Could this be avoided if they just released the film on the same day everywhere? If it is only four days early in the UK, they must have the film produced for all the markets already so that shouldn't be a problem. I sure they probably have some marketing reason to hold it back but does anyone really think that they can get more customers in other countries by showing it later?
There seem to be a lot of IT related patents being filed. I wonder if there is an easy way of challenging them before they are granted (perhaps some open source enthusiasts who are not so much into writing code could start a project to challenge as many patents as possible before they are granted.
Any window on Windows 2000 or later can be transparent; see the documentation for SetLayeredWindowAttributes. It is a nice feature and some programs use it but it can be very slow.
"The same GTA engine [...] with a new locale" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Both the games based on the GTA 3 engine have been very playable.
If they have got a game engine that does what they need, there is no need to re-write it for every version. Not many film reviews say "same old camera, different plot".
I was going to suggest that maybe game engines have evolved to the point where most of the effort of making a game can go into the content rather than the technology. Then I thought about all the LucasArts games based on similar SCUMM engines.
Perhaps the rule of thumb is that games need to have a certain amount of "newness" but it doesn't really matter if it comes from the technology or the content.
The BBC published this report on Microsoft security problems. Somehow, the person who wrote this managed to a whole article without including any information on what the bug actually was.
In sort form it reads, there was a security flaw, it is bad, actually it was really bad, maybe the worst ever and it is a security flaw.
As you say "Theres always loopholes and holes in implantation", which is the problem that this solution would try and solve. As getting any implementation right is so hard, you only want to have to write it once and have it written by someone who really knows what they are doing. In this solution, all the complicated problems of deciding what resources an application can access are moved away from the application and into the operating system.
It seems most of the security holes that turn up on Windows systems are due to applications trying to do security themselves and failing. If Internet Explorer could just tell the operating system that nothing apart from the save page and cache functions need access to the file system, it would immediately remove a large number of potential points where the application could cause a security problem (or at least move the problem to the operating system).
No, because the process it is running in would not have the permissions needed to execute the FTP client (or it could execute the FTP client but the FTP client wouldn't have the ability to access the Internet. Essentially you would be saying, "For this process, reject all calls to the following OS APIs...." (even if they are called by a child process). Easy and secure (as you are doing the tricky security stuff one as the OS level then in every application).
Indeed, with this system it would all work but instead of assuming that all of your software can use the internet all of the time just because your can, you would simply specify that your network enabled editor can use the network (and if the developers have done a good job, just the bits of the editor that actually require network access and nothing else).
You can do something similar. You can decide what each application can do (the first time it tries to access the Internet) but I was thinking of a wider solution. The permissions should apply to everything that an application could do (disk access, printing, internet access, network access, etc) and it should assume that the app is not allowed to do anything until told otherwise.
...but if this were at the OS level, the application designer could say this DLL/library/widget bit does nead Internet access (if approved by the user) with out changing the rest of the code base (so the file loading stuff could still have lots of nice buffer over runs). Again, I know this is possible to do now on most OSs, it just isn't easy and there is no standard way of doing it.
It should be simple to write secure software. Most current operating systems (in their default configuration), assume that applications run by the current user should have all the powers and privileges of the current user. This is obviously wrong.
If I install a text editor, I probably don't want it to be able to access the Internet. It should be possible to say, "for this app here, don't let it do anything network related". That way, no matter how badly the text editor is written, it can't do any harm beyond the data it is allowed to work with. If I then want to use the text editor to print to a network print, I should be able to tweak a few options to make that possible (without enabling anything else).
Ideally, all of this would happen when an application is installed. If there were some UI that said, "This here program is asking for the following rights, is that OK?", I would immediately know what I was letting myself in for.
I know there are various ways of doing this kind of thing at the moment (virtual machines, using permissions more effectively or using different accounts for software) but none of them are particularly easy to get going.
With all of this implemented correctly, it should be possible to run any application (no matter where it came from) with out risking all the data on a PC and connected resources and to deal with security in a way that any normal user would understand.
I have set up bar code stuff before and found the best way of getting what I want is to write it myself. I was using a printer similar to this Intermec one. Intermec provided nice documentation on everything needed to program it. The resulting data sent to the printer looked something like this. So see if your printer has a nice simple programming language and then sit down for an afternoon with some fresh coffee and work out a template for it.
Umm, yeah right. I was replying to someone who was suggesting backing up data to a hard disk. I simply suggested a way of making this simpler in some cases. I was not suggesting a general backup solution so I not really sure what you are on about when you say "Tell us you are not in charge of disaster recovery".
Why not use mirrored disks for backup? Although you loose protection against accedently deleting files, you gain a constant back up and possibly faster read times with minimal effort.
This seems like a good idea but I think there will be a lot of problems or limitations.
The BBC appear to have sold the rights to many of their successful programs to other channels such as UK Gold. For more recent programs, they might not own the Internet rights to them if they have been made for the BBC by third party companies (I think this has stopped them from including some radio programs in thier existing (and very good) radio archive site. Also, what about international rights - I would guess there are many cases were the BBC have sold rights for brodcast in other contries to other broadcasters.
While I think this good be very good, I wouldn't be suprised if it is limited to clips that are more useful for research purposes (like news footage and small budget documenteries) than the big money programs.
Indeed, http://www.ibm.com/robot.txt is a good example. Even with my complete lack of hacker skillz I can find out from one easy to read page that:
They are probably using perl and cgi and where scripts might be kept
There is possibly an admin area in/admin
There might be interesting things to look at in/zx/zz/i/ and/tmp
The webmaster's names
That they probably use something called Fast corporate crawler I am not saying that any of this would give anyone a way of hacking their site (which, by the way, I am not trying to do!), but perhaps some of it is more information than they might be wanting to make so easily available.
Having a robots.txt is a good idea but it always amuses me when web sites use robots.txt to list all the areas of their site that they don't what people to look at. When robots.txt contains entries like "Disallow:/admin.asp" or "Disallow:/backdoor.asp" it stops being a way of controlling search engines and becomes a site map of all the places hackers might be interested in.
Slashdot Mirror
Could this be avoided if they just released the film on the same day everywhere? If it is only four days early in the UK, they must have the film produced for all the markets already so that shouldn't be a problem. I sure they probably have some marketing reason to hold it back but does anyone really think that they can get more customers in other countries by showing it later?
Apple sue you.
Pseudo-interactive input processing in wireless environments
This appears to describe a hand held PC that can talk to a server now and then.
Method and system for providing a secure multimedia presentation
Seems to describe a secure file transfer system.
System and method for automated creation of personalized poster
This would appear to be an online poster ordering system.
There seem to be a lot of IT related patents being filed. I wonder if there is an easy way of challenging them before they are granted (perhaps some open source enthusiasts who are not so much into writing code could start a project to challenge as many patents as possible before they are granted.
Any window on Windows 2000 or later can be transparent; see the documentation for SetLayeredWindowAttributes. It is a nice feature and some programs use it but it can be very slow.
"The same GTA engine [...] with a new locale" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Both the games based on the GTA 3 engine have been very playable.
If they have got a game engine that does what they need, there is no need to re-write it for every version. Not many film reviews say "same old camera, different plot".
I was going to suggest that maybe game engines have evolved to the point where most of the effort of making a game can go into the content rather than the technology. Then I thought about all the LucasArts games based on similar SCUMM engines.
Perhaps the rule of thumb is that games need to have a certain amount of "newness" but it doesn't really matter if it comes from the technology or the content.
The BBC published this report on Microsoft security problems. Somehow, the person who wrote this managed to a whole article without including any information on what the bug actually was.
In sort form it reads, there was a security flaw, it is bad, actually it was really bad, maybe the worst ever and it is a security flaw.
As you say "Theres always loopholes and holes in implantation", which is the problem that this solution would try and solve. As getting any implementation right is so hard, you only want to have to write it once and have it written by someone who really knows what they are doing. In this solution, all the complicated problems of deciding what resources an application can access are moved away from the application and into the operating system.
It seems most of the security holes that turn up on Windows systems are due to applications trying to do security themselves and failing. If Internet Explorer could just tell the operating system that nothing apart from the save page and cache functions need access to the file system, it would immediately remove a large number of potential points where the application could cause a security problem (or at least move the problem to the operating system).
No, because the process it is running in would not have the permissions needed to execute the FTP client (or it could execute the FTP client but the FTP client wouldn't have the ability to access the Internet. Essentially you would be saying, "For this process, reject all calls to the following OS APIs...." (even if they are called by a child process). Easy and secure (as you are doing the tricky security stuff one as the OS level then in every application).
Indeed, with this system it would all work but instead of assuming that all of your software can use the internet all of the time just because your can, you would simply specify that your network enabled editor can use the network (and if the developers have done a good job, just the bits of the editor that actually require network access and nothing else).
You can do something similar. You can decide what each application can do (the first time it tries to access the Internet) but I was thinking of a wider solution. The permissions should apply to everything that an application could do (disk access, printing, internet access, network access, etc) and it should assume that the app is not allowed to do anything until told otherwise.
...but if this were at the OS level, the application designer could say this DLL/library/widget bit does nead Internet access (if approved by the user) with out changing the rest of the code base (so the file loading stuff could still have lots of nice buffer over runs). Again, I know this is possible to do now on most OSs, it just isn't easy and there is no standard way of doing it.
It should be simple to write secure software. Most current operating systems (in their default configuration), assume that applications run by the current user should have all the powers and privileges of the current user. This is obviously wrong.
If I install a text editor, I probably don't want it to be able to access the Internet. It should be possible to say, "for this app here, don't let it do anything network related". That way, no matter how badly the text editor is written, it can't do any harm beyond the data it is allowed to work with. If I then want to use the text editor to print to a network print, I should be able to tweak a few options to make that possible (without enabling anything else).
Ideally, all of this would happen when an application is installed. If there were some UI that said, "This here program is asking for the following rights, is that OK?", I would immediately know what I was letting myself in for.
I know there are various ways of doing this kind of thing at the moment (virtual machines, using permissions more effectively or using different accounts for software) but none of them are particularly easy to get going.
With all of this implemented correctly, it should be possible to run any application (no matter where it came from) with out risking all the data on a PC and connected resources and to deal with security in a way that any normal user would understand.
Random recommendations: Catch 22, The Dice Man, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451
Lets hope that "cl_localnetworkbackdoor.cpp" in the left corner of the thrird screenshot isn't as intresting as it sounds!
...including catch the CPU, hide the CPU, throw the CPU and Opteron Jenga
Wow the real Bill Gates posting on Slashdot. This place rocks.
I have set up bar code stuff before and found the best way of getting what I want is to write it myself. I was using a printer similar to this Intermec one. Intermec provided nice documentation on everything needed to program it. The resulting data sent to the printer looked something like this. So see if your printer has a nice simple programming language and then sit down for an afternoon with some fresh coffee and work out a template for it.
Umm, yeah right. I was replying to someone who was suggesting backing up data to a hard disk. I simply suggested a way of making this simpler in some cases. I was not suggesting a general backup solution so I not really sure what you are on about when you say "Tell us you are not in charge of disaster recovery".
Why not use mirrored disks for backup? Although you loose protection against accedently deleting files, you gain a constant back up and possibly faster read times with minimal effort.
This seems like a good idea but I think there will be a lot of problems or limitations.
The BBC appear to have sold the rights to many of their successful programs to other channels such as UK Gold. For more recent programs, they might not own the Internet rights to them if they have been made for the BBC by third party companies (I think this has stopped them from including some radio programs in thier existing (and very good) radio archive site. Also, what about international rights - I would guess there are many cases were the BBC have sold rights for brodcast in other contries to other broadcasters.
While I think this good be very good, I wouldn't be suprised if it is limited to clips that are more useful for research purposes (like news footage and small budget documenteries) than the big money programs.
Perhaps "Favourite Licence" might make for an intresting poll question. I guess the options would be GPL, LGPL, BSD, MS EULA and unlicenced.
All you need is two top secret lines from sco.h:
They are probably using perl and cgi and where scripts might be kept
There is possibly an admin area in /admin
There might be interesting things to look at in /zx /zz /i/ and /tmp
The webmaster's names
That they probably use something called Fast corporate crawler
I am not saying that any of this would give anyone a way of hacking their site (which, by the way, I am not trying to do!), but perhaps some of it is more information than they might be wanting to make so easily available.
Having a robots.txt is a good idea but it always amuses me when web sites use robots.txt to list all the areas of their site that they don't what people to look at. When robots.txt contains entries like "Disallow: /admin.asp" or "Disallow: /backdoor.asp" it stops being a way of controlling search engines and becomes a site map of all the places hackers might be interested in.
I would guess that the people wise enough to use your service will be the ones that can do all of this themselves.