Why y'all continue to trust applications to do anything is beyond me.
You don't hand your wallet to the clerk at the gas station, but you'll hand your whole machine over to any random bit of code, and get upset when it goes awry.
Your OS should ask which files to let your application access... until that changes, you're going to keep getting skunked.
Instead of assuming that the programs you run can be trusted, flip the assumption, and a lot of "cyber security | cyber war" crap goes away. This can be fixed, folks.
The deep root cause of all of this is that we trust our code to do what it says on the tin... we need to fork everything to invert this assumption and trust nothing (except the OS kernel)... it's a lot of work, but it can be done.
The root cause of all of these security problems has been in plain sight since 1970 or so, yet only a few people are even aware of it. It's obvious once you get it, and the scope of fixing things comes clearly into place. So, do you really want to take on forking every program to build a new version of it? If so, you can fix it, if not... this will continue to happen, and government will try to fix it by fiat, badly.
The cause is that our operating systems operate on the assumption that programs can be trusted. This makes it almost impossible to launch an executable safely, because there is no OS enforced way to limit the side effects of execution.
Only an operating system that requires specifying the resources to feed to a given instance of execution can limit the side effects by design, instead of luck.
It doesn't have to be user-unfriendly, because the OS can always handle prompting for file names, etc... in fact if done properly, the user might not even need re-training to use the new fork of their favorite program, because for their intents and purposes, it acts the same, with the same dialog boxes, etc.
The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.
Do you dare to take up the challenge, or will you let someone else try the latest band-aid instead?
1. I was told that Unix couldn't dual boot with MS-DOS... so I patched the boot sector to load an alternative version of itself into RAM before system start if an unused bit was set (thus enabling DOS to boot)... so I could reboot back and forth... sometime around 1985. 2. Built a box with a Z80, 2764 EPROM, A/D converter, speech chip and a hacked together telephone interface... had 4 inputs and read the voltages of each to the caller on the phone, twice... then hung up. 3. Wrote a Forth for OS/2 in assembler... because I was told you couldn't write assembler programs in OS/2. 4. Built a system out of solar cells behind a filter, to detect infrared laser, and help align laser CATV links, with a companion box to generate a tone to feed into the transmitting laser. 5. Used a bi-color LED as light and sensor to detect a beam break to a reflector. (Green light can be detected by the red LED, but not vice-versa)
We could as a community decide to switch to secure operating systems, the kind that never, ever trust program code to do what it says on the tin. This would require a lot of coding, but nothing more than the scope of GNU/Linux. This would eliminate viruses, spyware, and a whole host of other problems. I look forward to the day when I can tell the OS which files to allow an application to use... until then it's going to keep getting worse.
If you take the time to put the data in the pictures, it'll be there in the future. You can use Google's Picasa 3 to do facial recognition on your own stuff, in a private manner... it gets damned good over time... (It picks out the faces, you tag some, and then it starts making suggestions to speed things along considerably)
There are ways to then put those tags into the image, but they do take time to run. I expect this stuff to get better over time. I've run it against all my digital photos, and will keep doing so as I add more.
With old time photos, you could write all the names of people (and descriptions) on the back... please be sure to add metadata to the jpeg files, so that 50 years from now your grandkids will know who is who.
1. I'd pay the folks at the Genode project whatever it took to produce a live CD bootable image, and keep them doing it with every new release. (genode.org if you care) 2. I'd see if the silly idea I had in college for an FPGA replacement on steroids would actually work by designing the chip and having it fabbed... then fixing the bugs until it worked right. (bitgrid.blogspot.com if you care) 3. I'd redo the house, install enough solar to power everything, and build a laboratory with a machine shop. 4. I'd build my own locomotive to run out at the Heston Steam Museum (either diesel electric, or just electric) 4. I'd dig to the bottom of the cold fusion thing, and see if it really works.
When they start making devices based on Genode, and can generate a Private/Public key pair for authentication by pushing a button, and share the public pair via a local web page... I'll be interested.
As long as these things are running some version of Linux, Windows or that ilk, they won't be secure, no matter how many updates and patches you apply vigorously.
There are security models and systems perfected in the 1970s in response to the data processing needs of the air war in Viet Nam. There are commercially available systems which work for multilevel security. This model can be ported to the open source world, if enough people are interested. I'm waiting for the Genode project from Germany to get something I can use in the next few years, and I hope there will be others.
I hereby suggest we just eliminate the possibility of a cyber-war, instead of getting stuck in an arms race.
The information processing need to handle both classified and top secret data in the same computer system in order to direct air traffic for the Vietnam war resulted in honest-to-goodness multilevel secure systems in the early 1970s. The Rainbow books tell you how it's done.
The reason we're all mired in shit these days is that nobody believed multilevel security was something normal computers used. Unix was named as a joke to mock Multics, which aspired to have multi-level security (and did in the end, if I recall correctly).
If your OS doesn't ask for a list of resources to use to execute a program, it isn't secure. MacOS, Linux, Windows don't... the only thing I know of coming down the pike is the Genode project from Germany.
When you have middlemen (Insurance Companies) and administrations working to maximize profit, all being paid by the procedure... the quality of each procedure is far less important that the quantity. We need to put health back in the drivers seat as the #1 priority... which isn't going to happen until we Nationalize health care... even then it's not guaranteed to happen.
Yes, it is entirely possible to create a nuclear shaped charge. The Orion project was going to use quite a bit of them to launch a spacecraft with a payload of 6100 Tons to 300 Mile Low Earth Orbit.
There is an old story, set in the days of mainframes about a programmer who hacks together a small AI to steal time on mainframes, which eventually becomes self-aware. It was plausible enough back then, I'll be surprised it it doesn't happen by random chance in the next 10 years.
It is widely acknowledged that no system is secure, if an advanced persistent threat has made it a target.... and an AI could be that threat, imagine a bot-net specifically trying to spread itself out like an algal bloom across all the systems on the internet, getting smarter as it goes.
They need to fork Wikipedia, and add some directed tree flags to it. Skill META can be considered to belong to multiple parent categories, and has multiple meanings because of the vagaries of language META.
Any attempt to shoe-horn this into a tree is going to fail. Oh... and their search function is dead.
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Why y'all continue to trust applications to do anything is beyond me.
You don't hand your wallet to the clerk at the gas station, but you'll hand your whole machine over to any random bit of code, and get upset when it goes awry.
Your OS should ask which files to let your application access... until that changes, you're going to keep getting skunked.
The Trident 2 class submarines also have gravity gradiometry, which allows covert navigation without emitting any signals.
Absence of GPS does NOT imply war.... it implies a mad scramble to navigate and synchronize clocks by other means.
Instead of assuming that the programs you run can be trusted, flip the assumption, and a lot of "cyber security | cyber war" crap goes away. This can be fixed, folks.
The deep root cause of all of this is that we trust our code to do what it says on the tin... we need to fork everything to invert this assumption and trust nothing (except the OS kernel)... it's a lot of work, but it can be done.
The root cause of all of these security problems has been in plain sight since 1970 or so, yet only a few people are even aware of it. It's obvious once you get it, and the scope of fixing things comes clearly into place. So, do you really want to take on forking every program to build a new version of it? If so, you can fix it, if not... this will continue to happen, and government will try to fix it by fiat, badly.
The cause is that our operating systems operate on the assumption that programs can be trusted. This makes it almost impossible to launch an executable safely, because there is no OS enforced way to limit the side effects of execution.
Only an operating system that requires specifying the resources to feed to a given instance of execution can limit the side effects by design, instead of luck.
It doesn't have to be user-unfriendly, because the OS can always handle prompting for file names, etc... in fact if done properly, the user might not even need re-training to use the new fork of their favorite program, because for their intents and purposes, it acts the same, with the same dialog boxes, etc.
The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.
Do you dare to take up the challenge, or will you let someone else try the latest band-aid instead?
1. I was told that Unix couldn't dual boot with MS-DOS... so I patched the boot sector to load an alternative version of itself into RAM before system start if an unused bit was set (thus enabling DOS to boot)... so I could reboot back and forth... sometime around 1985.
2. Built a box with a Z80, 2764 EPROM, A/D converter, speech chip and a hacked together telephone interface... had 4 inputs and read the voltages of each to the caller on the phone, twice... then hung up.
3. Wrote a Forth for OS/2 in assembler... because I was told you couldn't write assembler programs in OS/2.
4. Built a system out of solar cells behind a filter, to detect infrared laser, and help align laser CATV links, with a companion box to generate a tone to feed into the transmitting laser.
5. Used a bi-color LED as light and sensor to detect a beam break to a reflector. (Green light can be detected by the red LED, but not vice-versa)
We could as a community decide to switch to secure operating systems, the kind that never, ever trust program code to do what it says on the tin. This would require a lot of coding, but nothing more than the scope of GNU/Linux. This would eliminate viruses, spyware, and a whole host of other problems. I look forward to the day when I can tell the OS which files to allow an application to use... until then it's going to keep getting worse.
I like the combination of both techniques DMG Mori is showing off... is there an english version of the video somewhere?
If you take the time to put the data in the pictures, it'll be there in the future. You can use Google's Picasa 3 to do facial recognition on your own stuff, in a private manner... it gets damned good over time... (It picks out the faces, you tag some, and then it starts making suggestions to speed things along considerably)
There are ways to then put those tags into the image, but they do take time to run. I expect this stuff to get better over time. I've run it against all my digital photos, and will keep doing so as I add more.
With old time photos, you could write all the names of people (and descriptions) on the back... please be sure to add metadata to the jpeg files, so that 50 years from now your grandkids will know who is who.
1. I'd pay the folks at the Genode project whatever it took to produce a live CD bootable image, and keep them doing it with every new release. (genode.org if you care)
2. I'd see if the silly idea I had in college for an FPGA replacement on steroids would actually work by designing the chip and having it fabbed... then fixing the bugs until it worked right. (bitgrid.blogspot.com if you care)
3. I'd redo the house, install enough solar to power everything, and build a laboratory with a machine shop.
4. I'd build my own locomotive to run out at the Heston Steam Museum (either diesel electric, or just electric)
4. I'd dig to the bottom of the cold fusion thing, and see if it really works.
I expect the A-10 will have a very strong showing, regardless of how they try to cripple it in the tests.
I have a friend who wants to be "buried" on the moon as follows:
Seated at a Card Table, playing poker
With a Beer
And a Royal Flush in his hands
So that some day Astronomy students can look up and see him.
When they start making devices based on Genode, and can generate a Private/Public key pair for authentication by pushing a button, and share the public pair via a local web page... I'll be interested.
As long as these things are running some version of Linux, Windows or that ilk, they won't be secure, no matter how many updates and patches you apply vigorously.
There are security models and systems perfected in the 1970s in response to the data processing needs of the air war in Viet Nam. There are commercially available systems which work for multilevel security. This model can be ported to the open source world, if enough people are interested. I'm waiting for the Genode project from Germany to get something I can use in the next few years, and I hope there will be others.
I hereby suggest we just eliminate the possibility of a cyber-war, instead of getting stuck in an arms race.
If your operating system isn't smart enough to require a list of resources to feed a program you want it to run, you lose.
If you built your entire civilization on such a stupid foundation, you lose.
Anyone smarter than that can wipe you off the face of the earth, unless you can survive long enough to correct your deeply embedded mistake.
The information processing need to handle both classified and top secret data in the same computer system in order to direct air traffic for the Vietnam war resulted in honest-to-goodness multilevel secure systems in the early 1970s. The Rainbow books tell you how it's done.
The reason we're all mired in shit these days is that nobody believed multilevel security was something normal computers used. Unix was named as a joke to mock Multics, which aspired to have multi-level security (and did in the end, if I recall correctly).
If your OS doesn't ask for a list of resources to use to execute a program, it isn't secure. MacOS, Linux, Windows don't... the only thing I know of coming down the pike is the Genode project from Germany.
When you have middlemen (Insurance Companies) and administrations working to maximize profit, all being paid by the procedure... the quality of each procedure is far less important that the quantity. We need to put health back in the drivers seat as the #1 priority... which isn't going to happen until we Nationalize health care... even then it's not guaranteed to happen.
Yes, it is entirely possible to create a nuclear shaped charge. The Orion project was going to use quite a bit of them to launch a spacecraft with a payload of 6100 Tons to 300 Mile Low Earth Orbit.
Thanks to tunable lasers, it is now possible to selectively ionize by isotope and immensly simplify the process of enrichment.
There is an old story, set in the days of mainframes about a programmer who hacks together a small AI to steal time on mainframes, which eventually becomes self-aware. It was plausible enough back then, I'll be surprised it it doesn't happen by random chance in the next 10 years.
It is widely acknowledged that no system is secure, if an advanced persistent threat has made it a target.... and an AI could be that threat, imagine a bot-net specifically trying to spread itself out like an algal bloom across all the systems on the internet, getting smarter as it goes.
*(&YTUEWTYW+++^NO CARRIER
They need to fork Wikipedia, and add some directed tree flags to it. Skill META can be considered to belong to multiple parent categories, and has multiple meanings because of the vagaries of language META.
Any attempt to shoe-horn this into a tree is going to fail. Oh... and their search function is dead.
Yes, you can use almost 100% of the silicon, if you use a BitGrid to process information instead of Von Neuman architectures.
Changing clocks twice a year is nuts, nuke this insanity from high orbit.