presently exists.
Furthermore, Google current cost structure is heavily anchored by their desire to own all the data and—soon—to have all the best machine intelligence. I suspect that the $150/month proposed equivalence would also fully subsidize their immense machine intelligence ambitions. Nice work, if you can get it.
Next time you "see" such a number, don't forget to laugh out loud.
But on Nov. 5, 2003, Larry McVoy noticed that there was a code change in the CVS copy that did not have a pointer to a record of approval. Investigation showed that the change had never been approved and, stranger yet, that this change did not appear in the primary BitKeeper repository at all.
Other issues back in 2003 were burning up the Linux development intertubes.
To me, the sign of people I really want to work with is that they have good taste, which is how... I sent you this stupid example that is not relevant because it's too small. Good taste is much bigger than this. Good taste is about really seeing the big patterns and kind of instinctively knowing what's the right way to do things.
The following is my idea of good taste (since the 1980s), whenever a comparison involves a constant term: if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (0 = current->uid))
retval = -EINVAL;
This does not achieve root. It won't even compile.
Mikko, what's your take on HTTP/2.0 in light of PHK's declared position?
—
For context, here are the two points that raised my own eyebrows.
First, PHK implies that HTTP/2.0 could have done something substantial to address the cookie problem.
This is almost triply ironic, because the major drags on HTTP are the cookies, which are such a major privacy problem, that the EU has legislated a notice requirement for them. HTTP/2.0 could have done away with cookies, replacing them instead with a client controlled session identifier. That would put users squarely in charge of when they want to be tracked and when they don't want to—a major improvement in privacy.
The reason HTTP/2.0 does not improve privacy is that the big corporate backers have built their business model on top of the lack of privacy. They are very upset about NSA spying on just about everybody in the entire world, but they do not want to do anything that prevents them from doing the same thing.
Second, PHK implies that encryption is enough of a burden in certain circumstances to make exceptions to the privacy by default revolution. My own gut instinct is that SSL is already cheap enough to simply write off across the board as the cost of doing business, almost always.
Local governments have no desire to spend resources negotiating SSL/TLS with every single smartphone in their area when things explode, rivers flood, or people are poisoned.... Yet, despite this, HTTP/2.0 will be SSL/TLS only, in at least three out of four of the major browsers, in order to force a particular political agenda.
Isn't it a rather crappy security profile to leave your "innocent" activities in clear text and only encrypt what is conventionally considered "sensitive"?
I did read a valid complaint the other day, where people writing servers trying to maintain 100,000 persistent SSL connections (average connection time measured in hours) become hot and bothered about the 20 kB per connection memory cost, enough to throw away a Go implementation (heavier in memory overhead) and go back to Ruby.
What say you about the technical/political HTTP/2 tango?
Even if you pay only a fraction of your time on security news, you probably already know Mikko Hypponen.
Nope. It was only recently (about a year ago) that I started to keep a formal list of prominent people in the security sector and, until five minutes ago, he was not there. It was the mosh pit of DNS and SSL security that finally drove me to it. To be honest, it was also the somewhat volatile Thomas H. Ptacek who drove me to it. Here's Colin Percival's rather decisive rebuttal to an ill-considered post by Ptacek.
Interestingly, Ptacek's original post, "Colin's Very Important Knob" is nowhere to be found on the internet. Since then, I've seen them engaging in pleasant, but opinionated exchanges. Normally, you can get a quick sense of who hates whom, but with security it's more like the way certain animals share a kill: with cheeks shredded and bleeding. No hard feelings. They might even be brothers.
Even if you pay only a fraction of your time on security news
On May 1, 2016, the wildfire began southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta. On May 3, it swept through the community, destroying approximately 2,400 homes and buildings and forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in Albertan history.
Hillis continues..."We misunderstand cancer by making it a noun. Instead of saying, "My house has water", we say, "My plumbing is leaking." Instead of saying, "I have cancer", we should say, "I am cancering." The truth of the matter is we're probably cancering all the time, and our body is checking it in various ways, so we're not cancering out of control. Probably every house has a few leaky faucets, but it doesn't matter much because there are processes that are mitigating that by draining the leaks. Cancer is probably something like that.
The first time I read that passage I went "well, that's a bit dramatic". But over the years I've come to realize that what separates the truly superior mind is the ability to read the lines of flow on the river well before the rocks arrive.
Dramatic sounding or not, six years ago, Hillis was already on the right flow line to miss these rocks completely—the mind-shrinking idea that cancer has no evolutionary significance until it ravages suburbia.
I don't believe this thesis anyway. Insufficient focus on gonads.
That "spokesman" did learn this exact paragraph in his management college. Exact. He was told to remember it word by word.
Why bother? You only need the last four words.
should the need arise
Hint, with all those resources and processes available, "need arising" is a major cost center.
Note that it's only the policies and procedures that are "managed by a dedicated team". Everyone else on call when the shit hits the fan—the one true sound of need "arising"—has a real job elsewhere within Intel.
If it's known there is an undiscovered backdoor people WILL find it.
So what? After you exhume the first backdoor, you no longer know whether additional undiscovered backdoors still exist. Merely finding a backdoor is no guarantee you can exploit it yourself.
In the security business, if there's a thing, there's ambiguity of the thing. You can't simply make this go away by busting out all-caps at the critical juncture.
Wait, it gets worse.
The NSA just needs to get a law passed that a certain piece of equipment must implement an NSA kernel, then install some frightfully devious code that doesn't actually contain a backdoor, so that the security industry can run around in circles failing to break the "known" back door.
There's no naive like all-caps naive. Accept no substitutes.
If Samsung is a year or more behind on resistive memory, the short-term objective might be to pound the sand out of Intel's new 3D XPoint, so that they really know what they're up against.
I wonder if Samsung just bought a private test facility for their unannounced 3D XPoint rival technology? Joyent has first rate infrastructure visibility behind the scenes.
I doubt this was the main driver, but it might have been a consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
You've misused the word "ultimately" to imply a stubborn impasse ending in capitulation.
That's not how things went. Cutler kept all that flaky shit out of ring0 long enough to get most of the bugs out of the core OS, without becoming befuddled by having so many fingers to point. The game vendors had to suck it for a while with a development model where their own bugs were obviously their own bugs. I'm sure this helped sober up some of the worst offenders immensely.
Then when they were finally allowed into the kernel, there wasn't a lot left to blame in the kernel (their huge investment in gaining credibility in the server space absolutely depended upon a stable kernel) and by now the game vendors were a lot less cavalier with their development methods. Moreover, Microsoft probably could have kicked them back out of ring0 again, should that have become an insufferable problem.
The ideal model would have been a tick box for the user which determined whether to kernel-load or not the video driver code. Then the astute user could play the game for a few weeks in some low-quality mode, and if it hasn't bombed out in user space, make a sane trade-off to jack performance.
Generally, if you don't have to trust something, you won't need to trust something. Violators will be quarantined at their own expense. Repeat offenders will be tarred and feathered in the gamer forums—by the big fucking A/B smoking gun. What an absolute joy that would have been. Popcorn not included.
My favourite thing to enter into required fields of obnoxious web forms is "unrequired". Language. It's a beautiful tool for escaping the box.
Now I just need to sign up to a social media account on unrequired.com and I'll be all set.
Unfortunately, it's presently a blank page hosted at godaddy.
Wow. What else can we shake out of a hierarchy of infinitesimals? Oh, yeah, the Drake equation.
This particular arms race, in all likelihood, ends with human extinction. Therefore, it's contribution to the integral of human fortune is effectively zero.
The non-zero contributions (we hope those exist) involve arranging to compete against enemies who won't.
That's one of the reasons we now have the giant, global police state: all the better to root out those who persist in believing in insanity as a credible bluff (it had a good run, but then we invented the bomb). An early tell of this lingering moral cancer is to observe a person espousing "do until others before they do unto you" in forms either subtle or not so subtle.
As with all things, sex innovates first. Evolution brought us ritual combat (where both parties fully recover, most of the time). And it also brought us arbitrary lines in the sanity sand, at least in part through the evolution of religious morality. There's the harsh "procreation only" line in the sand (lifetime quota: one co-procreant), the live-and-let-live "consenting adult" line in the sand (modulo outrageous violations of public health standards), all the way to the extremely permissive "if you bought it, it's yours to treat as you wish" (prerequisite: society that endorses human beings as property).
What do all these lines have in common? They're somewhat arbitrary, yet ruthlessly policed (nosy neighbours who point fingers were the original crowd source).
AI-powered autonomous fighter drones that can pull twenty Gs? Some lines would be on one side, some lines would be on the other side. Either way, to achieve a non-zero integral, some line is required.
In a similar vein, the valley can be relied upon to solve real problems — after financing all possible alternatives.
Whatever goes on, there has never been a shortage of real problems out there. Solving a real problem ties your capital up for a longer stretch of time. No VC worth his salt would choose to do that, when the alternative is a quick in-out. After a decade where "scale" became synonymous with "cosmic inflation", oh, the groans will be loud and protracted.
But it won't matter, because there's plenty of talent, plenty of tools nowhere near fully exploited, and more real world problems waiting to be solved that we can yet imagine.
How about the following?
Collectively, Americans Still Watch a Staggering Amount Of TV Every Day
Yeah, it's not perfect either, but the original version is already wrong after the first word.
Couldn't stupidity pinch its wee-wee for three whole words until we get to "watch"—whatever that actually means when the viewer is sitting on the couch with a baby, an iPhone, an iPad, some weed, and a small stack of medical disability claim forms.
An algorithm that ruthlessly assigns accurate probabilities (e.g. as justified by Deep Learning 3.0) to the vast majority of foreseeable scenarios (modeling an eventuality portfolio a hundred times broader than any human mind would consider ensemble, while projecting each scenario tens of seconds into the future) just isn't going to find itself perched on the tenth floor of the moral knife edge the way that shit drivers (humans, collectively) are predisposed to presuppose.
Was that sentence hard to read? Too many parentheses? Puny human. Sucks to be you.
Well, perhaps there are some other scenarios I've not considered yet. Suppose some rogue engineer at Volkswagon switches off the Drama Defeat. Just because. Unless the algorithm gets there first, and switches of the Drama Defeat defeat (to be honest, that algorithm worries me quite a bit).
Personally, I'd love to code the algorithm for minimizing harm when something large and dangerous peels off the hillbilly truck in front of you. Above all else, do not impact bouncing object at windscreen height. The test suite would be awesome. I could sit back and watch the test-suite animations run for hours and hours, every damn day.
The gal next to me would find herself working on some silly algorithm to not drive right behind the hillbilly truck in the first place. Booooring! Sucks to be her.
Then in the real world, her code would have influence all the time, while my clever code is activated once in a blue moon.
In fact, the whole stupid world will work like that, once the algorithms finish pushing fallible humans off to the curb.
Microsoft denies any wrongdoing, and says they only halted their appeal to avoid the cost of further litigation.
If further litigation was to become that expensive, it's "only" because their case wasn't terribly strong to begin with.
Implied corollary: If continuing to litigate was cost-free in all dimensions, we'd never drop an appeal voluntarily—only that patently isn't true, either, unless "cost free" includes a get-out-of-adverse-precedent free card.
Net translation:
Why do I almost hope that the hacker in question has already managed to hack this Slashdot story, replacing "bear" with "bare" just for shits and giggles?
Slashdot is just a spurtle that stirs the oatmeal already inside my head.
My cognitive processing pipeline requires a thickening stage. If not Slashdot, I'd have to find some other spurtle. Others prefer to give their quick oats a speedy zap in the microwave. Often, it shows.
At one level, it's completely ancillary to what I'm doing here that I bother to type at all. But as most writers know, actually bothering to formulate words and sentences drives the thought process to a more concrete outcome, so why not?
The theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor assume you're on some kind of assembly line in the first place.
He didn't understand spurtle, not one bit.
In much the same way that "all $S need $J to function", where:
$S = "Soviet diplomat"
$J = "lapel camera"
Moxie Marlinspike tells a story about Comodo at BlackHat 2011
The bit at 8m22 is priceless.
Comodo founder:
The hacker turns out to be a script-kiddie who got the technique from an introductory hacking video.
Comodo continues to embarrass themselves as the story unfolds, with their CEO finally complaining that all this wouldn't be a problem if man-in-the-middle wasn't possible. Huh? Aren't you in the business of selling the solution to the MITM problem?
That's one perspective. See red tape, eat red tape. What could possible go wrong?
Here's another perspective. Have you heard of the Age of Aquarius? How about the Age of Panopticonus?
I don't know precisely when the age of Panopticonus began. We can bracket this down to sometime between the first transparent-pixel web bug, of which the oldest mention I can find on Google is 15 July 1995, and the Snowden revelations of 5 June 2013, when Panopticonus suffered a very public Icarus moment.
In the Age of Panopticonus, if a company wants to assert a property claim to some name it can reliably find out whether such a name is already in use.
There's no point in forcing every to run off to an arbitrary red-tape registrar of record in the Age of Panopticonus. Before the AoP, it was sometimes a royal PITA to find out what was going on in the world of commerce. Back then it actually made sense to shift the burden of discovery to proactive paperwork.
If the web bug is older than you are, isn't this all beyond transparent?
Or perhaps we should make an exception for the Comodo Group, who couldn't possibly have discovered Google search by now (how would they look?), what with their membership in the very traditional UUBT (Underworld Union of Bridge Trolls).
The UUBT slogan is something along the lines of et justitiam in rota volvi lente, et ruminat multa nimis, but as they have not yet discovered the internet, I was unable to find the authoritative version on line.
—
My little adventure with Google translate from English to Latin went like this.
First I had to simplify the input. "Turn" was not recognized. And "grind" lead to bizarre outputs.
The wheels of justice revolve slowly, but chew exceedingly fine.
This following output looks not too bad.
Et justitiam in rota volvi paulatim, et ruminat multa nimis.
Back-translating for verification:
And justice in the wheel, by degrees, and cheweth the cud, very much cattle.
Close enough.
When cell came out, I was enthralled by using it for certain GPU-like computations where it would have been pretty much ideal for my purposes. But the more I looked into the security architecture, the more my gut twisted in dismay, so I never ended up buying one.
When corporations retain these broad powers (most appliances, almost all cloud services) it's almost invariably exercised to make you less happy at some point down the road.
If I could go back in time to offer my younger self some sage advice, it would include this:
Enjoy a game or two when the stars align, but never make a hardware/software decision based on any consideration of game support whatsoever. It's a toxic leash in every direction. Nine of out ten media/entertainment companies are rotten to the core. There is no happy medium. Do not make multi-boot bargains with devil or other "clever" concessions.
Circa 1996 I bought myself an awesome new Pentium Pro system, stuffed with RAM, and a disk drive almost bigger than the OS. Wow! By the standards of the time, it felt like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. The P6 got a bad rap because Win 95 was a POS, but the truth is that the P6 was the first workstation-class CPU Intel made, and it really kicked ass in NT4 or Linux.
However, Linux device support was spotty, getting a graphical desktop set up could degenerate into a multi-day task, and it was far from obvious when or if Linux would achieve world domination.
Plus NT4 could play Quake out of the box. Case closed. Stupid, stupid, stupid younger self! So now I've placed myself in the losing camp, and it took me five years to fully extract myself.
That gut twist I felt over the Cell security model that spared me from participating in this particular Sony shit-show? Paid for in full.
Paypal officially fell into a black hole as viewed from my frame of reference a year ago.
PayPal Will Be Able To Robo-Text/Call Users With No Opt-out Starting July 1
All this shit they still do at this point amounts to Hawking radiation.
Looney Tunes. Apparently they didn't bother to subtract out the cost of delivering all that advertising content, which might well be the greater half of running Google as it presently exists.
Furthermore, Google current cost structure is heavily anchored by their desire to own all the data and—soon—to have all the best machine intelligence. I suspect that the $150/month proposed equivalence would also fully subsidize their immense machine intelligence ambitions. Nice work, if you can get it.
Next time you "see" such a number, don't forget to laugh out loud.
If we're all feeling nostalgic, this should do the trick:
The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
retval = -EINVAL;
Other issues back in 2003 were burning up the Linux development intertubes.
The mind behind Linux
The following is my idea of good taste (since the 1980s), whenever a comparison involves a constant term:
if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (0 = current->uid))
retval = -EINVAL;
This does not achieve root. It won't even compile.
As it happens, I read the following article by Poul-Henning Kamp just the other day and had mixed feelings.
HTTP/2.0 — The IETF is Phoning It In (January 2016)
Mikko, what's your take on HTTP/2.0 in light of PHK's declared position?
—
For context, here are the two points that raised my own eyebrows.
First, PHK implies that HTTP/2.0 could have done something substantial to address the cookie problem.
Second, PHK implies that encryption is enough of a burden in certain circumstances to make exceptions to the privacy by default revolution. My own gut instinct is that SSL is already cheap enough to simply write off across the board as the cost of doing business, almost always.
Isn't it a rather crappy security profile to leave your "innocent" activities in clear text and only encrypt what is conventionally considered "sensitive"?
I did read a valid complaint the other day, where people writing servers trying to maintain 100,000 persistent SSL connections (average connection time measured in hours) become hot and bothered about the 20 kB per connection memory cost, enough to throw away a Go implementation (heavier in memory overhead) and go back to Ruby.
What say you about the technical/political HTTP/2 tango?
Nope. It was only recently (about a year ago) that I started to keep a formal list of prominent people in the security sector and, until five minutes ago, he was not there. It was the mosh pit of DNS and SSL security that finally drove me to it. To be honest, it was also the somewhat volatile Thomas H. Ptacek who drove me to it. Here's Colin Percival's rather decisive rebuttal to an ill-considered post by Ptacek.
My Very Important Knob
Interestingly, Ptacek's original post, "Colin's Very Important Knob" is nowhere to be found on the internet. Since then, I've seen them engaging in pleasant, but opinionated exchanges. Normally, you can get a quick sense of who hates whom, but with security it's more like the way certain animals share a kill: with cheeks shredded and bleeding. No hard feelings. They might even be brothers.
Hmm. The eyeball economy is strong in this one.
Takes its toll?
2016 Fort McMurray wildfire
By May 1st your genes are toxic. No toll.
By May 3rd your home burns down. Toll.
Edge Master Class 2010: W. DANIEL HILLIS ON "CANCERING"
The first time I read that passage I went "well, that's a bit dramatic". But over the years I've come to realize that what separates the truly superior mind is the ability to read the lines of flow on the river well before the rocks arrive.
Dramatic sounding or not, six years ago, Hillis was already on the right flow line to miss these rocks completely—the mind-shrinking idea that cancer has no evolutionary significance until it ravages suburbia.
I don't believe this thesis anyway. Insufficient focus on gonads.
Why bother? You only need the last four words.
Hint, with all those resources and processes available, "need arising" is a major cost center.
Note that it's only the policies and procedures that are "managed by a dedicated team". Everyone else on call when the shit hits the fan—the one true sound of need "arising"—has a real job elsewhere within Intel.
So what? After you exhume the first backdoor, you no longer know whether additional undiscovered backdoors still exist. Merely finding a backdoor is no guarantee you can exploit it yourself.
In the security business, if there's a thing, there's ambiguity of the thing. You can't simply make this go away by busting out all-caps at the critical juncture.
Wait, it gets worse.
The NSA just needs to get a law passed that a certain piece of equipment must implement an NSA kernel, then install some frightfully devious code that doesn't actually contain a backdoor, so that the security industry can run around in circles failing to break the "known" back door.
There's no naive like all-caps naive. Accept no substitutes.
A second thought just occurred to me.
If Samsung is a year or more behind on resistive memory, the short-term objective might be to pound the sand out of Intel's new 3D XPoint, so that they really know what they're up against.
I wonder if Samsung just bought a private test facility for their unannounced 3D XPoint rival technology? Joyent has first rate infrastructure visibility behind the scenes.
I doubt this was the main driver, but it might have been a consideration.