The visual appearance of an object is defined by how photons of different frequencies bounce off the object. Yet these images may not reflect that. Do colored quarks really interact with different frequencies (=energies) differently?
I wonder what these quarks sound like, smell like, or feel like.
Although the internet was designed to "route around" damage, its systems seem to assume an undamaged unified DNS system. I wonder if we need a new protocol (or tweaks to the old one) to create an international equivalent to NAT between countries with independently controlled DNS.
MS only need to provide the hooks, not necessarily the full functionality... MS could provide the hooks for av software, other vendors could supply the virus definition library, regular updates, nice ui etc
I can see your point, but it creates some nasty vulnerabilities. What stops the virus writer from exploiting these same hooks? Every hook is a new opening for malware to overwrite/modify the virus definition files, disable the AV function, escalate privileges, inject arbitrary code, create a fake AV UI that actually installs malware, etc. I'm not sure that letting 3rd party software modify the AV system is a good idea.
As much as I dislike MS, I can see four arguments that antivirus is an OS function.
A key function of an OS is to regulate, allocate, and manage the hardware and software resources of the machine. Controlling which chunks of code/processes/threads have access to which other chunks of RAM/filesystem/IO seems core to both an OS and to controlling malware.
Anti-malware software needs to operate at higher level of privilege than the malware to avoid malware countermeasures. If the anti-virus is just another application, even if its at the admin level, its going to be vulnerable to being turned off by malware that explicitly tries to avoid detection and removal. Anti-virus needs to run at a privilege level above most user and admin processes. This puts it deep into the OS and should probably load before any 3rd party extensions or any form of networking stack.
Malware often exploits holes in the OS. All jokes aside, the OS vendor is one of the most likely organizations to understand these vulnerabilities and make a semi-competent decisions on whether to patch the OS to close the vulnerability or use anti-malware to expunge or repel the malware.
Defense against malware should be a default-feature of the OS, not an add-on. No car could be sold with bumpers, locks, and seat-belts sold separately. In an age of consumer PCs and botnets, it becomes part of the system provider's responsibility to deliver a "safe" product.
One core problem is that the people that regulate cybersecurity don't own the infrastructure. This means they have little hope of understanding how real-world privately-owned (and vulnerable) networks operate. The flip side is that the government people that might have intelligence data on cybersecurity threats won't share that info with the people that actually own and operate the networks.
One group (govt) may understand the threat, but is clueless on the operations side. The other group (owers) don't have the classified intelligence data on the threat, but do know the operations side of the network.
Until the two sides share both info and operations knowledge, cybersecurity isn't possible.
Although I can understand helping people who have debilitating neuron-chemical imbalances, I'm not sure that everyone should be normalized. The world needs both risk-takers (hyper-actives) and risk-avoiders (anxiety-prone) to both spur innovation and create solutions that minimize deleterious consequences.
Note: I'm no a fan of PC (politically-correct) diversity, but do see value in variety to maximize total economic performance across a range of conditions and fields of endeavor.
Perhaps it is a WYSIWYG universe, we just don't understand how to properly see what we see.
This may also be a cautionary tale about the use of linear models (Newtonian gravity) versus nonlinear ones -- interactions among masses distort the solution. If one assumes the wrong things and gets an answer that doesn't fit the observations, perhaps its time to change the assumptions, not add unseen dark matter, epicycles, etc.
The latest whiz bang feature to impress their friends
The latest feature copied from a competitor's software
The latest feature to be compatible with everyone else
The most feature checkmarks for the PHB to authorize the purchase or selection of a software application
None of these demands fosters reliability. It fosters a frantic race to add features and ship stuff ASAP. Everyone seems caught in a massive vicious cycle of upgrades so that nothing ever stabilizes or matures.
Perhaps if/when people stop finding new uses, new formats, new file types, and new applications, then the industry will mature and people will turn their attention to stability and reliability.
This analysis must exclude entire categories of continuous data collection devices such as webcams, data loggers, OS log files, sensing equipment etc. All jokes aside about porn on webcam's, I can imagine that future historian would love such a rich data source on how people lived their lives, what they have in their surroundings, etc.
The point is that many current systems spew a huge volume of low value (but nonzero value) data (multiple MB or GB/day/device). The lack of storage means most of this is not captured and is thus never indexed.
Even massive companies can't keep all their data. Wal-Mart stores on the order of 460 TB in their data warehouse, but only has room for the last 13 months of data or so. At 138 million customers per week, they only have room for a paltry 59kB per customer per week.
This sounds like a security/privacy nightmare. What stops the host PC from copying the drive or infecting it with malware from the prior user. Even if the USB drive uses an encrypted filesystem, once you type your password into the PC to access any file on the user data partition, you have no guarantee that it won't access every file on the drive. I can also see this giving corporate security managers the screaming heebie jeebies over the thought of returning road-warrior executives bringing infected USB drives inside the the corporate firewall (yes, you can scan for malware but you're still susceptible to zero-day attacks and delays in AV updates).
Perhaps this would work if the client machine were truly memory-less (no HD, no NVRAM, no flash ROM, etc.). Then the machine could be a secure blank slate for whatever the USB user needed to do. Given the prevalence of flashable firmware on everything (and the need for persistent machine configuration data), I doubt this is very feasible.
The kernel is considered 'lower' than user space when talking about such things.
Thanks for the clarification (and the compliment). You're absolutely right that anti-malware needs to live in a lower layer (below the applications that might be infected or be infections). But anti-malware also needs higher privileges than the user or admin or the malware that attacks at these levels (I should have clarified this). Its confusing that lower layers often have higher privileges when it comes to controlling malware.
As much as I dislike MS, I can see three arguments that antivirus is an OS function.
A key function of an OS is to regulate, allocate, and manage the hardware and software resources of the machine. Controlling which chunks of code/processes/threads have access to which other chunks of RAM/filesystem/IO seems core to both an OS and to controlling malware.
Anti-malware software needs to operate at a level higher than the malware to avoid malware countermeasures. If the anti-virus is just another application, even if its at the admin level, its going to be vulnerable to being turned off by malware that explicitly tries to avoid detection and removal. Anti-virus needs to run at a level above most user and admin processes.
Malware often exploits holes in the OS. All jokes aside, the OS vendor is one of the most likely organizations to understand these vulnerabilities and make a semi-competent decisions on whether to patch the OS to close the vulnerability or use anti-malware to expunge or repel the malware.
Finally Apple has learned from some of their shipping problems of the past. This is a good move on three levels. First, it's better to surprise a customer with something better than expected. Second, it's also a great way to avoid a sales slump when updated models get announced. Apple has always feared the Osbourne effect, but hasn't been able to stop the rumor mill from letting people know when to stop buying old machines and wait for new machines. Third, its a nice way to ramp to volume production without the pressure of backorders on a new model.
Woah, you're complaining about 20% tax?!?! on 50 grand??!! No wonder your education and healthcare systems are famous throughout the world...
The real joke (on the U.S., that is) is that the U.S. actually spends more per student on education than high-tax places in Europe or high-education places like Japan. Yes, our education system is broken, but more tax money isn't going to fix it.
My own experience is that some of the financial issues for contractors are a big change versus being an employee.
Delays in getting paid: Timely payments are a big issue for contractors. Whereas an employee gets paid like clockwork, some contractor situations involve invoices, approvals, and getting the check from the accounting department. It may take 30 to 60 days between doing the work and getting the check. A good cushion in a savings account helps buffer irregular payments for the self-employed.
Estimated tax payments: The IRS wants its cut and with no automatic deductions, its up the the contractor to figure out and make timely payments. If you get to the end of the year without making these payments, you may be surprised at: a) how much you own on the accumulated earnings, b) that you own even more due to penalties (a 50k contracting gig can easily create $10,000 in tax liabilities -- which could be a nasty surprise come April 15th).
Expenses: Start collecting receipts for all the office junk that you must now buy and own yourself. You might consider devoting a room in your house as a home office (and taking the home office deduction) but there are reasons not to (we don't) and the full list of pro/cons is beyond the scope of what I can confidently discuss.
Benefits: Contractors need to get their own health insurance. The downside can be the cost. On the plus side, you can get the health plan you want in terms of deductable, types of coverage, etc. For people with good financial self-discipline, a high-deductable plan and an HSA are great -- the health insurance premiums are lower and they permit much greater tax-free deductions of healthcare expenses.
Retirement plan: Again, the contractor is on his own. The good news is some self-employed, small-business retirement plans are pretty nice. A QRP/KEOGH lets you sock away up to 20% of net revenues before taxes (much better than the limits on IRAs).
Perhaps routers (both the devices and the companies) should bid for packets in a real-time (or with a periodic) reverse auction. Rather than count segments to the destination, the logic would minimize the cost-to-deliver the packet. For most connections between true peers, the total of the charges would be zero.
Bandwidth isn't (and never will be) truly free as long as the hardware and admin labor has a cost. But if we seek way to deliver the most packets at the least cost, then market forces will drive the price down. The total system would route around both damage and inefficient (= high cost) parts of the network.
I doubt this will work because a phisher can easily set themselves up as a man-in-the-middle -- asking the customer for the password, shoe size, mothers maiden voyage, SSN, automagical secret electronic box code, etc. and relaying that to the bank whilst performing criminal transactions. Because most consumers don't have static IPs (or might want to use multiple machines to check their bank accoutns), the phisher can attack from anywhere including zombie PCs in your own geographic area. Because software on the web and client-side is so malleable, there is NEVER any guarantee that what is on a web browser screen is what it claims to be.
The only way banks can create a secure connection to consumers is by forcing consumers to use the bank's client software on a trusted platform. In theory, banks could support multiple platforms. In practice, they will support one and only one. Consumers with Mac or Linux will be out of luck and kicked off e-banking.
I think I prefer avoiding/defeating phishers myself rather than suffer the consequences of the bank's solution to the problem
I'd wager that a goodly number of the "active domains" are the random letter/word domains created by spammers to evade filters and blacklists. Because the cost of adding another domain is nearly $0, the statistic doesn't reflect as much new content creation as it might seem. Add to that the addition of new TLDs (and peopel buying their domain in multiple TLDs) and the practice of search sites slurping expiring domains to get traffic, and I wonder how much new content lies behind the increase number of "active domains".
It would be interesting to analyze the number of domains per unique content set.
Speaking of that, the sandbox these nematodes run in has to be perfect, or else it's just another malware vector.
Exactly! But its worse than that because the nematodes must live outside the sandbox and inside the OS at the highest level of privilege. Catching and removing malware means running at a privilege higher than that of the malicious worms. Because malware tries (and succeeds) in attacking at user and admin levels, nematodes must operate even higher levels. Otherwise the malware can simply deactivate the nematode system (just as some current viruses deactivate antivirus apps).
But nematodes' existence at high privilege levels makes that the ultimate target for malware writers. NASTY!
I'd bet that blogger revenues follow a nasty powerlaw distribution. For every blogger making $400,000 a year, there are 10 making $40,000, for every blogger making $40,000/yr, there are 10 making only $4,000, and so on. Or, for every blogger making $400k, there are 1000 making $400/year. (I don't have hard data on this. It may not be a 10:1 ratio it could be better or it could be worse)
The point: I'd bet that that only a dozen or so bloggers make a decent income, thousands make a little money and millions make nothing from their blogs. As with any fame driven industry, if a person thinks that they can be one of the top 10 blogs in the entire world, then they should go for it. If they can't be top 10, then they should NOT quit their day job.
This sounds like a great way to create malware with privileges.
It's a very worthy goal, but they need to be extremely careful in the coding. One accidental (or malicious) tweak and these worms could overwhelm network resources, DoS the system, or damage valid systems (autoimmune disease).
In the past, PC makers that offered non-MS variants were allegedly punished by MS with higher prices, delayed access to info on future MS OSes, etc. That both Dell and HP are offering machines with Linux suggests that the power has shifted, that MS needs HP and Dell more than those big PC makers need MS.
If the phones/broadband are down, how do people re-install legal copies of software? Laptops and even PCs can run on emergency power, but without internet, the users can't recover if they must re-install software.
I've cloned my start-up drive and all my files onto a 250 GB firewire drive (and several bare IDE HDs stashed in strategic locations). Given that I can order a new computer by 2 AM Eastern and have it delivered the same morning, I can be back in business in no time. I like cloned drives because you can retain all the OS and user preferences.
100% of the funded ventures in TFA target businesses as the end customer. Customization, implementation, & support seem to be the core of every company's revenue model. Being dependent on support revenues means that these businesses have a vested interest in keeping open source software hard to configure and hard to use. Although getting businesses to adopt a product sure worked for IBM and Microsoft, I wonder if this VC activity will actually lead to the creation and widespread adoption of easy-to-use open source software.
VCs need to own something and in this case they want to own customers that can't use the software without them.
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I wonder what these quarks sound like, smell like, or feel like.
Although the internet was designed to "route around" damage, its systems seem to assume an undamaged unified DNS system. I wonder if we need a new protocol (or tweaks to the old one) to create an international equivalent to NAT between countries with independently controlled DNS.
I can see your point, but it creates some nasty vulnerabilities. What stops the virus writer from exploiting these same hooks? Every hook is a new opening for malware to overwrite/modify the virus definition files, disable the AV function, escalate privileges, inject arbitrary code, create a fake AV UI that actually installs malware, etc. I'm not sure that letting 3rd party software modify the AV system is a good idea.
One group (govt) may understand the threat, but is clueless on the operations side. The other group (owers) don't have the classified intelligence data on the threat, but do know the operations side of the network.
Until the two sides share both info and operations knowledge, cybersecurity isn't possible.
Note: I'm no a fan of PC (politically-correct) diversity, but do see value in variety to maximize total economic performance across a range of conditions and fields of endeavor.
This may also be a cautionary tale about the use of linear models (Newtonian gravity) versus nonlinear ones -- interactions among masses distort the solution. If one assumes the wrong things and gets an answer that doesn't fit the observations, perhaps its time to change the assumptions, not add unseen dark matter, epicycles, etc.
None of these demands fosters reliability. It fosters a frantic race to add features and ship stuff ASAP. Everyone seems caught in a massive vicious cycle of upgrades so that nothing ever stabilizes or matures.
Perhaps if/when people stop finding new uses, new formats, new file types, and new applications, then the industry will mature and people will turn their attention to stability and reliability.
The point is that many current systems spew a huge volume of low value (but nonzero value) data (multiple MB or GB/day/device). The lack of storage means most of this is not captured and is thus never indexed.
Even massive companies can't keep all their data. Wal-Mart stores on the order of 460 TB in their data warehouse, but only has room for the last 13 months of data or so. At 138 million customers per week, they only have room for a paltry 59kB per customer per week.
Perhaps this would work if the client machine were truly memory-less (no HD, no NVRAM, no flash ROM, etc.). Then the machine could be a secure blank slate for whatever the USB user needed to do. Given the prevalence of flashable firmware on everything (and the need for persistent machine configuration data), I doubt this is very feasible.
Thanks for the clarification (and the compliment). You're absolutely right that anti-malware needs to live in a lower layer (below the applications that might be infected or be infections). But anti-malware also needs higher privileges than the user or admin or the malware that attacks at these levels (I should have clarified this). Its confusing that lower layers often have higher privileges when it comes to controlling malware.
A key function of an OS is to regulate, allocate, and manage the hardware and software resources of the machine. Controlling which chunks of code/processes/threads have access to which other chunks of RAM/filesystem/IO seems core to both an OS and to controlling malware.
Finally Apple has learned from some of their shipping problems of the past. This is a good move on three levels. First, it's better to surprise a customer with something better than expected. Second, it's also a great way to avoid a sales slump when updated models get announced. Apple has always feared the Osbourne effect, but hasn't been able to stop the rumor mill from letting people know when to stop buying old machines and wait for new machines. Third, its a nice way to ramp to volume production without the pressure of backorders on a new model.
The real joke (on the U.S., that is) is that the U.S. actually spends more per student on education than high-tax places in Europe or high-education places like Japan. Yes, our education system is broken, but more tax money isn't going to fix it.
Bandwidth isn't (and never will be) truly free as long as the hardware and admin labor has a cost. But if we seek way to deliver the most packets at the least cost, then market forces will drive the price down. The total system would route around both damage and inefficient (= high cost) parts of the network.
The only way banks can create a secure connection to consumers is by forcing consumers to use the bank's client software on a trusted platform. In theory, banks could support multiple platforms. In practice, they will support one and only one. Consumers with Mac or Linux will be out of luck and kicked off e-banking.
I think I prefer avoiding/defeating phishers myself rather than suffer the consequences of the bank's solution to the problem
It would be interesting to analyze the number of domains per unique content set.
Exactly! But its worse than that because the nematodes must live outside the sandbox and inside the OS at the highest level of privilege. Catching and removing malware means running at a privilege higher than that of the malicious worms. Because malware tries (and succeeds) in attacking at user and admin levels, nematodes must operate even higher levels. Otherwise the malware can simply deactivate the nematode system (just as some current viruses deactivate antivirus apps).
But nematodes' existence at high privilege levels makes that the ultimate target for malware writers. NASTY!
The point: I'd bet that that only a dozen or so bloggers make a decent income, thousands make a little money and millions make nothing from their blogs. As with any fame driven industry, if a person thinks that they can be one of the top 10 blogs in the entire world, then they should go for it. If they can't be top 10, then they should NOT quit their day job.
It's a very worthy goal, but they need to be extremely careful in the coding. One accidental (or malicious) tweak and these worms could overwhelm network resources, DoS the system, or damage valid systems (autoimmune disease).
In the past, PC makers that offered non-MS variants were allegedly punished by MS with higher prices, delayed access to info on future MS OSes, etc. That both Dell and HP are offering machines with Linux suggests that the power has shifted, that MS needs HP and Dell more than those big PC makers need MS.
If the phones/broadband are down, how do people re-install legal copies of software? Laptops and even PCs can run on emergency power, but without internet, the users can't recover if they must re-install software.
I've cloned my start-up drive and all my files onto a 250 GB firewire drive (and several bare IDE HDs stashed in strategic locations). Given that I can order a new computer by 2 AM Eastern and have it delivered the same morning, I can be back in business in no time. I like cloned drives because you can retain all the OS and user preferences.
VCs need to own something and in this case they want to own customers that can't use the software without them.