And unfortunately, because of how most admins are lazy, the only solution seems to be:
Step 1: get the latest exploits
Step 2: Sweep IP blocks for vulnerable machines
Step 3: gain access to them and install SSH, add your own user account, and change the root password.
Step 4: secure the box, leave a polite message about the admin needing to be fired, and remove any other traces of your passage.
Once we've secured enough machines through these methods, kiddies won't be able to use them. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't like the idea that they could possibly be insecure, and resist and sort of proactive effort to cut off clueless admins at the knees.
Look how much resistance the RBL and MAPS and ORBS get.. and they're just shutting down "rather harmless" open relays. Compare this with a fleet of rooted boxen, and you see how much more serious *this* issue is. --
"but what do you expect from an OS that doesn't even know the difference between a device and a regular file. (Ever try renaming something to 'NUL'?)"
I'd expect it to be like any other UNIX which treats everything as a file.
The problem is not that it fails to differentiate, but that it pollutes the namespace by not having a separate directory for the special device inodes. --
"This is the reason that Rambus (16-bit 400 MHz) is so hard to manufacture compared to SDRAM. Moving to a serial bus allows the clock speed to be cranked much, much, MUCH higher without worrying as much about data errors."
Either you just accidently contradicted yourself, you forgot to add a final sentence, or you're confused about RDRAM and SDRAM.
SDRAM is parallel. The Rambus is hard to manufacture because it has to be high clock speeds.. very high clock speeds, to beat out the parallel technology. That's because a normal PC100 DIMM doesn't have to be very fast (thus avoiding the more severe effects of cross talk) because it can push 64bits per clock cycle. It can acheive a peak bandwidth of 800Mbps. This is half of what an 800Mhz RDRAM RIMM can do. But the "simpler" RDRAM RIMM is much, much more expensive. Adding extra datapins at slow speeds isn't too hard compared to cranking even the smallest number of pins to incredibly high speeds.
Based on your assertation that crosstalk is bad thing, one would think that RDRAM would be easier to manufacture as they use the simple serial process. This isn't completely true, as you've oversimplified the case and sound like you contracticted yourself ("RDRAM is hard to mfr.. Serial RDRAM is easy to mfr"). ---
I've been working on reverse engineering the code they used for a day or so now. Translating ASM back into C after not working with ASM for a few years sucks.:)
Anyways, they use a method of selectively garbling it based on the length of the UPC and a few other tricks. Without their special keyboard hooked driver DLL, you'll just get gobbdygook back from their cuecat hardware.
I just hope the fact that this was mentioned on/. won't stop Radio Shack from giving the scanners out. I don't actually have a scanner from the local Radio Shack yet (the code was passed to me by some of the other #kuro5hin regulars who have also been working on this). ---
Just for those not reading the moderation FAQ: If you agree with a post, post a message discussing with it. In this case, you could post how you like a particular ambient light setting.
On the other hand, a post about a manager not willing to turn off the lights does not seem "Insightful" to me, and not exactly "Informative" either as (and I may be way off here) I expect most managers like to keep the lights on around the "normal" office workers.
I'd be much happier if you'd moderated up a post where Signal 11 talked about studies one ergonomics or noise polution in the work place, vs. a Signal 11 bold/italics "turn off the lights" post. ---
Ahh, but wouldn't it simply be easier to port the existing Macintosh version (aka the "sans anti-trust monopoly integration API" version) to Linux? It's a different code base, and only shares its name with the Win32 IE. ---
Except that patents are meant to protect small startup companies while they form a market share over a period of time.
Patenting the ability to set a cookie, OTOH, is a bit different from a genuine new way of "morphing" the ISA of one processor into the ISA of another (especially going from CISC to VLIW!), and in such a way that is actually saves power.
Again, it's the "one of these things is obvious, one of these things is not" and the "this company is small, in debt, and being eyed by the the larger companies," versus the, "lock out the competition by patenting a common practice" method of business. Patents do have a real, useful purpose. Why do you think they were made in the first place? ---
They always have twists. It's an intro with a few in-jokes and other refences, a knee-slapper or two, and then the twist to the main-ish-er story.
Consider: all they have to do is add a further twist. Granted, the build will have to be larger, but the movie won't be any different in scale compared to the show as Really, Really Big Man is to Really Big Man. ---
"Extra bits don't give you more speed. It only increases what you can do (which might possibly give more speed, but generally wider datapaths are slower, not faster)."
No true at all. Wider data paths are faster because they can move more data per tick. Compare: NARROW FAST SCSI -> 10Mbps, WIDE FAST SCSI -> 20mbps.
And if you increase the number of clock ticks by 2, you get ULTRA WIDE SCSI -> 40Mbps!
It's a choice of pumping more bits per tick, or having more ticks with which to pump bits. An AMD Athlon may have 1 billion ticks with which to pump bits, but the bus it's connected to is incredibly slow compared to it. Widen the path, and you get double the performance with today's technology.
I think your flaw is in thinking based on what you know. As most first year chem students, and they'll say that wet air is heavier than dry air because a wet towel is heavier than a dry one. This is flawed logic. ---
"This is the mighty slashdot. Where IP laws and corporations are denounced at every turn. I think the main reason that stories like this get posted on the main page, is becase the editors and readers here have a strong anti-corporatist bent. I can hardly wait to see how Katz will describe this company as commiting a heinous act, while he wholeheartedly supports Napster, et al."
Hardly. If this was like the Napster situation, we would be peacefully boycotting this database of entries because they forced the grad students to sign a licence to get their thesises presented for peer review at all, and from this same licence, they would be able to turn around and sell these for 60$ a pop. As it stands, they are violating copyright, not using unfair monopoly policies and price gouging to extort money from people.
The Napster issue is not about piracy. It is about the unfair monopoly used to keep prices on CDs high. I personally support the lowering of the prices, and will not buy CDs until they are at a fair price (10 to 150$ Cdn), VS the existing 20 to 26$ I have to pay. In the meantime, I listen to public MP3 streams, rather than resorting to piracy. ---
It's interesting to note that bilinear filtering and trilinear filtering are exactly the proper point sampling scaling techniques now implemented in all 3D cards that this fellow talks about when discussing how images should be scaled up for use on a monitor.
Think how much better textures look in Quake 2 and 3 when they are properly sampled with their neigbours and blended for use on the walls, rather than just pixel replication (like walking up to a wall in Doom and seeing a square of some ugly, solid) colour. Although there are still other ways to make the image quality look worse (compare how the blood/smoke clouds look on a Voodoo2 or a Voodoo5 vs. the square-ish-grid-look that seems to be inside them on an nVidia chipset [at least on the NV3, NV4, and NV5 chips ]:-)). ---
I suggest you read the/usr/include/stdint.h on your system. It will show you how they libc people use C preprocessor magic to make types sane by default. ---
64-bit default pointer means you get > 2 gb file size limit without any performance penatly or backflips on the part of your OS.
Your memory bandwidth will increase (think AGP 4x being faster still!) because you move larger chunks of data per clock cycle (not more).
You, too, can run nuclear weapon detonation simulations on your home machine without waiting an eon for a result.
Whereas most small operations (such as bit reads/writes) are about the same in terms of speed, all "large" operations (such as flushing memory pages to disk) will go faster.
AMD specific: you lose some of the Intel compatbility-bagage, and should get better performance because of the much-saner memory segment handling.
Cons of a 64-bit proccessor:
Most software not written with portability in mind will break in interesting ways (not fixable if it's closed source)
Some 32-bit code will not run on it because of some of the legacy compatibility removed.
So what you're saying is we shouldn't upgrade because some programmers (to put it mildy) can't code their way out of a paper bag?
"Remember how much stability problems arised in windows due to the 16-bit compatibility? Ok, so it was not because of the bitness but the insecure memory model."
NT runs 16-bit code in its own separate address space. That's what should've happened in Win9x, and might have happened had MS not been helmed by marketters trying to sell the more expensive NT to businesses (who themselves bought the 9x because it was the "legacy" update to their legacy Win31 machines).
"Still, providing backwards compatibility to 32-bit software is going to happen with separate interfaces (what's the length of an 'int'?^). Have some more DLL Hell?"
It's not AMD's fault that programmers can't be bothered to use proper types and use sanity checking in their programs. AFAIK, NetBSD is the only project written with enough portability discipline to run on a 26-bit processor (one of the ARM family). Using things like "int" and assuming they are 16-bit, 32-bit, or even 64-bit is wrong. There are specific types given with every mature libc that allow you to define exactly how many bits it should be via such defined types as int8_t, int16_t, int32_t, etc.
If you look at this Kernel Traffic, you'll see what assumptions Linux makes about the various bit types.
So before you complain about migration hell, remember that you probably made the choice to run your company on a Windows powered server. If you then can't get support for it 10 years later on newer hardware because the company behind it has decided to sell other things, you have to accept that. Don't try to call foul when the hardware standards advance, but your chosen software does not.
I agree that earlier stuff should be emulated in software, rather than hardware. That's where the Crusoe has an edge -- it can, at the lowest level, emulate several processor families and allow them to communicate using the system memory. A benefit that is only gained by emulating another processor on theirs (which is what those "D00d, c0mp1l3 R4D H4t f0r 17 n471v3" kiddies fail to understand). ---
"Hmm, a file browser + web browser without the bloat of two separate products"
Since when has integration of a file browser and a web browser been a good thing?
Yes, it's nice to have a file browser which can do useful things with the various types of files, but I define "useful things" as launching the application that works with files of that MIME type -- NOT loading another component into place in the file browser window.
You present new users with an interface that keeps changing, and doesn't give a clear line between different applications. This is confusing to people still struggling with the "executable programs and content data" split, not to mention probably not what the people experienced with computers wanted. I prefer to work with the data I've selected in a separate program, as opposed to in plae, so I can arrange them on my virtual desktops and continue to use the file manager for its purpose -- managing files. ---
All that does is change the exploit from a stack overflow, to a slightly different kind of stack overflow. The bandaid would work at first, but after a few months, all the kiddie exploit tools would work in a new way.
Linus Torvalds (and other kernel designers) have posted exaclty how to defeat a Solar Designer patches kernel as an example. Read the kernel traffic and then realise that this sort of thing is a not a long-term success measure. The programmer must always be careful when designing a program, and no anal-retentive language or kernel-patches can protect you from bad code. ---
A country does gain something for coming up with things first.
The metric system is "System Internationale" -- a French name, because the French came up with it.
Stamps from England do not bear a country name anywhere on them. This is because the English invented postage.
The US does not need to force people into.com.us. They "developed" arpa net under the arm of DARPA. They have earned it.
(PS: I'm Canadian, so don't think I'm boosting my own country) ---
Re:If anyone is wondering why Kuro5hin
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 3
Hehe... I am an admin there:) Me and Rusty are the guys who work on it. Rusty wrote Scoop, the weblog engine we use, and I do the more practical Unix admin stuff. Being an admin isn't anthing special because K5 is all user run (story moderation, etc).
We're sometimes on #kuro5hin on irc.kuro5hin.org (same IRC network that hosts #slashdot), can be mailed, etc, if you want to chat with us.
As for traffic being "free," someone has to pay for bandwidth..:) But it is nice to get some extra people to read and help the site grow. ---
Slashdot Mirror
And unfortunately, because of how most admins are lazy, the only solution seems to be:
Step 1: get the latest exploits
Step 2: Sweep IP blocks for vulnerable machines
Step 3: gain access to them and install SSH, add your own user account, and change the root password.
Step 4: secure the box, leave a polite message about the admin needing to be fired, and remove any other traces of your passage.
Once we've secured enough machines through these methods, kiddies won't be able to use them. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't like the idea that they could possibly be insecure, and resist and sort of proactive effort to cut off clueless admins at the knees.
Look how much resistance the RBL and MAPS and ORBS get.. and they're just shutting down "rather harmless" open relays. Compare this with a fleet of rooted boxen, and you see how much more serious *this* issue is.
--
Dan's Data, a nice little tech site run by an Aussie with a proper appreciation for IBM keyboards, already had something similar posted back on the 18th. Of course, he also has a page on how to properly destroy your PC.
(If you really want a laugh, read the comics, too.)
--
"but what do you expect from an OS that doesn't even know the difference between a device and a regular file. (Ever try renaming something to 'NUL'?)"
I'd expect it to be like any other UNIX which treats everything as a file.
The problem is not that it fails to differentiate, but that it pollutes the namespace by not having a separate directory for the special device inodes.
--
PayPLA?
Why, that's great, because those PLA people deserve every cent. It takes a special kind of person to describe how to really hack WWIV BBSes.
--
"This is the reason that Rambus (16-bit 400 MHz) is so hard to manufacture compared to SDRAM. Moving to a serial bus allows the clock speed to be cranked much, much, MUCH higher without worrying as much about data errors."
Either you just accidently contradicted yourself, you forgot to add a final sentence, or you're confused about RDRAM and SDRAM.
SDRAM is parallel. The Rambus is hard to manufacture because it has to be high clock speeds.. very high clock speeds, to beat out the parallel technology. That's because a normal PC100 DIMM doesn't have to be very fast (thus avoiding the more severe effects of cross talk) because it can push 64bits per clock cycle. It can acheive a peak bandwidth of 800Mbps. This is half of what an 800Mhz RDRAM RIMM can do. But the "simpler" RDRAM RIMM is much, much more expensive. Adding extra datapins at slow speeds isn't too hard compared to cranking even the smallest number of pins to incredibly high speeds.
Based on your assertation that crosstalk is bad thing, one would think that RDRAM would be easier to manufacture as they use the simple serial process. This isn't completely true, as you've oversimplified the case and sound like you contracticted yourself ("RDRAM is hard to mfr.. Serial RDRAM is easy to mfr").
---
In 2061, Chinese landed on Europa and were killed in Arthur C. Clarke's universe, but a light seeking tentacle thing :)
In 2010, a Russian cosmonaut was killed by a transmission from the monolith.
---
Actually, no.
:)
/. won't stop Radio Shack from giving the scanners out. I don't actually have a scanner from the local Radio Shack yet (the code was passed to me by some of the other #kuro5hin regulars who have also been working on this).
I've been working on reverse engineering the code they used for a day or so now. Translating ASM back into C after not working with ASM for a few years sucks.
Anyways, they use a method of selectively garbling it based on the length of the UPC and a few other tricks. Without their special keyboard hooked driver DLL, you'll just get gobbdygook back from their cuecat hardware.
I just hope the fact that this was mentioned on
---
Thank you for correcting that obvious density error (there are at least two meanings to that statement ;))
---
Just for those not reading the moderation FAQ: If you agree with a post, post a message discussing with it. In this case, you could post how you like a particular ambient light setting.
On the other hand, a post about a manager not willing to turn off the lights does not seem "Insightful" to me, and not exactly "Informative" either as (and I may be way off here) I expect most managers like to keep the lights on around the "normal" office workers.
I'd be much happier if you'd moderated up a post where Signal 11 talked about studies one ergonomics or noise polution in the work place, vs. a Signal 11 bold/italics "turn off the lights" post.
---
Ahh, but wouldn't it simply be easier to port the existing Macintosh version (aka the "sans anti-trust monopoly integration API" version) to Linux? It's a different code base, and only shares its name with the Win32 IE.
---
Except that patents are meant to protect small startup companies while they form a market share over a period of time.
Patenting the ability to set a cookie, OTOH, is a bit different from a genuine new way of "morphing" the ISA of one processor into the ISA of another (especially going from CISC to VLIW!), and in such a way that is actually saves power.
Again, it's the "one of these things is obvious, one of these things is not" and the "this company is small, in debt, and being eyed by the the larger companies," versus the, "lock out the competition by patenting a common practice" method of business. Patents do have a real, useful purpose. Why do you think they were made in the first place?
---
They always have twists. It's an intro with a few in-jokes and other refences, a knee-slapper or two, and then the twist to the main-ish-er story.
Consider: all they have to do is add a further twist. Granted, the build will have to be larger, but the movie won't be any different in scale compared to the show as Really, Really Big Man is to Really Big Man.
---
Still, it'll be interesting to see if they put a Miguel Sanchez easter egg in the credits :)
---
"A bunch of volunteers working on an open source project with deep philosophical problems with GPL. Are you from Redmond? "
Don't you mean, "are you from #freebsd?"
---
"Extra bits don't give you more speed. It only increases what you can do (which might possibly give more speed, but generally wider datapaths are slower, not faster)."
No true at all. Wider data paths are faster because they can move more data per tick. Compare: NARROW FAST SCSI -> 10Mbps, WIDE FAST SCSI -> 20mbps.
And if you increase the number of clock ticks by 2, you get ULTRA WIDE SCSI -> 40Mbps!
It's a choice of pumping more bits per tick, or having more ticks with which to pump bits. An AMD Athlon may have 1 billion ticks with which to pump bits, but the bus it's connected to is incredibly slow compared to it. Widen the path, and you get double the performance with today's technology.
I think your flaw is in thinking based on what you know. As most first year chem students, and they'll say that wet air is heavier than dry air because a wet towel is heavier than a dry one. This is flawed logic.
---
"This is the mighty slashdot. Where IP laws and corporations are denounced at every turn. I think the main reason that stories like this get posted on the main page, is becase the editors and readers here have a strong anti-corporatist bent. I can hardly wait to see how Katz will describe this company as commiting a heinous act, while he wholeheartedly supports Napster, et al."
Hardly. If this was like the Napster situation, we would be peacefully boycotting this database of entries because they forced the grad students to sign a licence to get their thesises presented for peer review at all, and from this same licence, they would be able to turn around and sell these for 60$ a pop. As it stands, they are violating copyright, not using unfair monopoly policies and price gouging to extort money from people.
The Napster issue is not about piracy. It is about the unfair monopoly used to keep prices on CDs high. I personally support the lowering of the prices, and will not buy CDs until they are at a fair price (10 to 150$ Cdn), VS the existing 20 to 26$ I have to pay. In the meantime, I listen to public MP3 streams, rather than resorting to piracy.
---
I meant proper as in "better than how Doom scaled up pixels," rather than "proper for best possible image quality."
:-)
You are right. I still think it's an alright tradeoff at this point, at least until anistropic filtering gets implemented in hardware
---
It's interesting to note that bilinear filtering and trilinear filtering are exactly the proper point sampling scaling techniques now implemented in all 3D cards that this fellow talks about when discussing how images should be scaled up for use on a monitor.
Think how much better textures look in Quake 2 and 3 when they are properly sampled with their neigbours and blended for use on the walls, rather than just pixel replication (like walking up to a wall in Doom and seeing a square of some ugly, solid) colour. Although there are still other ways to make the image quality look worse (compare how the blood/smoke clouds look on a Voodoo2 or a Voodoo5 vs. the square-ish-grid-look that seems to be inside them on an nVidia chipset [at least on the NV3, NV4, and NV5 chips ]:-)).
---
I suggest you read the /usr/include/stdint.h on your system. It will show you how they libc people use C preprocessor magic to make types sane by default.
---
Pros of 64-bit proccssor:
Cons of a 64-bit proccessor:
Over all, a good upgrade (IMO).
---
So what you're saying is we shouldn't upgrade because some programmers (to put it mildy) can't code their way out of a paper bag?
"Remember how much stability problems arised in windows due to the 16-bit compatibility? Ok, so it was not because of the bitness but the insecure memory model."
NT runs 16-bit code in its own separate address space. That's what should've happened in Win9x, and might have happened had MS not been helmed by marketters trying to sell the more expensive NT to businesses (who themselves bought the 9x because it was the "legacy" update to their legacy Win31 machines).
"Still, providing backwards compatibility to 32-bit software is going to happen with separate interfaces (what's the length of an 'int'?^). Have some more DLL Hell?"
It's not AMD's fault that programmers can't be bothered to use proper types and use sanity checking in their programs. AFAIK, NetBSD is the only project written with enough portability discipline to run on a 26-bit processor (one of the ARM family). Using things like "int" and assuming they are 16-bit, 32-bit, or even 64-bit is wrong. There are specific types given with every mature libc that allow you to define exactly how many bits it should be via such defined types as int8_t, int16_t, int32_t, etc.
If you look at this Kernel Traffic, you'll see what assumptions Linux makes about the various bit types.
So before you complain about migration hell, remember that you probably made the choice to run your company on a Windows powered server. If you then can't get support for it 10 years later on newer hardware because the company behind it has decided to sell other things, you have to accept that. Don't try to call foul when the hardware standards advance, but your chosen software does not.
I agree that earlier stuff should be emulated in software, rather than hardware. That's where the Crusoe has an edge -- it can, at the lowest level, emulate several processor families and allow them to communicate using the system memory. A benefit that is only gained by emulating another processor on theirs (which is what those "D00d, c0mp1l3 R4D H4t f0r 17 n471v3" kiddies fail to understand).
---
"Hmm, a file browser + web browser without the bloat of two separate products"
Since when has integration of a file browser and a web browser been a good thing?
Yes, it's nice to have a file browser which can do useful things with the various types of files, but I define "useful things" as launching the application that works with files of that MIME type -- NOT loading another component into place in the file browser window.
You present new users with an interface that keeps changing, and doesn't give a clear line between different applications. This is confusing to people still struggling with the "executable programs and content data" split, not to mention probably not what the people experienced with computers wanted. I prefer to work with the data I've selected in a separate program, as opposed to in plae, so I can arrange them on my virtual desktops and continue to use the file manager for its purpose -- managing files.
---
All that does is change the exploit from a stack overflow, to a slightly different kind of stack overflow. The bandaid would work at first, but after a few months, all the kiddie exploit tools would work in a new way.
Linus Torvalds (and other kernel designers) have posted exaclty how to defeat a Solar Designer patches kernel as an example. Read the kernel traffic and then realise that this sort of thing is a not a long-term success measure. The programmer must always be careful when designing a program, and no anal-retentive language or kernel-patches can protect you from bad code.
---
It's been said before, but it bears saying again.
.com.us. They "developed" arpa net under the arm of DARPA. They have earned it.
A country does gain something for coming up with things first.
The metric system is "System Internationale" -- a French name, because the French came up with it.
Stamps from England do not bear a country name anywhere on them. This is because the English invented postage.
The US does not need to force people into
(PS: I'm Canadian, so don't think I'm boosting my own country)
---
Hehe... I am an admin there :) Me and Rusty are the guys who work on it. Rusty wrote Scoop, the weblog engine we use, and I do the more practical Unix admin stuff. Being an admin isn't anthing special because K5 is all user run (story moderation, etc).
:) But it is nice to get some extra people to read and help the site grow.
We're sometimes on #kuro5hin on irc.kuro5hin.org (same IRC network that hosts #slashdot), can be mailed, etc, if you want to chat with us.
As for traffic being "free," someone has to pay for bandwidth..
---