Actually, I don't think that will be the case. I think that MS has learned the lesson that DRM-laden OSes will not sell and remove the DRM and bloat from Windows 7 You know, I really have my doubts there. IMO, the end user complaints have not focused on DRM, they've focused on things like performance and driver availability.
For example, lots of people bought a cheap printer or scanner to go with their PC prior to the launch of Vista, bought a new PC with Vista and discovered that their peripheral wasn't supported. You can say "buyer beware; don't buy cheap shoddy peripherals" all you like, but Windows users haven't had to worry about whether or not the peripheral they're buying will be supported under their OS in 10 or 15 years - certainly not to the same extent that they have with Vista.
I suspect hardware advances will solve the performance issue, and I doubt Microsoft will repeat the same "half your peripherals no longer work" crap again.
100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
100MB/sec, assuming it can be sustained, is slightly over the top speed of most hard disks. By the time you throw seek time into the mix, it's dramatically faster.
I'll assume the guy was using the same IP address to create the accounts. I wonder why the hosts don't have some kind of software to look for IP's that open multiple accounts?
Probably wouldn't work very well seeing as most ISPs allocate IP addresses through DHCP - and even if they didn't your idea breaks as soon as someone releases a block of numbers for whatever reason and it gets taken and re-used by someone else.
In such a situation, why don't we just side with the corporation whose lawyers actually read the statute? (That would be Google). AFAICT, Viacom are trying to muddy the waters by treating it as one great big copyright infringement suit. Google, OTOH, are saying "You're using the wrong law."
Now, prior to the DMCA being enacted, Viacom would probably have had to use the earlier copyright laws to sue Google (assuming those laws make it possible to sue Google). The question I have is that now the DMCA stands in addition to those copyright laws, does that mean that you can no longer sue under the older copyright law if action under the DMCA would be more appropriate?
Over pricing compared to what? The crappy dell with similar specs, made from cheap parts, an weak case? If you will insist on comparing the cheapest Dell.
No, I mean halfway decent stuff from Dell like the latitude range.
Not quite as heavy duty as IBM's casing, I grant you, but you don't need to be a bulgarian weightlifting grandmother to get it into work.
This may not be a big deal if you drive to work anyway, but in much of Europe the population density is such that we can use public transport and walk some or all of the way in.
I was looking at new Thinkpads through Lenovo, and a T60/T61 with Linux pre-installed actually costs less than the same system with Windows XP or Windows Vista.
I haven't looked at their desktops, so I don't know if the same applies there. I'm not surprised. Lenovo have inherited from IBM the policy of overpricing their products by 20-25%.
However, if you read the Windows EULA, you can get a full refund from the retailer for the copy of Windows, so that proves a point, and saves you a lot of money. Assuming the retailer has read the EULA, that is.
Depending on the country you're in, they may or may not be obliged to refund the cost of Windows. Very few countries where they would be have included in such legislation "and the retailer must make it easy".
Forcing you to spend an hour on the phone to a potplant reading from a script and training staff in a draconian refund policy (but not the customer's legal rights) are just two ways retailers use to duck out of honouring your statutory rights.
If the software was perfect, ie the original programmers had put enough time into it to completely debug the code, the user interface was simple and intuitive, no conflicts with other programs arose, etc...
there would be no need for tech-support
there would be no income from the software
So by giving away the software free, does that encourage buggy programming? Interesting argument, but the amount of time (and therefore money) involved in producing code which has demonstrably zero bugs is such that only a very few are prepared to pay it (think heavily regulated industries such as aerospace).
Hence, most commercial software is just as full of bugs as its free counterpart. The biggest difference is that commercial software houses work most of these bugs out inhouse before showing any of their work to the world, so they can present the illusion that they churn out code with relatively few bugs.
Four months? I find your lack of faith disturbing! What was CSS broke in, three hours with three lines of recursive code? CSS was broken mainly because it was fundamentally lousy encryption to begin with - and it was probably lousy because the developers didn't want to fall foul of what (at the time) was an absolutely draconian US policy regarding the export of decryption.
That policy no longer exists.
The "why bother, it will be broken" argument appears to be based upon the premise that the developers want to build 100% guaranteed uncrackable-under-any-circumstances protection which they can safely sell in millions to every man and his dog without fear of it being cracked. I would argue that they know full well that this is nigh-on impossible - all they're aiming for is "good enough to keep 99% of customers under the thumb".
Imagine like, in some 8-10 thousands years, some religious leaders (of a denomination formed in our time) start preaching that an arbitrary STD is sent from God to punish those sinners for not using The Holly (sic) Condom! I imagine it's rather more likely that you'd get an STD using a holy condom.
It'll certainly run fine on an equivalent 32-bit x86 processor with 1 GB RAM and all the features enabled. You might want more RAM to multitask, but I'm guessing you probably want more RAM in your Mac Mini also. I have a similarly specc'ed Mac Mini.
No you don't really need more RAM. It would be nice when editing large photos - but that's almost always true. For most daily use - nope, 1 GB is fine.
My Vista Home Premium machine that is the 32-bit version only reports 3326MB of the 4 gigs I have installed. You're not using PAE.
Intel architecture (for that matter, most modern chip architectures) make device IO available to the programmer by setting aside a block of memory addresses and while you write to them with the same memcpy() operations you can use for any memory copy operation in C, copying the right data to those memory addresses is how you program a soundcard, a network card or [INSERT DEVICE HERE].
Hence, 4GB of RAM won't actually appear to the OS as 4GB of RAM because the motherboard has to allocate some of that address space to devices rather than available as RAM. So you need to enable PAE when the RAM you have available hits around the 3.5GB mark.
Same is true on Linux.
If Microsoft are letting you take full advantage of 4GB of RAM in Vista, they're enabling PAE then artificially crippling their memory management so it doesn't fully exploit the RAM your motherboard is capable of handling, assuming it's capable of more than 4GB.
And I can understand him, he's just trying any way possible to screw as much people as possible, wile walking away with money. Nearly, but not quite.
It would be more accurate to say he sees it as a way of making an enormous quantity of money in a very short time. Whether or not that would happen to screw a bunch of people is really not of any consequence to him.
Then M$ will spend millions to take over that. And again we switch. Again M$....again switch...and one day M$ gives up....:-D There are only so many half-decent portals in the world. One day, MS would own 95% of the market.
Every/.'er using some other lesser-known portal wouldn't significantly change that number.
How about "You have data on your laptop which is worth 100x the value of the laptop itself and may be worth that much to a third party"?
But I don't. And, be honest, neither do you. Our lives are just not sufficiently interesting that we have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of trade secrets knocking about on out laptops.
Seriously, these are customs guys -- if they wanted to take things of value they have keys to a lock up containing about kilos and kilos of recently-confiscated cocaine. Value of laptop: £600 Value of copy of code that's a release candidate for a program that's expected to pull in over £1 million in licensing and support fees over the course of the next 5 years (not impossible if you're developing code for particularly specialist industrial requirements. Not everything has a good quality opensource equivalent batting around on Sourceforge): rather a lot more than £600.
"It's unlikely it will fall into the wrong hands" is exactly the kind of mentality that leads to things like this:
Or you could just work offline and not introduce any external media or software that you didn't create yourself from scratch. Good luck booting a PC without a BIOS or any means of toggling in code.
(Though to be fair I think we've both disappeared into the Land of The Fairies by now)
The only thing that Schneier says is how . I still don't get WHY? What do I have on my laptop that Customs would be interested in, or would cause them to confiscate it? Emails from my fiance? Jesus, who cares? I'm never going to see that customs guy again, where's the actual harm? How about "You have data on your laptop which is worth 100x the value of the laptop itself and may be worth that much to a third party"?
It may be that under some circumstances you could refuse to comply, but I don't know how broadly they've been finalized at border crossing -- for citizens or non-citizens. Here's a thought - and a scary one too.
Are airports legally considered to be part of the country they're sat in or are they international soil?
Because if they're international soil (or, for that matter, the US decides to declare its airports to be international soil), then suddenly the US can and probably will decide that the law is whatever they want and there isn't a constitution because it's not the US.
asking for a password before it will boot into any OS or read anything from the HDD with some sort of RSA on it so you wouldn't know the password without the RSA key - ship the key before you go. Yep, that works. Assuming the script if the passenger says "It's not possible for me to enter the password" says "return laptop to passenger, send them on their way".
You could probably load all your work on a usb drive? then have a clean laptop, and slide thru? If they're paranoid enough to search laptops, what makes you think they won't be paranoid enough to search you for any sign of a USB drive, memory card or something similar?
As soon as you say "I haven't got anything like that" and their search reveals that in fact you have, you've given them cause to investigate you further. I somehow doubt such investigation would be a terribly pleasant experience.
Point taken. But the fact remains that there's only one way to guarantee malware is forever gone, and that's a reinstall. Don't care if you're running Windows, Linux or Mac OS.
(Mind you, the only way you can guarantee it won't happen again is to throw the computer down a mineshaft and fill in the mineshaft with reinforced concrete so it's all rather academic).
What you described sounds similar to how signature/definition-based scanners work. I'm sure a lot of scanners make bootable versions - I know that older versions of McAfee came with a boot floppy.
Not really.
Signature-based scanners are a glorified form of grep. They look through every file looking for a string of bytes which is reasonably unique to a virus. It's not possible to have a computer know in advance with 100% certainty whether executing a particular block of code is dangerous - the best you can do is say "this is probably dangerous", so realistically your options are:
1. Look for things which are known to be bad, delete any we find. Well, 20 years of antivirus should have taught us by now that this is a crappy solution. 2. Look for things which are known to be good. Anything which isn't known to be good we delete. This is essentially what I described originally.
The minor issue with this (and indeed with what I described) is that writing a general-purpose application which does this without leaving the system broken beyond real use (who's going to put up with an AV product which deletes every data file they've got because there have been known vulnerabilities in programs which read those files?) is impossible.
However, they do say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and nowhere in IT is it more true than here. Don't allow users to run as admin, filter email for anything even remotely suspicious, configure your desktop PCs to automatically update, run antivirus on your fileserver to slow down the spread of anything, get proper configurable desktop AV software - preferably configurable such that end users can't easily mess with the configuration - and set it up to scan everything on access.
And while we're at it, abandon any email scanner which filters dodgy attachments on the basis of their file extension. The first virus which comes with text saying "Rename to.exe and run" will sail straight through.
This sounds like a lot of work, but I've been in the middle of dealing with virus outbreaks before. Once configured, 99.5% of my suggestions can be just left to their own devices and it's a lot less hassle than dealing with a virus outbreak.
Don't they have virus scanners you can run from CDs? Let's assume you wanted to write the perfect AV which was able to work from a CD with guaranteed 100% success rate. Once complete, you can be sure that the computer can be rebooted and will neither be affected by a piece of malware, nor will the user inadvertently spread dormant malware.
It would have to compare the checksum of every executable and every DLL on the system to known good examples to confirm they've not been infected (though to be honest I suspect most of them are just taking advantage of the labyrinthine mess that is Windows rather than going to all the hassle of infecting files).
It would have to confirm that every patch which has security implications has been installed (eg. there have been patches which deal with code which loads JPEGs - not much point in rebooting if the first thing that's going to happen is you get reinfected so that's got to be solved).
It would have to delete any application that isn't on a known-good list. So you need a "known-good" list covering every Windows application known to man, and you also need to account for those rare cases where you're dealing with a software developers machine and there are executables on there that aren't known to man.
And remember what I said earlier about "there have been vulnerabilities in code that reads JPEGs"? Well, that means you need to delete any JPEG which isn't known-good, And any other file for which similar vulnerabilities in decoding have been found. Or it's possible that the first thing that will happen on reboot is the user will email out this "kewl JPEG" to all their friends, forwarding the malicious payload in the process.
And you need to do all this without breaking anything in the process. Or else if you do, you might just as well have wiped and rebuilt the system.
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For example, lots of people bought a cheap printer or scanner to go with their PC prior to the launch of Vista, bought a new PC with Vista and discovered that their peripheral wasn't supported. You can say "buyer beware; don't buy cheap shoddy peripherals" all you like, but Windows users haven't had to worry about whether or not the peripheral they're buying will be supported under their OS in 10 or 15 years - certainly not to the same extent that they have with Vista.
I suspect hardware advances will solve the performance issue, and I doubt Microsoft will repeat the same "half your peripherals no longer work" crap again.
100MB/sec? Assuming that the capital "B" is the intent, that means it would take close to 3 hours to write a full 1TB disk. Is that fast enough for most backup applications? I mean, obviously it would be fine for archival purposes, but it doesn't seem practical for daily backups.
100MB/sec, assuming it can be sustained, is slightly over the top speed of most hard disks. By the time you throw seek time into the mix, it's dramatically faster.
Probably wouldn't work very well seeing as most ISPs allocate IP addresses through DHCP - and even if they didn't your idea breaks as soon as someone releases a block of numbers for whatever reason and it gets taken and re-used by someone else.Now, prior to the DMCA being enacted, Viacom would probably have had to use the earlier copyright laws to sue Google (assuming those laws make it possible to sue Google). The question I have is that now the DMCA stands in addition to those copyright laws, does that mean that you can no longer sue under the older copyright law if action under the DMCA would be more appropriate?
No, I mean halfway decent stuff from Dell like the latitude range.
Not quite as heavy duty as IBM's casing, I grant you, but you don't need to be a bulgarian weightlifting grandmother to get it into work.
This may not be a big deal if you drive to work anyway, but in much of Europe the population density is such that we can use public transport and walk some or all of the way in.
I haven't looked at their desktops, so I don't know if the same applies there. I'm not surprised. Lenovo have inherited from IBM the policy of overpricing their products by 20-25%.
Depending on the country you're in, they may or may not be obliged to refund the cost of Windows. Very few countries where they would be have included in such legislation "and the retailer must make it easy".
Forcing you to spend an hour on the phone to a potplant reading from a script and training staff in a draconian refund policy (but not the customer's legal rights) are just two ways retailers use to duck out of honouring your statutory rights.
there would be no need for tech-support
there would be no income from the software
So by giving away the software free, does that encourage buggy programming? Interesting argument, but the amount of time (and therefore money) involved in producing code which has demonstrably zero bugs is such that only a very few are prepared to pay it (think heavily regulated industries such as aerospace).
Hence, most commercial software is just as full of bugs as its free counterpart. The biggest difference is that commercial software houses work most of these bugs out inhouse before showing any of their work to the world, so they can present the illusion that they churn out code with relatively few bugs.
That policy no longer exists.
The "why bother, it will be broken" argument appears to be based upon the premise that the developers want to build 100% guaranteed uncrackable-under-any-circumstances protection which they can safely sell in millions to every man and his dog without fear of it being cracked. I would argue that they know full well that this is nigh-on impossible - all they're aiming for is "good enough to keep 99% of customers under the thumb".
No you don't really need more RAM. It would be nice when editing large photos - but that's almost always true. For most daily use - nope, 1 GB is fine.
IME, you don't get permission denied and you don't get a UAC prompt. You get silent failure.
My Vista Home Premium machine that is the 32-bit version only reports 3326MB of the 4 gigs I have installed. You're not using PAE.
Intel architecture (for that matter, most modern chip architectures) make device IO available to the programmer by setting aside a block of memory addresses and while you write to them with the same memcpy() operations you can use for any memory copy operation in C, copying the right data to those memory addresses is how you program a soundcard, a network card or [INSERT DEVICE HERE].
Hence, 4GB of RAM won't actually appear to the OS as 4GB of RAM because the motherboard has to allocate some of that address space to devices rather than available as RAM. So you need to enable PAE when the RAM you have available hits around the 3.5GB mark.
Same is true on Linux.
If Microsoft are letting you take full advantage of 4GB of RAM in Vista, they're enabling PAE then artificially crippling their memory management so it doesn't fully exploit the RAM your motherboard is capable of handling, assuming it's capable of more than 4GB.
It would be more accurate to say he sees it as a way of making an enormous quantity of money in a very short time. Whether or not that would happen to screw a bunch of people is really not of any consequence to him.
Every
Seriously, these are customs guys -- if they wanted to take things of value they have keys to a lock up containing about kilos and kilos of recently-confiscated cocaine. Value of laptop: £600
Value of copy of code that's a release candidate for a program that's expected to pull in over £1 million in licensing and support fees over the course of the next 5 years (not impossible if you're developing code for particularly specialist industrial requirements. Not everything has a good quality opensource equivalent batting around on Sourceforge): rather a lot more than £600.
"It's unlikely it will fall into the wrong hands" is exactly the kind of mentality that leads to things like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7103911.stm
(Though to be fair I think we've both disappeared into the Land of The Fairies by now)
Are airports legally considered to be part of the country they're sat in or are they international soil?
Because if they're international soil (or, for that matter, the US decides to declare its airports to be international soil), then suddenly the US can and probably will decide that the law is whatever they want and there isn't a constitution because it's not the US.
I don't really think that's very likely.
As soon as you say "I haven't got anything like that" and their search reveals that in fact you have, you've given them cause to investigate you further. I somehow doubt such investigation would be a terribly pleasant experience.
Point taken. But the fact remains that there's only one way to guarantee malware is forever gone, and that's a reinstall. Don't care if you're running Windows, Linux or Mac OS.
(Mind you, the only way you can guarantee it won't happen again is to throw the computer down a mineshaft and fill in the mineshaft with reinforced concrete so it's all rather academic).
What you described sounds similar to how signature/definition-based scanners work. I'm sure a lot of scanners make bootable versions - I know that older versions of McAfee came with a boot floppy.
Not really.Signature-based scanners are a glorified form of grep. They look through every file looking for a string of bytes which is reasonably unique to a virus. It's not possible to have a computer know in advance with 100% certainty whether executing a particular block of code is dangerous - the best you can do is say "this is probably dangerous", so realistically your options are:
1. Look for things which are known to be bad, delete any we find. Well, 20 years of antivirus should have taught us by now that this is a crappy solution.
2. Look for things which are known to be good. Anything which isn't known to be good we delete. This is essentially what I described originally.
The minor issue with this (and indeed with what I described) is that writing a general-purpose application which does this without leaving the system broken beyond real use (who's going to put up with an AV product which deletes every data file they've got because there have been known vulnerabilities in programs which read those files?) is impossible.
However, they do say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and nowhere in IT is it more true than here. Don't allow users to run as admin, filter email for anything even remotely suspicious, configure your desktop PCs to automatically update, run antivirus on your fileserver to slow down the spread of anything, get proper configurable desktop AV software - preferably configurable such that end users can't easily mess with the configuration - and set it up to scan everything on access.
And while we're at it, abandon any email scanner which filters dodgy attachments on the basis of their file extension. The first virus which comes with text saying "Rename to
This sounds like a lot of work, but I've been in the middle of dealing with virus outbreaks before. Once configured, 99.5% of my suggestions can be just left to their own devices and it's a lot less hassle than dealing with a virus outbreak.
It would have to compare the checksum of every executable and every DLL on the system to known good examples to confirm they've not been infected (though to be honest I suspect most of them are just taking advantage of the labyrinthine mess that is Windows rather than going to all the hassle of infecting files).
It would have to confirm that every patch which has security implications has been installed (eg. there have been patches which deal with code which loads JPEGs - not much point in rebooting if the first thing that's going to happen is you get reinfected so that's got to be solved).
It would have to delete any application that isn't on a known-good list. So you need a "known-good" list covering every Windows application known to man, and you also need to account for those rare cases where you're dealing with a software developers machine and there are executables on there that aren't known to man.
And remember what I said earlier about "there have been vulnerabilities in code that reads JPEGs"? Well, that means you need to delete any JPEG which isn't known-good, And any other file for which similar vulnerabilities in decoding have been found. Or it's possible that the first thing that will happen on reboot is the user will email out this "kewl JPEG" to all their friends, forwarding the malicious payload in the process.
And you need to do all this without breaking anything in the process. Or else if you do, you might just as well have wiped and rebuilt the system.
Every Debian-based distro generates SSH host keys upon installation, and turns on sshd by default.
Except for Debian. The standard install (with none of the optional extra packages) does not include OpenSSH.