Unfortunately today the standards of education have gone down so much, it's possible to finish school without having programmed a computer _once_. Programming is one of the most important skills as it enables you to make use of computers. Everyone should have at least a faint idea of what it's about. Just like we teach math or liberal arts to give people a faint idea of that.
If you can live with a low bandwidth, get some cheap Voltcraft. They are fairly good. Cheap Tektronix is kinda "meh", they do work, but Voltcraft has a somewhat better firmware and less noise on it's inputs. Other than that, you'll probably be able to do virtually everything you want on an old used CRT one.
Ohh and if the device has a USB Host port, it doesn't mean it can actually use USB-sticks. Most of the time it'll only support fairly small ones.
I'm sorry, but you can safe at least 99.99% of the problem in defence. If you write your programmes correctly nothing of this would be an issue. If you know about computers, why do you waste your time in the military, why don't you do security audits? Locking people away in the military is not much better than locking them away in prisons.
The only realistic thing an army could do in that area would be to shoot really bad programmers who greatly overestimate their abilities. (i.e. many PHP or C(++) coders)
I'm sorry, but that's just utter bullshit. You don't secure IT systems by joining an "cyberarmy" you secure them by building them correctly. Thus everyone knowing about computer security and joining such a "cyberarmy" instead of just going out to build correct systems or teach people about security actually makes the systems less secure.
It's like drafting all the good builders. Eventually we're left with all the bad ones and the standards of building will deteriorate.
I mean if you switch on a UK soap opera and you see a radio in the background it's a DAB one. The sets are widely distributed, everybody has seen one.
For example I was on a geek tour of a German radio station once. The guide asked who had a DAB radio. None of the people present had one. DAB is just dead in Germany.
The N900 doesn't even try to compete with Apple and Android offerings, it's essentially a desktop computer in a small case. It essentially runs a flavour of Debian. (yes, you do have apt-get on those devices)
Now the next step would be to encourage more mobile phone vendors to do the same.
Do you really expect someone who thinks running such a device with Windows is a good idea thinks even a moment about security? Developing such simple GUI applications platform independently is trivial today.
I'm sorry, but there is no reason to run such a kiosk on Windows. However there are many reasons not to do. Just try to enumerate all the different ways an attacker could execute code. Just think of features like autorun, or the default dialogs. You can run code every time you reach the help system. On Linux you install a normal system, and just start your application fullscreen without any window manager. Without a keyboard this already is quite save.
The side effect of "Getting Linux back" will probably be the ability to run pirated games. Previously none of the Linux people cared about pirating games, now their knownledge gained from bringing back Linux might be used for just that.
The first is obviously that it's really easy to implement on microcontrollers. Plus it always works.
The second problem is less obvious. Have you ever tried to use one of those USB->Serial converters under Windows? In every other OS you just plug them in and they work. This is because they are part of the USB standard. With Windows you need a driver for each one of them. So if you want to save your bricked router over USB, you'd first have to find the CD-Rom with the driver for that particular USB->Serial converter. Good luck with that.
Absolutely. there probably were some earlier purely logic based attacks on phone systems.
For example in Germany you could for a long time just call somebody and not hang up. Only the originating party could stop a phone call, so the other party did have their phone disabled. Some taxi companies used that to play foul on their competitors.
It's not like Apple couldn't build business computers. For example I have an old G3 somewhere around which is just very easy to maintain.
However the refusal of Apple to accept the business market causes them to not be taken seriously in terms of quality. When I buy a consumer product, I know it won't work. I know that it will have GPU fans, cables held by cable straps and capacitors rated for 1000 hour use. I have seen it many times with consumer computers.
Now Apple also had it's "consumer moments". Just think of the many "logic board failures" it had in the past. (my iBook G3 had 3 of them in 3 years!) It would be great if Apple had a product line geared towards businesses where you could be sure, the quality would be alright.
And please, Apple, stop manufacturing in China. China is great for simple things, but they really don't care very much about quality.We once made them do a couple of coaxial cables and none of them worked.
I don't think you have ever worked with a Windows computer. Those aren't "fire up and go". Typically you are left with a PC with no working mouse because the mouse driver for USB mice somehow failed to install (happened to me several times). Or your computer suddenly starts to show advertisements for porn-sites, or your computer just slows down to a halt gradually.
BTW if you look around in the windows world, you will find that there is even far less "coercion". There's still Windows software out there using the Windows fonts. There's windows software for every era of design guidelines. There's software around with it's own crappy interface ideas. Just for once try to scan 10 pages with the software comming with a typical consumer scanner. Just try to do it and you will see what I mean.
There is one _big_ minefield with Windows, and that is software distribution. How on earth can a non-geek ever find out if a software package he downloads is legit or a piece of malware? This is probably the single biggest worry about amateurs using windows systems. (to some extend the problem is the same with the Mac)
Most Linux distributions solve that by having a package manager. I can safely tell a person to search for software in there and be assured that the chance they download malware is very slim.
As long as Microsoft refuses to address this problem and make all files downloaded instantly executable, I just cannot recommend Windows to the average user.
Yay! By that logic most people would fail in the real world of business. You know when I went to school, we had a real world business system from Microsoft. We had Microsoft Works for Xenix and Microsoft Works for DOS. State of the art systems as Microsoft surely called them back then.
It's no use teaching children about feature 5432 of version 54.22.154.12.b of some software product as it will disappear or be made obsolete by some other function in the next version, often by the time the teacher actually gets ot teach what he has learnt.
What does matter is teaching what those programs are about. What is a word processor? What are the typical features of such a piece of software? It doesn't matter if you teach that with Microsoft Word 95 or Open Office, in fact Open Office has the advantage of being available to the children.
No matter what software product you will use as an example, by the time the children start working, it will be long obsolete.
Today it's just sensible to use open source.Not only does it cause far fewer headaches, it also enables children to learn more about the technology. It's much easier for interested children to expand their knowledge. For example if they want to learn about TCP/IP, they can just use netcat, and then later maybe wireshark. Others might learn about programming by using shell scripts.
Over time you will have many people in lots of different jobs knowing a bit about computers. This will lead to departments having one or two persons with such experience. The knowledge of those people will then slowly diffuse in the department and cause higher efficiency.
I'm confused now. Haven't Microsoft and Apple been cooperating for decades now? After all Microsoft wrote MacPaint, and ported Office and IE to the Mac, while Apple for many years shipped with IE by default. Hey you can even get iTunes for Windows.
Both systems will probably die in the long run as they will be replaced by normal operating system. The iPhone already officially runs on MacOSX, but because of stupid marketing decisions it's not open. The Android is marketed as a Linux device, but instead is just running a proprietary flavour of Linux which is barely compatible with anything. It doesn't even use X11!
So I predict that in the future, people who actually care about what their phones can do (which is a minority) will probably run some kind of stripped down normal OS. Early devices implementing this are the Maemo ones which is essentially a stripped down Debian. It's probably already possible to share repositories with Ubuntu ARM. (need to try that)
I mean what's the advantage of phase change memory in this scenario? If you loose power to your CPU or your system crashes, you will have effectively lost your memory content anyhow. So you might as well open your files with mmap and have lots of RAM. The system will automagically figure out what to swap to disk if RAM isn't enough as well as it will regularly backup the contents do disk.
I agree, those old HP LaserJet printers work really well. I think I somewhere have one from 1992 still running perfectly.
I don't know about the sub $100 laser printers, but the cheap sub $500 colour laser printers are often fairly decent. My parents have an HP at home and it seems to be well designed. Even the cheap Konica Minolta ones last fairly long with one in our company now only falling appart slowly after several years.
Only very few people can do string processing in C. Actually I believe more people can do string processing in assembler than in C, as with assembler you see where the problems are whereas C makes you believe it has some kind of string support.
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Unfortunately today the standards of education have gone down so much, it's possible to finish school without having programmed a computer _once_.
Programming is one of the most important skills as it enables you to make use of computers. Everyone should have at least a faint idea of what it's about. Just like we teach math or liberal arts to give people a faint idea of that.
Those devices usually don't work.
If you can live with a low bandwidth, get some cheap Voltcraft. They are fairly good. Cheap Tektronix is kinda "meh", they do work, but Voltcraft has a somewhat better firmware and less noise on it's inputs. Other than that, you'll probably be able to do virtually everything you want on an old used CRT one.
Ohh and if the device has a USB Host port, it doesn't mean it can actually use USB-sticks. Most of the time it'll only support fairly small ones.
I'm sorry, but you can safe at least 99.99% of the problem in defence. If you write your programmes correctly nothing of this would be an issue.
If you know about computers, why do you waste your time in the military, why don't you do security audits?
Locking people away in the military is not much better than locking them away in prisons.
The only realistic thing an army could do in that area would be to shoot really bad programmers who greatly overestimate their abilities. (i.e. many PHP or C(++) coders)
I'm sorry, but that's just utter bullshit. You don't secure IT systems by joining an "cyberarmy" you secure them by building them correctly. Thus everyone knowing about computer security and joining such a "cyberarmy" instead of just going out to build correct systems or teach people about security actually makes the systems less secure.
It's like drafting all the good builders. Eventually we're left with all the bad ones and the standards of building will deteriorate.
Yes, but in Germany we just get generic cheap radios (sold at high prices) there. If you'd come to Germany you'd think that DAB does not exist.
1. Because the show you want to watch starts a few minutes after that and you want to make sure your equipment works.
2. Have you ever seen German television? Even the worst programming in the UK is _way_ better than the German average.
I mean if you switch on a UK soap opera and you see a radio in the background it's a DAB one. The sets are widely distributed, everybody has seen one.
For example I was on a geek tour of a German radio station once. The guide asked who had a DAB radio. None of the people present had one. DAB is just dead in Germany.
The N900 doesn't even try to compete with Apple and Android offerings, it's essentially a desktop computer in a small case. It essentially runs a flavour of Debian. (yes, you do have apt-get on those devices)
Now the next step would be to encourage more mobile phone vendors to do the same.
Do you really expect someone who thinks running such a device with Windows is a good idea thinks even a moment about security?
Developing such simple GUI applications platform independently is trivial today.
I'm sorry, but there is no reason to run such a kiosk on Windows. However there are many reasons not to do. Just try to enumerate all the different ways an attacker could execute code. Just think of features like autorun, or the default dialogs. You can run code every time you reach the help system.
On Linux you install a normal system, and just start your application fullscreen without any window manager. Without a keyboard this already is quite save.
The side effect of "Getting Linux back" will probably be the ability to run pirated games. Previously none of the Linux people cared about pirating games, now their knownledge gained from bringing back Linux might be used for just that.
The first is obviously that it's really easy to implement on microcontrollers. Plus it always works.
The second problem is less obvious. Have you ever tried to use one of those USB->Serial converters under Windows? In every other OS you just plug them in and they work. This is because they are part of the USB standard. With Windows you need a driver for each one of them. So if you want to save your bricked router over USB, you'd first have to find the CD-Rom with the driver for that particular USB->Serial converter. Good luck with that.
Absolutely. there probably were some earlier purely logic based attacks on phone systems.
For example in Germany you could for a long time just call somebody and not hang up. Only the originating party could stop a phone call, so the other party did have their phone disabled. Some taxi companies used that to play foul on their competitors.
It's not like Apple couldn't build business computers. For example I have an old G3 somewhere around which is just very easy to maintain.
However the refusal of Apple to accept the business market causes them to not be taken seriously in terms of quality. When I buy a consumer product, I know it won't work. I know that it will have GPU fans, cables held by cable straps and capacitors rated for 1000 hour use. I have seen it many times with consumer computers.
Now Apple also had it's "consumer moments". Just think of the many "logic board failures" it had in the past. (my iBook G3 had 3 of them in 3 years!) It would be great if Apple had a product line geared towards businesses where you could be sure, the quality would be alright.
And please, Apple, stop manufacturing in China. China is great for simple things, but they really don't care very much about quality.We once made them do a couple of coaxial cables and none of them worked.
It's definitely an emulator. Otherwise you couldn't run closed source software.
I don't think you have ever worked with a Windows computer. Those aren't "fire up and go". Typically you are left with a PC with no working mouse because the mouse driver for USB mice somehow failed to install (happened to me several times). Or your computer suddenly starts to show advertisements for porn-sites, or your computer just slows down to a halt gradually.
BTW if you look around in the windows world, you will find that there is even far less "coercion". There's still Windows software out there using the Windows fonts. There's windows software for every era of design guidelines. There's software around with it's own crappy interface ideas. Just for once try to scan 10 pages with the software comming with a typical consumer scanner. Just try to do it and you will see what I mean.
There is one _big_ minefield with Windows, and that is software distribution. How on earth can a non-geek ever find out if a software package he downloads is legit or a piece of malware? This is probably the single biggest worry about amateurs using windows systems. (to some extend the problem is the same with the Mac)
Most Linux distributions solve that by having a package manager. I can safely tell a person to search for software in there and be assured that the chance they download malware is very slim.
As long as Microsoft refuses to address this problem and make all files downloaded instantly executable, I just cannot recommend Windows to the average user.
Yay! By that logic most people would fail in the real world of business.
You know when I went to school, we had a real world business system from Microsoft. We had Microsoft Works for Xenix and Microsoft Works for DOS. State of the art systems as Microsoft surely called them back then.
It's no use teaching children about feature 5432 of version 54.22.154.12.b of some software product as it will disappear or be made obsolete by some other function in the next version, often by the time the teacher actually gets ot teach what he has learnt.
What does matter is teaching what those programs are about. What is a word processor? What are the typical features of such a piece of software? It doesn't matter if you teach that with Microsoft Word 95 or Open Office, in fact Open Office has the advantage of being available to the children.
No matter what software product you will use as an example, by the time the children start working, it will be long obsolete.
Today it's just sensible to use open source.Not only does it cause far fewer headaches, it also enables children to learn more about the technology.
It's much easier for interested children to expand their knowledge. For example if they want to learn about TCP/IP, they can just use netcat, and then later maybe wireshark.
Others might learn about programming by using shell scripts.
Over time you will have many people in lots of different jobs knowing a bit about computers. This will lead to departments having one or two persons with such experience. The knowledge of those people will then slowly diffuse in the department and cause higher efficiency.
I'm confused now. Haven't Microsoft and Apple been cooperating for decades now? After all Microsoft wrote MacPaint, and ported Office and IE to the Mac, while Apple for many years shipped with IE by default. Hey you can even get iTunes for Windows.
There is no competition between those companies.
Both systems will probably die in the long run as they will be replaced by normal operating system. The iPhone already officially runs on MacOSX, but because of stupid marketing decisions it's not open. The Android is marketed as a Linux device, but instead is just running a proprietary flavour of Linux which is barely compatible with anything. It doesn't even use X11!
So I predict that in the future, people who actually care about what their phones can do (which is a minority) will probably run some kind of stripped down normal OS. Early devices implementing this are the Maemo ones which is essentially a stripped down Debian. It's probably already possible to share repositories with Ubuntu ARM. (need to try that)
I mean what's the advantage of phase change memory in this scenario? If you loose power to your CPU or your system crashes, you will have effectively lost your memory content anyhow. So you might as well open your files with mmap and have lots of RAM. The system will automagically figure out what to swap to disk if RAM isn't enough as well as it will regularly backup the contents do disk.
I would recommend a traditional BASIC Interpreter with line numbers, then later Pascal. If you want to go further, Assembler and then maybe C.
It's no use trying to teach someone C without him having a firm grasp of Assembler. And Assembler is best beeing taught via traditional BASIC.
Asside from C, the worst popular language to start would probably be PHP, because you already need to know what you are doing, when writing in PHP.
As for Operating Systems, I would definitely go for Linux as it makes things like networking a _lot_ easier to learn.
The point is, the malware has been found, it will be taken out of the repositories and there won't be any new infections.
Under Windows you have millions of malware sites, and even after they have been found, they won't get shut down.
What we have here is malware in some obscure repository most users wouldn't even be able to access.
I agree, those old HP LaserJet printers work really well. I think I somewhere have one from 1992 still running perfectly.
I don't know about the sub $100 laser printers, but the cheap sub $500 colour laser printers are often fairly decent. My parents have an HP at home and it seems to be well designed. Even the cheap Konica Minolta ones last fairly long with one in our company now only falling appart slowly after several years.
Only very few people can do string processing in C. Actually I believe more people can do string processing in assembler than in C, as with assembler you see where the problems are whereas C makes you believe it has some kind of string support.