Ah, they actually detect rootkits by detecting their attempts to hide? That is clever. Yes, I suppose that an offline scan could only really work using signatures, which is not a very good way to detect things.
The single most intriguing feature is the "Virtual Machine Detector," which uses the time elapsed between two low-level CPU instructions to determine if the operating system is running directly on the PC or in a virtual machine.
There are actually a few other ways to detect if you are running inside a VM, e.g. use of a non-priviledged instruction that reveals information about memory mappings (here). However, there is still an arms race: the rootkit programmer might attempt to detect these tricks and defeat them.
I'd like a rootkit detector that detects Windows rootkits, but runs from a live Linux distribution on a CDROM or a USB key. So I reboot a machine that I suspect is infected and do the rootkit scan without running any software from the hard disk. Seems to me that this would be a cheap way to do the "hardware level rootkit detection" of which you speak: provided that the Linux distribution was clean, a rootkit would not be able to hide itself on the disk.
Do you know of such a thing? Do you plan to port your Windows rootkit detector to Linux to enable this?
Yeah, it's silly to quote a band, but I was quite disturbed by your post and thought the song was quite similar in tone.
Are things really so bad in France that you, presumably an intelligent person, are considering voting for Le Pen, i.e. a Neo-Nazi? Surely there is some solution to France's problems that does not involve jackboots, concentration camps, and all-out war against anyone involved with that "evil" religion. Because when the Nazis have finished "dealing with the Muslims" they will start dealing with everyone else, and that will eventually include you. "When they came for Muslims, I did not speak out... etc."
Pink Floyd wrote a song about the British equivalent of the Front National. Here is an excerpt.
Would you like to see Britannia, Rule again, my friend? All you have to do is follow the worms. Would you like to send our coloured cousins, Home again, my friend? All you need to do is follow the worms.
Waiting, to cut out the deadwood. Waiting, to clean up the city. Waiting, to follow the worms. Waiting, to put on a black shirt. Waiting, to weed out the weaklings. Waiting, to smash in their windows and kick in their doors. Waiting, for the final solution to strengthen the strain. Waiting, to follow the worms. Waiting, to turn on the showers and fire the ovens. Waiting, for the queers and the coons and the reds and the jews. Waiting, to follow the worms.
-- Pink Floyd, The Wall, side 4 of 4, Waiting for the Worms
Could an attempt to "turn back the clock" actually lead to something far worse? It's not unreasonable to think so. Just what is the FN's "final solution" for the Islamic question? Just what will they do about single mothers and ethnic minorities? Given that their strategy so far is straight out of the Dr Goebbels songbook, it's not too hard to guess.
Hmm. It's not really a left vs. right issue. I think that protests against the FN are really about drawing attention to the nature of the FN.
Neo-Nazi organisations like the FN and the BNP in Britain have come up with a "respectable" face. Now they are patriots. It's all about conserving traditional values, a return to the way things were at some magical point in history when things were Good. Traditional justice, small government, support for local business, more policing - who wouldn't want that?
But there's much more to it than that. Underneath, the same people are involved, and they want the same thing - power. Power like the kind of power Hitler had. And their bigoted views are lurking just out of sight: Send the darkies home, fight back against the Muslims (terrorists, dontchaknow). Holocaust? What holocaust?
Some people will support them because they are genuine bigots. But I believe that most people are basically good, not intrinsically racist. It is these people who should understand the true nature of the FN before they make the mistake of voting for them.
Everyone, whether liberal, conservative, or socialist, should speak out against fascist ideas. Your political viewpoint doesn't matter: no-one wants a dictator.
Only if these other players have the ability to record the content. When I tried to record a song from a DVD (music video playing) to my Minidisc via optical, all I got was "NO COPY" flashing on my player's display.
That's SCMS (serial copy management system). It allows the source device to indicate whether the target device should permit recording. The idea is to prevent you copying a copy: you can space-shift your CDs onto MD, but you can't then space-shift that MD onto another without going analogue. The source device can also prevent any recording at all - your DVD player is doing this. The usual workaound is an SCMS removal box that just flips the appropriate bits in the bitstream. SCMS is not very secure:).
It amuses me to think of those paranoid Sony execs, convinced that the minidisc would usher in a terrifying era of unrestrained copying if *something* wasn't done. What confidence they had in their product. Remind you of any other Sony products?
btw. I bought minidisc equipment shortly before the MP3 revolution and have always regretted my short-sightedness.
You buy New-RPG. You install New-RPG and plug in the dongle. At that point, you have the option to create a username and password, or use the dongle as your authentication mechanism. Later, if you want to change, you simply insert the dongle and go to the config and change it. (Needed to enable AND disable, for obvious reasons.)
Yes, this is a great idea. +5, Fantastic.
I do not have a Warcrack account but my partner does. I am terrified that her machine will get a keylogger on it and some "gold farmer" will steal her password and all her stuff. I am even considering forcing her to move her web browsing and instant messaging inside a virtual machine, but that would be inconvenient for her, and she'd still be vulnerable to exploits that could escape the VM. A physical security device like this proposed dongle would be transparent to her, and fantastic peace of mind for me.
The only reason she is not also petrified of keyloggers is that she feels safe. She doesn't understand that there is always a risk. There is no way to be completely safe from malware if you're using a network. No, not even on Linux.
I suppose the market is Linux distributors who can't bundle MPlayer for legal reasons. Can't see anyone buying this directly, though.
They'd probably be legally unable to be as good as MPlayer, (a universal video player, home page, debs), as licensing some codecs will require signing up to agreements to play nicely with DRM. MPlayer is good because there's none of that nonsense: it just works, for every video that I've tried.
That's an interesting quote. I notice that he still says that DRM is about preventing piracy, but says that the mechanism is by controlling legitimate users, rather than actually preventing unauthorised copying. So he's still blaming piracy to justify the need for DRM.
Really this article is a non-story, an opinion piece with no real sources. The sort of thing most of us could have written with a couple of minutes of thought. It's not news.
"Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article:
I just read the article - there is no cited evidence that anyone from Hollywood has ever said this. It may be true, yes, and I agree with the conclusions of the article itself, but this isn't some sort of sensational scoop.
MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM. The current generation will never admit that: piracy is their excuse and they will stick to it. DRM is part of their business model and it won't go anywhere until it results in a shareholder-awakening loss of money.
If people prefer to pirate stuff, that means the DRM is not restrictive enough to stop them. That is the only thing they'll ever tell you, and the only thing you'll hear from the media outlets that they own.
I'm an independent filmmaker who releases all my movies under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License that allows anyone to freely copy, distribute, display, and perform my work.
This pro **AA act could be the nail in the coffin for not only the Creative Commons, but MY freedom as an artist.
Couldn't you circumvent the act by hosting your content overseas?
I agree it will be a bad law, but sometimes we end up needing workarounds for bad laws because the people in power aren't willing to change them (for whatever reason). I am sure there are plenty of hosting options that will allow you to avoid DRM. Host your work in the EU and link to it with a large notice: "DRM-free video - plays on anything".
In fact, if DRM is going to be required on all downloadable content in the US, it is a good time to establish DRM-free content hosting services in other countries. Let US-based hosts drown in waves of unnecessary regulation if that's what the government wants.
Flamebait? "The threat of DRM completely making our computers useless" is not a contraversial statement. Even if you really like DRM, you can probably think of some examples where it has been taken too far: think Sony rootkits, Starforce CDROM damage, and Jon Johansen and Dimitri Skylarov being arrested for hacking their own computers.
Read up on TCPA immediately. Consider how much of the design of Vista has been aimed at preventing access to high-quality copies of information protected by DRM. Should the film industry really have been allowed to design an operating system?
I don't think the patent office is allowed to care about that.
In any case, many software patents are used "defensively", i.e. to counter claims of patent infringement from another corporation. These patents seem to have been taken out for the same reason. Let us hope they are never used for evil.
It always scares me to see people speaking in favour of Marxism, considering what has happened every time an actual implementation has been attempted. Capitalism has its faults, but the other extreme makes you a slave with no economic or political power whatsoever. Fans of Marxism might like to read up on the actual history of the USSR or 20th century China before supporting an ideology in which everyone becomes the property of the state.
- The server farm is outside anyone's jurisdiction. In space! - You make your own connection - you own all the connection equipment except the equipment that is in space. - Satellite could run virtual hosting of websites or Linode-like virtual machines - run whatever applications you want, but in space!
Perhaps the satellite could have a regular Internet link as long as it was possible to have one, just to get it started. Eventually this would be forced down by the authorities, as inevitably the satellite would be hosting things they didn't like. But if the actual owners of the satellite refused to give up the remote administration keys (or destroyed them), the satellite would stay up for years, unreachable except at great expense. Geeks win. In space.
Seriously, I hope someone does this, because it would kick so much ass. Could enough virtual hosting be sold to fund design, construction and launch? Are rad-hardened computers sufficiently compact to make it economically feasible to do this yet?
The ulimit is a property of each process which is passed on to any children that it spawns. This works for any program, not just a shell. There is no reason why you can't ulimit your window manager: then, every program it launches will also be subject to the same resource limits.
If only people didn't WRITE PROGRAMS to run on OPERATING SYSTEMS.
Hey, if Vista refused to run non-Microsoft programs, that would guarantee the Vista experience, right? Microsoft should show us all what "monopoly" really means by refusing to run third-party code.
I think you're right - it is a manufactured media phenomenon. But the manufacturer is the band manager. He's clearly figured out a way to get publicity:
Create Internet presence including Myspace
After X many downloads, send out press releases saying "We could be in the top 40! And we're independent! Woo!"
Story is picked up by newspapers and Slashdot
More exposure means more downloads
Band actually does enter the top 40
Profit!
Reinvest profits to gain more publicity
More profit!
In other words he has done the marketing work of the record company, and used the Internet to do the distribution work. Clever stuff. As you have found, it shows through in the web page, where the marketing speak of a typical record company has been carefully emulated.
The labels don't have a monopoly on "bollocks" yet.
Quake certainly was technically impressive, but I couldn't help being disappointed by it at the time. It just wasn't as good as Doom. Technically, of course, it was better, but it wasn't as much fun. In particular, single player completely sucked, and the level artwork was a miserable collection of dull greys. I don't think I ever finished every level - I just lost interest in it.
None of this was Carmack's fault, of course. He can only be blamed for Quake C:).
My concerns about the software are really about the UI and applications. As I understand it, these are almost entirely new. I'm sure the OS will be fine since it is based on mature technology as you say. However, someone has pointed out that I can try out the whole thing right now using code from http://laptop.org/ - I'll do that before posting any more concerns which are only based on second hand information.
There is one aspect of the OLPC that really worries me: the software. The machine will ship with many pieces of entirely new software, or at least new frontends for existing programs (e.g. Firefox). I think that this is a significant risk. There is a lot of code to be designed, written, and thoroughly tested before their first deployment on millions of machines. Those machines may not see a network connection after they are sold, so the software has to be right first time. It also has to be secure.
However, the OLPC folks seem unworried:
With two more betas to go before the summer, Bletsas was unfazed by the glitches. He also called the current state of the software "barely useable," but again was confident that it would be where it needed to be by launch.
WOW works in Windows 2000 in a limited user account*. In fact, most games do. The only exceptions I've seen recently are games that use Punkbuster - but that's a problem with Punkbuster, not the games themselves.
* except a month or two ago, when Blizzard's update changed one of the shortcuts used to launch the game. If you'd installed as administrator, this part of the update failed as the file was read-only.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, they actually detect rootkits by detecting their attempts to hide? That is clever. Yes, I suppose that an offline scan could only really work using signatures, which is not a very good way to detect things.
Thanks for clearing that up.
There are actually a few other ways to detect if you are running inside a VM, e.g. use of a non-priviledged instruction that reveals information about memory mappings (here). However, there is still an arms race: the rootkit programmer might attempt to detect these tricks and defeat them.
I'd like a rootkit detector that detects Windows rootkits, but runs from a live Linux distribution on a CDROM or a USB key. So I reboot a machine that I suspect is infected and do the rootkit scan without running any software from the hard disk. Seems to me that this would be a cheap way to do the "hardware level rootkit detection" of which you speak: provided that the Linux distribution was clean, a rootkit would not be able to hide itself on the disk.
Do you know of such a thing? Do you plan to port your Windows rootkit detector to Linux to enable this?
Yeah, it's silly to quote a band, but I was quite disturbed by your post and thought the song was quite similar in tone.
Are things really so bad in France that you, presumably an intelligent person, are considering voting for Le Pen, i.e. a Neo-Nazi? Surely there is some solution to France's problems that does not involve jackboots, concentration camps, and all-out war against anyone involved with that "evil" religion. Because when the Nazis have finished "dealing with the Muslims" they will start dealing with everyone else, and that will eventually include you. "When they came for Muslims, I did not speak out... etc."
-- Pink Floyd, The Wall, side 4 of 4, Waiting for the Worms
Could an attempt to "turn back the clock" actually lead to something far worse? It's not unreasonable to think so. Just what is the FN's "final solution" for the Islamic question? Just what will they do about single mothers and ethnic minorities? Given that their strategy so far is straight out of the Dr Goebbels songbook, it's not too hard to guess.
Hmm. It's not really a left vs. right issue. I think that protests against the FN are really about drawing attention to the nature of the FN.
Neo-Nazi organisations like the FN and the BNP in Britain have come up with a "respectable" face. Now they are patriots. It's all about conserving traditional values, a return to the way things were at some magical point in history when things were Good. Traditional justice, small government, support for local business, more policing - who wouldn't want that?
But there's much more to it than that. Underneath, the same people are involved, and they want the same thing - power. Power like the kind of power Hitler had. And their bigoted views are lurking just out of sight: Send the darkies home, fight back against the Muslims (terrorists, dontchaknow). Holocaust? What holocaust?
Some people will support them because they are genuine bigots. But I believe that most people are basically good, not intrinsically racist. It is these people who should understand the true nature of the FN before they make the mistake of voting for them.
Everyone, whether liberal, conservative, or socialist, should speak out against fascist ideas. Your political viewpoint doesn't matter: no-one wants a dictator.
Only if these other players have the ability to record the content. When I tried to record a song from a DVD (music video playing) to my Minidisc via optical, all I got was "NO COPY" flashing on my player's display.
That's SCMS (serial copy management system). It allows the source device to indicate whether the target device should permit recording. The idea is to prevent you copying a copy: you can space-shift your CDs onto MD, but you can't then space-shift that MD onto another without going analogue. The source device can also prevent any recording at all - your DVD player is doing this. The usual workaound is an SCMS removal box that just flips the appropriate bits in the bitstream. SCMS is not very secure
It amuses me to think of those paranoid Sony execs, convinced that the minidisc would usher in a terrifying era of unrestrained copying if *something* wasn't done. What confidence they had in their product. Remind you of any other Sony products?
btw. I bought minidisc equipment shortly before the MP3 revolution and have always regretted my short-sightedness.
You buy New-RPG. You install New-RPG and plug in the dongle. At that point, you have the option to create a username and password, or use the dongle as your authentication mechanism. Later, if you want to change, you simply insert the dongle and go to the config and change it. (Needed to enable AND disable, for obvious reasons.)
Yes, this is a great idea. +5, Fantastic.
I do not have a Warcrack account but my partner does. I am terrified that her machine will get a keylogger on it and some "gold farmer" will steal her password and all her stuff. I am even considering forcing her to move her web browsing and instant messaging inside a virtual machine, but that would be inconvenient for her, and she'd still be vulnerable to exploits that could escape the VM. A physical security device like this proposed dongle would be transparent to her, and fantastic peace of mind for me.
The only reason she is not also petrified of keyloggers is that she feels safe. She doesn't understand that there is always a risk. There is no way to be completely safe from malware if you're using a network. No, not even on Linux.
Well, I stand corrected :).
The message they give out to the public is normally "agh, pirates are stealing our stuff, we need DRM to stop them", which is misleading.
I suppose the market is Linux distributors who can't bundle MPlayer for legal reasons. Can't see anyone buying this directly, though.
They'd probably be legally unable to be as good as MPlayer, (a universal video player, home page, debs), as licensing some codecs will require signing up to agreements to play nicely with DRM. MPlayer is good because there's none of that nonsense: it just works, for every video that I've tried.
That's an interesting quote. I notice that he still says that DRM is about preventing piracy, but says that the mechanism is by controlling legitimate users, rather than actually preventing unauthorised copying. So he's still blaming piracy to justify the need for DRM.
Really this article is a non-story, an opinion piece with no real sources. The sort of thing most of us could have written with a couple of minutes of thought. It's not news.
"Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article:
I just read the article - there is no cited evidence that anyone from Hollywood has ever said this. It may be true, yes, and I agree with the conclusions of the article itself, but this isn't some sort of sensational scoop.
MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM. The current generation will never admit that: piracy is their excuse and they will stick to it. DRM is part of their business model and it won't go anywhere until it results in a shareholder-awakening loss of money.
If people prefer to pirate stuff, that means the DRM is not restrictive enough to stop them. That is the only thing they'll ever tell you, and the only thing you'll hear from the media outlets that they own.
I'm an independent filmmaker who releases all my movies under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License that allows anyone to freely copy, distribute, display, and perform my work.
This pro **AA act could be the nail in the coffin for not only the Creative Commons, but MY freedom as an artist.
Couldn't you circumvent the act by hosting your content overseas?
I agree it will be a bad law, but sometimes we end up needing workarounds for bad laws because the people in power aren't willing to change them (for whatever reason). I am sure there are plenty of hosting options that will allow you to avoid DRM. Host your work in the EU and link to it with a large notice: "DRM-free video - plays on anything".
In fact, if DRM is going to be required on all downloadable content in the US, it is a good time to establish DRM-free content hosting services in other countries. Let US-based hosts drown in waves of unnecessary regulation if that's what the government wants.
Flamebait? "The threat of DRM completely making our computers useless" is not a contraversial statement. Even if you really like DRM, you can probably think of some examples where it has been taken too far: think Sony rootkits, Starforce CDROM damage, and Jon Johansen and Dimitri Skylarov being arrested for hacking their own computers.
Read up on TCPA immediately. Consider how much of the design of Vista has been aimed at preventing access to high-quality copies of information protected by DRM. Should the film industry really have been allowed to design an operating system?
I don't think the patent office is allowed to care about that.
In any case, many software patents are used "defensively", i.e. to counter claims of patent infringement from another corporation. These patents seem to have been taken out for the same reason. Let us hope they are never used for evil.
Your post is spot on.
It always scares me to see people speaking in favour of Marxism, considering what has happened every time an actual implementation has been attempted. Capitalism has its faults, but the other extreme makes you a slave with no economic or political power whatsoever. Fans of Marxism might like to read up on the actual history of the USSR or 20th century China before supporting an ideology in which everyone becomes the property of the state.
I think this is a great idea:
- The server farm is outside anyone's jurisdiction. In space!
- You make your own connection - you own all the connection equipment except the equipment that is in space.
- Satellite could run virtual hosting of websites or Linode-like virtual machines - run whatever applications you want, but in space!
Perhaps the satellite could have a regular Internet link as long as it was possible to have one, just to get it started. Eventually this would be forced down by the authorities, as inevitably the satellite would be hosting things they didn't like. But if the actual owners of the satellite refused to give up the remote administration keys (or destroyed them), the satellite would stay up for years, unreachable except at great expense. Geeks win. In space.
Seriously, I hope someone does this, because it would kick so much ass. Could enough virtual hosting be sold to fund design, construction and launch? Are rad-hardened computers sufficiently compact to make it economically feasible to do this yet?
The ulimit is a property of each process which is passed on to any children that it spawns. This works for any program, not just a shell. There is no reason why you can't ulimit your window manager: then, every program it launches will also be subject to the same resource limits.
If only people didn't WRITE PROGRAMS to run on OPERATING SYSTEMS.
Hey, if Vista refused to run non-Microsoft programs, that would guarantee the Vista experience, right? Microsoft should show us all what "monopoly" really means by refusing to run third-party code.
I think you're right - it is a manufactured media phenomenon. But the manufacturer is the band manager. He's clearly figured out a way to get publicity:
In other words he has done the marketing work of the record company, and used the Internet to do the distribution work. Clever stuff. As you have found, it shows through in the web page, where the marketing speak of a typical record company has been carefully emulated.
The labels don't have a monopoly on "bollocks" yet.
Quake certainly was technically impressive, but I couldn't help being disappointed by it at the time. It just wasn't as good as Doom. Technically, of course, it was better, but it wasn't as much fun. In particular, single player completely sucked, and the level artwork was a miserable collection of dull greys. I don't think I ever finished every level - I just lost interest in it.
:).
None of this was Carmack's fault, of course. He can only be blamed for Quake C
Do you have any links or citations that quotes Bletsas as saying this?
0 2326NWHWEV
Yes, it's in the article. http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/20070109
My concerns about the software are really about the UI and applications. As I understand it, these are almost entirely new. I'm sure the OS will be fine since it is based on mature technology as you say. However, someone has pointed out that I can try out the whole thing right now using code from http://laptop.org/ - I'll do that before posting any more concerns which are only based on second hand information.
There is one aspect of the OLPC that really worries me: the software. The machine will ship with many pieces of entirely new software, or at least new frontends for existing programs (e.g. Firefox). I think that this is a significant risk. There is a lot of code to be designed, written, and thoroughly tested before their first deployment on millions of machines. Those machines may not see a network connection after they are sold, so the software has to be right first time. It also has to be secure.
However, the OLPC folks seem unworried:
With two more betas to go before the summer, Bletsas was unfazed by the glitches. He also called the current state of the software "barely useable," but again was confident that it would be where it needed to be by launch.
I hope that this confidence is not misplaced.
WOW works in Windows 2000 in a limited user account*. In fact, most games do. The only exceptions I've seen recently are games that use Punkbuster - but that's a problem with Punkbuster, not the games themselves.
* except a month or two ago, when Blizzard's update changed one of the shortcuts used to launch the game. If you'd installed as administrator, this part of the update failed as the file was read-only.
The best solution is not to use MS software or even closed source software in general, but of course that's not going to happen.
Naturally I agree with you on both points. That's the only way that the necessary security auditing could ever be practical.