This is a good place to start testing the 'cacheability' of your dynamic web pages. Quite frankly it's appauling that even the big common web apps used today like most forum or blog scripts don't generate sensible Last-Modified, Vary, Expires, Cache-Control headers. With most of the metadata you need to generate this stuff stored in the existing database scheme theres just really no excuse for it.
Abolishment of nasty long query strings into nicer, more memorable URI's is also something we should be seeing more of in "Web 2.0." Use mod_rewrite, you'll feel better for it.
...the URL and query string and hence everything you are Googling for being passed to Microsoft's servers. Think of all those Google searches (and the following immediate clicks) Microsoft could extrapolate and use to improve their own search engine...
How do sites like these get SSL from Verisign? How could that slip though? There was a recent/. Headline about SSL Extended Validation and how it's needed: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/204 6225 In cases like these, i guess it makes sense
When you can buy SSL certificates so damn cheap, $15 or less at some places, no serious company is going to certify you as being hardened against XSS or traditional hacks like this and compensate you or your users when you DO get hacked.
Besides, Verisign only guarantee that their private signing keys are secure and therefore noone could have possibly forged the certificate and hence eavesdropped on the data as it passes across the wire. They really couldn't give a rats arse about what data retention or security is like on the other end. In fact refusing to issue MySpace a SSL certificate on the grounds their server side security is shit would be wrong, as this kind of hack is not what SSL was intended to prevent.
Agreed. I don't see how incremental changes is going to do anything but produce more versions of legacy HTML to worry about in X years time when everyone should be using XHTML already.
There are plenty of other things the W3C could work on. How about they spend some time extending 'forms' (which are essentially just embedded controls) to incorporate more complex widgets like embedded video viewers or audio players? I'm sick of being a Linux user and hitting pages that use some strange flash/activex player system or something thats sized in a pop up explicitly for Windows Media Player's browser plug in.
They wouldn't actually have to produce anything using native widgets, just a set of standards regarding embedded video player sizes (and perhaps basic layout formats) that implementors could follow, and suggest a standard for styling this via CSS and controlling it via javascript.
The web is more than just hypertext now, people expect media, but as it stands theres a dozen different ways to embed things like video it into a web page unlike images and the old faithful <img> tag. I say if it can work for images it can work for video and sound, and even flash and we can do away with alot of this activex and netscape embedded junk.
Back on getting people to move to XHTML, I blame schools, the various courses i've been on that mention HTML still talk of it as a series of tag's in vaguely the right order rather than explaining the concept of XML, nesting or CSS.
I installed it and instantly hated the "visual refresh". Install this theme which restores the 1.5 look and feel. Once this was done I found disappointing. For me the annoyances introduced in 2.0 are outweighing the things I like about it.
The GTK matching on Linux is not very good, with glitches surrounding button sizes and positioning of text (the new "add ons" combi-dialog is horrible) and with strange button focusing.
One thing I will say for it is it does seem a bit zippier than 1.5.x, but I suspect I will be messing with userChrome.css in the coming weeks.
Sarcasm aside, beta 4 hit portage a while ago and the 2.0 beta's have been very useable and stable. Infact the damn things been in beta for ages and ages and ages.
Personally I feel 2.0 is a huge improvement on 1.5 on the GUI front, especially on the presentation of your buddy lists.
If anything, Microsoft is getting even uglier (have you seen Vista or Windows Live Messenger? Blech).
Vista isn't that bad once you tweak it. The first things I have been doing with the beta/rc versions are:
Disable Glass/Transparency and Desktop Composition (Using the advanced system settings dialog which they buried)
Switch to the "Aero Basic" theme (Yes, this is a seperate step)
Remove the useless 4 pixel "border padding" on windows
Get rid of the Segoe UI font (I use Tahoma) and tweak the font sizes
Put Run back on the Start Menu and switch the start menu and tweak a few other bits on it
Disable UAC (I don't trust it)
Enable DEP (x64 only) for "All Programs and Services" (It has mitigated quite a few of the XP critical issues recently). I add a few executables that don't work with it on (printer software) to the exception list
Disable the built in Firewall (i'm behind a well managed router), Automatic Updates (I'm in a routine for the 2nd tuesday of the month and read Slashdot so it's no big deal for me) and some other miscellaneous security warnings.
Switch my account to a Limited User account (By adding it to Users and removing from Administrators groups using MMC)
.... once again MS has just chosen shitty defaults.
a user needs to plug the disc into their computer to access a cryptophic key before being able to use the data stored on the disc
..as opposed to the way cryptographic CSS keys are stored on a DVD standalone player?
What difference does it make where you put the key, you have to ship it with media or the player so people can actually watch the movie. It doesn't matter how many layers of bullshit you wrap it in...protected software layers... obfuscation...hardware decoders...dongles..the key is still there. When are they going to get this into their thick overpaid fucking skulls? If it can be played it can be copied.
You cannot stop DVD piracy via technical means. Period. Give up. Go home. Throw the money back in the pot and find ways to lower costs and making DVD's cheaper for everyone and we will fucking buy them.
Vista may be trying to harden their OS with Vista, but there screwing up alot of the decisions again.
People are still essentially setup as pseudo-admins out of the box (i'm sure UAC won't solve the problem) and DEP is disabled on all programs by default (most of the recent critical XP flaws are prevented by DEP being enabled for all programs and services).
I'm glad they have improved useability as a limited user though. Switching to a limited user account, disabling UAC, and enabling DEP will be the first things I do. Vista still prompts for admin priveleges but asks for a password instead of a simple click.
There is also the point of XVideo and XVideo Motion Compensation support, i've noticed that CPU load is much higher playing DVD's under the free "nv" driver than the nvidia proprietary driver.
If you have the hard disk space (since you must rip to hard disk) you might consider trying DVDFab Decrypter. It's freeware and has been used quite alot by the ripping and encoding community since copy protections started making DVD Decrypter (which was threatened by Macrovision Europe and has ceased distribution, i'm not sure about development) useless.
You can do some further post processing on the ripped files by using something like IfoEdit or DVD Shrink (which can squash the rip from DVD9 to 4.3GB DVD)
Vista x64 detects every last bit of hardware in the box I built in February. As did Windows XP x64 Edition (which I run now as my secondary OS). Right now, It's just a matter of choosing hardware wisely, when I built this box I deliberately chose components that had manufacturer provided Windows XP x64 Edition drivers (and of course, good Linux drivers as I run Linux as my primary OS).
Obviously for hardware over a year to 18 months old it's difficult... but it's no use whinging to Microsoft. Nag the manufacturers, Microsoft only bundle, and yes, the RC1 builds did include alot of drivers that didn't come with XP x64.
[For the record, XP x64 with a full house of drivers is noticeably better than XP SP2 (32 bit) and has this kernel Patchguard junk in there already. Of course, Windows is waaay behind on the 64 bit shift when compared to Linux ]
> Now, a better article would point out who Windows Media Player will run any old code as root on your box if you've got "Obtain licenses automatically" checked. I can't believe there isn't more of a sh*t storm over that.
Please elaborate...I haven't read or heard of any recently scares surrounding WMP.
> One of which is when fast mobile wifi becomes so cheap that it becomes practical to replace the disk/memory card based mp3 player with one that streams from your home server.
Yes, everyone I know runs a home server...oh wait...
No, the Vista kernel is built upon the 2003 Server kernel as a foundation just like Windows XP x64 Edition was. There are loads and loads of enhancements and tweaks.
It's such a shame that the aweful userland/UI decisions (horrible default colour scheme, nasty default fonts, users still running as pseudo-admin's, DEP *still* disabled by default even if implemented by the CPU) are going to be the things that define Vista in most peoples eyes.
As an engineering student being forced as part of my degree to do a boat load of math I would hazard a guess that the crazy fucked up world of mathematics has a way to carry out double precision fp ops by transforming the problem into a vector of hundreds of numbers.
That sounds quite compatible with MS's approach. The difference is that you acknowlege the value of trade-offs in the Internet design, but deny it for MS's design.
I was referring to my parent's comments about the infrastructure and design of the Internet. I intended to stay well clear of the Microsoft debate. But no, I don't deny this trade-off in the case of Microsoft for the sake of bashing them...
That said, when Microsoft first chiseled out Windows there was plenty of secure OS features and controls already out in the field and they *chose* not to implement them (or disable, hide or bastardise them) in favour of dumbing down the user experience for the desktop and workplace. The Internet on the other hand was kind of the first of it's breed. At first the creators only had a few distinct uses in mind for it and, although alot of them may have dreamed of something along the lines of what we have now, it just wasn't justified building extra constaints into the system.
So back on the topic of the Internet, my previous point was that if the net had had strictly 'more secure' schemes dropped into the mix from the offset then it's expansion and massively diverse growth *may* have been hindered. Just look at the massive growth of PHP based websites, ALOT of which is subject to security and other issues resulting from poor code as a modern day example of messy 'slightly insecure' systems becoming so widely used.
I think it's better to create a moderately 'insecure' system (What exactly is insecure about the Internet's infrastructure anyway?) than to impose a grand overly complex security scheme on it to find it becomes a hinderence later (20 years later for example).
Take for example e-mail/POP. It certainly has it's flaws, but is hugely successful and noone has yet been able to come up with a better system (for example, one that mitigates the spam problem) that doesn't also involve some hefty compromises that would make the whole system less useful to alot of people (and i don't mean just spammers:P).
I guess that means the Windows Media DRM keys are now only accessible from kernel mode. A smart move considering WM DRM can be cracked rampantly now. Still, this driver signing nuisance will also soon be cracked...
nVidia's latest driver's for Vista include an "OpenGL driver for compatibility testing.". OpenGL won't be a problem, it'll be provided by third party drivers like it always has been, there just won't be any software fallback provided by MS (OpenGL in software is useless anyway).
As for DRM, well. Nothing in Vista itself is going to prevent you from copying DVD's, software or music or any other such thing. Windows Media files will still be protected of course, and HDCP will HAVE to be built into all HD-DVD/Blu-ray drives and decoders (read: the hardware) for you to watch this material.
The DRM issue with respect to Vista is all mythic. The only true rights taken away from you in Vista compared to XP are in the 64bit (x64) edition, under which, you cannot install unsigned drivers (unless you add an option to the Vista bootloader which isn't that difficult).
Slashdot Mirror
Reference
This is a good place to start testing the 'cacheability' of your dynamic web pages. Quite frankly it's appauling that even the big common web apps used today like most forum or blog scripts don't generate sensible Last-Modified, Vary, Expires, Cache-Control headers. With most of the metadata you need to generate this stuff stored in the existing database scheme theres just really no excuse for it.
Abolishment of nasty long query strings into nicer, more memorable URI's is also something we should be seeing more of in "Web 2.0." Use mod_rewrite, you'll feel better for it.
...the URL and query string and hence everything you are Googling for being passed to Microsoft's servers. Think of all those Google searches (and the following immediate clicks) Microsoft could extrapolate and use to improve their own search engine...
When you can buy SSL certificates so damn cheap, $15 or less at some places, no serious company is going to certify you as being hardened against XSS or traditional hacks like this and compensate you or your users when you DO get hacked.
Besides, Verisign only guarantee that their private signing keys are secure and therefore noone could have possibly forged the certificate and hence eavesdropped on the data as it passes across the wire. They really couldn't give a rats arse about what data retention or security is like on the other end. In fact refusing to issue MySpace a SSL certificate on the grounds their server side security is shit would be wrong, as this kind of hack is not what SSL was intended to prevent.
Agreed. I don't see how incremental changes is going to do anything but produce more versions of legacy HTML to worry about in X years time when everyone should be using XHTML already.
There are plenty of other things the W3C could work on. How about they spend some time extending 'forms' (which are essentially just embedded controls) to incorporate more complex widgets like embedded video viewers or audio players? I'm sick of being a Linux user and hitting pages that use some strange flash/activex player system or something thats sized in a pop up explicitly for Windows Media Player's browser plug in.
They wouldn't actually have to produce anything using native widgets, just a set of standards regarding embedded video player sizes (and perhaps basic layout formats) that implementors could follow, and suggest a standard for styling this via CSS and controlling it via javascript.
The web is more than just hypertext now, people expect media, but as it stands theres a dozen different ways to embed things like video it into a web page unlike images and the old faithful <img> tag. I say if it can work for images it can work for video and sound, and even flash and we can do away with alot of this activex and netscape embedded junk.
Back on getting people to move to XHTML, I blame schools, the various courses i've been on that mention HTML still talk of it as a series of tag's in vaguely the right order rather than explaining the concept of XML, nesting or CSS.
I installed it and instantly hated the "visual refresh". Install this theme which restores the 1.5 look and feel. Once this was done I found disappointing. For me the annoyances introduced in 2.0 are outweighing the things I like about it.
The GTK matching on Linux is not very good, with glitches surrounding button sizes and positioning of text (the new "add ons" combi-dialog is horrible) and with strange button focusing.
One thing I will say for it is it does seem a bit zippier than 1.5.x, but I suspect I will be messing with userChrome.css in the coming weeks.
Sarcasm aside, beta 4 hit portage a while ago and the 2.0 beta's have been very useable and stable. Infact the damn things been in beta for ages and ages and ages.
Personally I feel 2.0 is a huge improvement on 1.5 on the GUI front, especially on the presentation of your buddy lists.
That does sound simple I would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Vista isn't that bad once you tweak it. The first things I have been doing with the beta/rc versions are:
RC1 froze the rendering engine until release. What's the big deal?
What difference does it make where you put the key, you have to ship it with media or the player so people can actually watch the movie. It doesn't matter how many layers of bullshit you wrap it in...protected software layers... obfuscation...hardware decoders...dongles..the key is still there. When are they going to get this into their thick overpaid fucking skulls? If it can be played it can be copied.
You cannot stop DVD piracy via technical means. Period. Give up. Go home. Throw the money back in the pot and find ways to lower costs and making DVD's cheaper for everyone and we will fucking buy them.
Vista may be trying to harden their OS with Vista, but there screwing up alot of the decisions again.
People are still essentially setup as pseudo-admins out of the box (i'm sure UAC won't solve the problem) and DEP is disabled on all programs by default (most of the recent critical XP flaws are prevented by DEP being enabled for all programs and services).
I'm glad they have improved useability as a limited user though. Switching to a limited user account, disabling UAC, and enabling DEP will be the first things I do. Vista still prompts for admin priveleges but asks for a password instead of a simple click.
There is also the point of XVideo and XVideo Motion Compensation support, i've noticed that CPU load is much higher playing DVD's under the free "nv" driver than the nvidia proprietary driver.
Well, I find the fact that some of those multi-gig files have "xml" in the filename rather nauseating...
If you have the hard disk space (since you must rip to hard disk) you might consider trying DVDFab Decrypter. It's freeware and has been used quite alot by the ripping and encoding community since copy protections started making DVD Decrypter (which was threatened by Macrovision Europe and has ceased distribution, i'm not sure about development) useless.
You can do some further post processing on the ripped files by using something like IfoEdit or DVD Shrink (which can squash the rip from DVD9 to 4.3GB DVD)
Vista x64 detects every last bit of hardware in the box I built in February. As did Windows XP x64 Edition (which I run now as my secondary OS). Right now, It's just a matter of choosing hardware wisely, when I built this box I deliberately chose components that had manufacturer provided Windows XP x64 Edition drivers (and of course, good Linux drivers as I run Linux as my primary OS).
Obviously for hardware over a year to 18 months old it's difficult... but it's no use whinging to Microsoft. Nag the manufacturers, Microsoft only bundle, and yes, the RC1 builds did include alot of drivers that didn't come with XP x64.
[For the record, XP x64 with a full house of drivers is noticeably better than XP SP2 (32 bit) and has this kernel Patchguard junk in there already. Of course, Windows is waaay behind on the 64 bit shift when compared to Linux ]
> Now, a better article would point out who Windows Media Player will run any old code as root on your box if you've got "Obtain licenses automatically" checked. I can't believe there isn't more of a sh*t storm over that.
Please elaborate...I haven't read or heard of any recently scares surrounding WMP.
> One of which is when fast mobile wifi becomes so cheap that it becomes practical to replace the disk/memory card based mp3 player with one that streams from your home server.
Yes, everyone I know runs a home server...oh wait...
No, the Vista kernel is built upon the 2003 Server kernel as a foundation just like Windows XP x64 Edition was. There are loads and loads of enhancements and tweaks.
It's such a shame that the aweful userland/UI decisions (horrible default colour scheme, nasty default fonts, users still running as pseudo-admin's, DEP *still* disabled by default even if implemented by the CPU) are going to be the things that define Vista in most peoples eyes.
As an engineering student being forced as part of my degree to do a boat load of math I would hazard a guess that the crazy fucked up world of mathematics has a way to carry out double precision fp ops by transforming the problem into a vector of hundreds of numbers.
That sounds quite compatible with MS's approach. The difference is that you acknowlege the value of trade-offs in the Internet design, but deny it for MS's design.
I was referring to my parent's comments about the infrastructure and design of the Internet. I intended to stay well clear of the Microsoft debate. But no, I don't deny this trade-off in the case of Microsoft for the sake of bashing them...
That said, when Microsoft first chiseled out Windows there was plenty of secure OS features and controls already out in the field and they *chose* not to implement them (or disable, hide or bastardise them) in favour of dumbing down the user experience for the desktop and workplace. The Internet on the other hand was kind of the first of it's breed. At first the creators only had a few distinct uses in mind for it and, although alot of them may have dreamed of something along the lines of what we have now, it just wasn't justified building extra constaints into the system.
So back on the topic of the Internet, my previous point was that if the net had had strictly 'more secure' schemes dropped into the mix from the offset then it's expansion and massively diverse growth *may* have been hindered. Just look at the massive growth of PHP based websites, ALOT of which is subject to security and other issues resulting from poor code as a modern day example of messy 'slightly insecure' systems becoming so widely used.
I think it's better to create a moderately 'insecure' system (What exactly is insecure about the Internet's infrastructure anyway?) than to impose a grand overly complex security scheme on it to find it becomes a hinderence later (20 years later for example).
:P).
Take for example e-mail/POP. It certainly has it's flaws, but is hugely successful and noone has yet been able to come up with a better system (for example, one that mitigates the spam problem) that doesn't also involve some hefty compromises that would make the whole system less useful to alot of people (and i don't mean just spammers
Interesting post.
I guess that means the Windows Media DRM keys are now only accessible from kernel mode. A smart move considering WM DRM can be cracked rampantly now. Still, this driver signing nuisance will also soon be cracked...
I'm getting 349 Mbps - (using Vista RC1) and I have d/led 29% of the file in about 20 minutes
Talk about a contradiction, 29% of 3.6 GB (best case) in 20 minutes is only ~7 Mbps, but keep dreaming.
nVidia's latest driver's for Vista include an "OpenGL driver for compatibility testing.". OpenGL won't be a problem, it'll be provided by third party drivers like it always has been, there just won't be any software fallback provided by MS (OpenGL in software is useless anyway).
As for DRM, well. Nothing in Vista itself is going to prevent you from copying DVD's, software or music or any other such thing. Windows Media files will still be protected of course, and HDCP will HAVE to be built into all HD-DVD/Blu-ray drives and decoders (read: the hardware) for you to watch this material.
The DRM issue with respect to Vista is all mythic. The only true rights taken away from you in Vista compared to XP are in the 64bit (x64) edition, under which, you cannot install unsigned drivers (unless you add an option to the Vista bootloader which isn't that difficult).