LOL. My Hackintosh supports software updates from Apple. Can't they at least install PC EFI? They're a fuckin integrator, they could BUY EFI boards. Morons.
Yeah, that's one possible way. Will kill performance worse than Vista, though.
My idea to just insert a Linux in the BIOS with a script that sends data then boots the main OS is so much better. Sill not use emulation and thus won't kill perf.
Everyone who steals a laptop has it re-installed clean in the next hour. Anything else is begging for arrest.
You're net an elite programmer? Forget it, then. You'd have to be really, really elite to do what you want.
Or you could try to dig for a laptop on which you can flash the BIOS with a Linux kernel and a script that posts its IP and location, but it would have to include a full TCP stack and I don't think it does that (and I'm not gonna check up on that just to prove you wrong).
Point is, you need to put the code where it can't be erased by a thief. And thiefs are all poor morons. There is no cheap thief who can erase the BIOS on a stolen laptop. Thus, stick the code in the BIOS. You need to be highly elite to do that on "just any" laptop, but one or two outdated models might be supported by LinuxBIOS. Which you'd need to edit heavily anyway. So, no solution.
You're fucked. And cops won't do shit, because if they began really searching for the 50,000 laptops yearly stolen in the US of A alone, they'd do nothing else.
Keyloggers on public terminals? Geez, I need a new tinfoil hat.
LiveCDs won't work. The pakis running the cyberspaces don't know shit about their computers to begin with, so if you come rebooting their half-secured machines, they're gonna throw you out with a baseball bat and an axe.
Running Firefox off an USB stick, not gonna happen, either. Kiosk software worth pirating blocks executables enough. With such crap as old Win95-like "policies", mind you, there's gonna be 25 years before they understand what the NX bit is for, but it's inconvenient enough that you'd have an easier time using a LiveCD (and get beaten out the door). As for the inconvenience of updating your password file, well, use one password for all your accounts and pray, if you can't keep up with that. Passwords are next to useless anyway... a dedicated attack WILL search the tiny namespace of "a dozen keyboard strokes" in no time.
Home computers with Mac or Linux? Well, killall -9 keylogger, LOL!!11! No, seriously : use MacOSX, there's no known keylogger. Linux boxen get rooted all the time. Macs may be technically less secure, but there are hundreds of rootkits for Linux and a thriving market for them.
I'm Belgian. French is my native language, but since 95% of all I read, write, listen to and watch is in English, my command of the English language is about as good as a native speaker's.
I remember back in High School, some English teacher told us that even he could not read Shakespeare. To which I promptly answered "Really? I can."
That's an usual occurence. It's just because your browser sent a value that's mapped to à in your computer's codepage and mapped to Ãf in Slashdot's.
Maybe if Slashdot sent HTML with the codepage explicitly defined, that would not happen... depends on your browser, I suppose. It must be a very stupid browser, though, because it's fuckin' self-evident to guess what codepage to send the POST data in : same as webpage.
If I designed an app framework, or an OS, I'd have a lib that ALL text goes through to take care of that problem.
I can't remember how many times I wanted to kill the braindead morons who can't decide that the default UNIX locale will now be UTF-8 and not 'C', because I speak FRENCH so I NEED them funny characters with accents on them, and not replaced by graphical crap no one ever uses since the Amiga. ("That would make it incompatible with thirty years of whine whine whine" YEAH RIGHT, like Linux programs are NOT recompiled at every version by the distro...)
Yeah, right. I'll believe that when I can install Linux and have it detect all my hardware Just Right. And when it doesn't lock me out of my data because of brain-dead security settings. And when I'll find software that does what I need it to, using all the same toolkit. (KDE is almost there... and has been for ten years...) When vital applications such as OOo don't take an hour to load. When X11 finally at long last gets multi-threaded. When NTFS support does not hog the whole CPU doing I/O, because lobotomized morons thought it would be a good idea to run it in userspace just so that it does NOT use DMA/BusMaster. When applications that just Make My Life Easier do NOT hog my I/O all the time, like Amarok needs six hours to scan my media library, too. (On an NTFS drive, see above.) When there is a WORKING ACPI implementation. Working as in "I close the laptop so it goes S3 and when I open it... I take out the plug and battery and pray to $DEITY that my filesystem is not TOO dead." When lm-sensors includes defaults for all major mainboards. (That's been YEARS. I've tried all the major distros on all my PCs and never ever got that to work.) When all webcams Just Work. When TV apps Just Work (and the tuner card too) When WiFi Just Works. At LEAST with Intel chips, because they're in ALL laptops. O, and, how comes there are three/dev nodes for the SAME type of device depending on chipset? Do I need a/dev/nv and a/dev/atirad and a/dev/pieceocrap, one for each of the three graphics chips? NO.
And so on forever. There is ONE functional, integrated, perfect Desktop Unix and it's MacOSX. Let Linux go where the people who pay its developpers will : on Big Iron.
And, has the non-existent webcam support been put there, working OOTB, already? And what about TV tuners? And what about "exotic" resolutions that everyuone and theirdog uses since over three years, like 1440x90 and 1280x800? And what about temperature sensors? (Only SMART ever worked) And what about supporting all the hardware out of the box? And what about sensible defaults in programs, so that their config files point to the right/dev node?
And so on and so forth forever. Linux will be ready for mainstream the day Canonical has two thousand, not developpers, but technicians to integrate everything nicely together, so that Linux may become a nice, directly-usable DESKTOP UNIX like MacOSX. Hell, I gave up on Linux BECAUSE it's so EASY to get MacOSX to do everything I want it to, right on my non-Apple PC.
ONE hour to tweak a Linux distro as tight as MacOSX? Your time is worth much, much more than $1300 an hour. Your time could make SuSE replace Apple. Yeah, 15% market share in a year, that's how much for the Messiah who figured out how to configure the distro Just Right?
That everything works? I mean EVERYTHING. Temperature sensors and webcam and all... No, you lie. No one can do that. In under a year? No, you said under one hour. YEAH RIGHT.
No, it's not. The Asus eee suck at web broswing I'm typing this from a MacBook and its 1280px horizontal size is NOT ENOUGH for some sites. So, a screen that's 800px wide, for web surfing? They're CRAZY.
Usable UMPCs are beyond $2000, and they suck. GMA950 and all. Fit a REAL monitor into an Eee and I'll buy one.
Or I'l find some way to get me an XO. It' its own Internet infrastruture. WHEN WILL YOU UNDERSTAND? No more cables, guaranteed last-mile conectivity, NO COST, and it's for kids. Kids who will grow up with the whole of hman knowledge at their fingertips? That will solve one of the two worst problems about school : rote learning. You simply CAN NOT ask kids to learn anything by rote when they KNOW they can find ANY information whasoever with a few skills that complement the "relevancy" algorithms of search engines.
No, no, no. Synmatec Internet Security usually happens as a pre-installed "90-days trial" after which you can reinstall Windows to get rid of it. Or when you buy an "Internet Security" option from your ISP, which will happily send you Norton install CDs every year.
ClamAV is never updated and DEAD.
It is unfortunate that there is so much emphasis on reactive security like antivirus when we should be, at least, looking for proactive measures as much as possible. Still, you have to use what's available to combat the threats that are known.
Proactive security? That's called a firewall for you. Filter unrequested packets first, to protect from the really dangerous malware, that which installs itself using real vulnerabilities. Then, save all your documents in an OpenBSD-based server with a CMS. Back it up twice a day. Connect to it with Windows clients that re-install themselves clean at every boot-up, with FireFox and Adblock, until you've replaced them all with Macs. There, solved.
That's why there exists one laptop model that's perfect for chidren, is as rugged as a Toughbook, costs nothing, can almost run on solar, connects itself to others of its kind, making them a FREE Internet infrastructure like WiFi promised to be, and now HP tries to sell an overpriced POS like that...
You know what? VIA processors suck. Their craphics cards (No, they're not GPUs at all - are they even faster than an S3 Trio?) can't run games, what's called "run games", not "get under one fps with all the options to zero, but runs"
And they're fucing expensive.
I want a XO laptop. I'd happily spend $400 for it, too. But when Negroponte will realize that the only way to ever get to th goal of One Laptop Per Child, he'll have to SELL them to people so that those sales subsidize his sending zillions of laptops to all kids. Because govenments are corrupt enough that the business division of HP knows enough Govt bouyers that they can sell overpriced crap to US schools, when the best alternative is a FIFTH OF THE PRICE.
That can be fixed in under two seconds (after twenty hours of web search to learn how to do Just That). BIOSes can be modified from the OS, and there WILL be some way to update them.
Even the LiveCD is a solution to a non-existing problem. It won't fix the huge majority of phishing scams, like "enter your account details on paypall.com" or "money transfers now go through bankofamerika.cjb.net".
The bank would better tell their customers "If you're using Windows for using with our online banking, then it's your fault when (not if) you get scammed."
There's no good reason for evoting machines to cost between $15,000 and $30,000 per precinctper precinct because the "booths" cost $3,000 each. The equipment costs are now one tenth that and the difference represents the tremendous overhead cost of doing things the non free way. For all of that, I've read that Dibold never made much money of these things and wants out of the business. Booths $3000 each. Yeah, right. They're really Windows PCs with a specialized application as shell.
Everyone at Diebold wanted out before the 2005 election, and the sole reason they continued is that their CEO is (was?) a Republican who'd sworn to help GWB get re-elected. Didn't he, amidst a maelstrom of vote fraud, by a feeble tiny margin?
So there. They're not even it it for the money. And don't anyone dare to tell me that they didn't make any! A private entity would've had efficient e-voting all over the country for a tenth of the price at big most.
Which is to say, it's not the overhead of the non-free way, you True Believer in the Free Software Magic Bullet. It's because it's the State. Because it's public money. Private entities don't go around spilling the slosh of buckets of money. They have to earn it womehow. The State rackets whatever it can get away with. Then happily pays hugely inflated prices to whichever private entity they get the most money from.
Who's going to pay your buck-o-five? You are, multiple times.The larger costs are security and reliability problems that's gotten these overpriced machines banned despite sunken costs. Voters were willing to pay the price when they were lied to and they are willing to lick their wounds and get rid of the things now. It would be nice if the same machines could be fixed with free software. Well, they're Wintel PCs in big cases.
I think Diebold probably made a LOT of money on it - initially. My guess is that they probably lost because they were forced to re-examine, re-implement, and re-certify the crap that they tried to pass off as secure voting machines. Now that the cat's out of the bag, it's understandable that Diebold would want to distance itself as much as possible. Like hell they will. "Re-examine, re-implement, re-certify" - they're fuckin' idiots. I could program a voting system for the whole world, with zero holes, in a month. Anyone with basic programming skills can do Just That.
Counting votes is a solved problem. If the US can't do it right, it's because special interests want voting to stay unreliable and their will is SO much more powerful than "Democracy".
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't followed the link, but, yeah, sounds just like what I explained. OF COURSE you'd use the first netlink available.
LOL. My Hackintosh supports software updates from Apple. Can't they at least install PC EFI? They're a fuckin integrator, they could BUY EFI boards. Morons.
Yeah, that's one possible way. Will kill performance worse than Vista, though.
My idea to just insert a Linux in the BIOS with a script that sends data then boots the main OS is so much better. Sill not use emulation and thus won't kill perf.
Yeah, right. Recovery. Moron.
Everyone who steals a laptop has it re-installed clean in the next hour. Anything else is begging for arrest.
You're net an elite programmer? Forget it, then. You'd have to be really, really elite to do what you want.
Or you could try to dig for a laptop on which you can flash the BIOS with a Linux kernel and a script that posts its IP and location, but it would have to include a full TCP stack and I don't think it does that (and I'm not gonna check up on that just to prove you wrong).
Point is, you need to put the code where it can't be erased by a thief. And thiefs are all poor morons. There is no cheap thief who can erase the BIOS on a stolen laptop. Thus, stick the code in the BIOS. You need to be highly elite to do that on "just any" laptop, but one or two outdated models might be supported by LinuxBIOS. Which you'd need to edit heavily anyway. So, no solution.
You're fucked. And cops won't do shit, because if they began really searching for the 50,000 laptops yearly stolen in the US of A alone, they'd do nothing else.
And your tinfoil hat weighs two tons.
Yeaaah! Free threadjack! Thank the trolls.
Keyloggers on public terminals? Geez, I need a new tinfoil hat.
LiveCDs won't work. The pakis running the cyberspaces don't know shit about their computers to begin with, so if you come rebooting their half-secured machines, they're gonna throw you out with a baseball bat and an axe.
Running Firefox off an USB stick, not gonna happen, either. Kiosk software worth pirating blocks executables enough. With such crap as old Win95-like "policies", mind you, there's gonna be 25 years before they understand what the NX bit is for, but it's inconvenient enough that you'd have an easier time using a LiveCD (and get beaten out the door).
As for the inconvenience of updating your password file, well, use one password for all your accounts and pray, if you can't keep up with that. Passwords are next to useless anyway... a dedicated attack WILL search the tiny namespace of "a dozen keyboard strokes" in no time.
Home computers with Mac or Linux? Well, killall -9 keylogger, LOL!!11! No, seriously : use MacOSX, there's no known keylogger. Linux boxen get rooted all the time. Macs may be technically less secure, but there are hundreds of rootkits for Linux and a thriving market for them.
I'm Belgian. French is my native language, but since 95% of all I read, write, listen to and watch is in English, my command of the English language is about as good as a native speaker's.
I remember back in High School, some English teacher told us that even he could not read Shakespeare. To which I promptly answered "Really? I can."
But, no, I'm not French.
That's an usual occurence. It's just because your browser sent a value that's mapped to à in your computer's codepage and mapped to Ãf in Slashdot's.
Maybe if Slashdot sent HTML with the codepage explicitly defined, that would not happen... depends on your browser, I suppose. It must be a very stupid browser, though, because it's fuckin' self-evident to guess what codepage to send the POST data in : same as webpage.
If I designed an app framework, or an OS, I'd have a lib that ALL text goes through to take care of that problem.
I can't remember how many times I wanted to kill the braindead morons who can't decide that the default UNIX locale will now be UTF-8 and not 'C', because I speak FRENCH so I NEED them funny characters with accents on them, and not replaced by graphical crap no one ever uses since the Amiga. ("That would make it incompatible with thirty years of whine whine whine" YEAH RIGHT, like Linux programs are NOT recompiled at every version by the distro...)
Well, unless your straming pr0n has viruses in it, yeah, you're 100% safe. Malware only happens in advertisements these days.
Bah, nobody will register and that's it. It's called an unenforceable law, like those on intellectual property.
Yeah, right. I'll believe that when I can install Linux and have it detect all my hardware Just Right. /dev nodes for the SAME type of device depending on chipset? Do I need a /dev/nv and a /dev/atirad and a /dev/pieceocrap, one for each of the three graphics chips? NO.
And when it doesn't lock me out of my data because of brain-dead security settings. And when I'll find software that does what I need it to, using all the same toolkit. (KDE is almost there... and has been for ten years...)
When vital applications such as OOo don't take an hour to load.
When X11 finally at long last gets multi-threaded.
When NTFS support does not hog the whole CPU doing I/O, because lobotomized morons thought it would be a good idea to run it in userspace just so that it does NOT use DMA/BusMaster.
When applications that just Make My Life Easier do NOT hog my I/O all the time, like Amarok needs six hours to scan my media library, too. (On an NTFS drive, see above.)
When there is a WORKING ACPI implementation. Working as in "I close the laptop so it goes S3 and when I open it... I take out the plug and battery and pray to $DEITY that my filesystem is not TOO dead."
When lm-sensors includes defaults for all major mainboards. (That's been YEARS. I've tried all the major distros on all my PCs and never ever got that to work.)
When all webcams Just Work.
When TV apps Just Work (and the tuner card too)
When WiFi Just Works. At LEAST with Intel chips, because they're in ALL laptops. O, and, how comes there are three
And so on forever. There is ONE functional, integrated, perfect Desktop Unix and it's MacOSX. Let Linux go where the people who pay its developpers will : on Big Iron.
Use Intel procesors and chipset. That's what's in Macs.
And, has the non-existent webcam support been put there, working OOTB, already? And what about TV tuners? And what about "exotic" resolutions that everyuone and theirdog uses since over three years, like 1440x90 and 1280x800? And what about temperature sensors? (Only SMART ever worked) And what about supporting all the hardware out of the box? And what about sensible defaults in programs, so that their config files point to the right /dev node?
And so on and so forth forever. Linux will be ready for mainstream the day Canonical has two thousand, not developpers, but technicians to integrate everything nicely together, so that Linux may become a nice, directly-usable DESKTOP UNIX like MacOSX. Hell, I gave up on Linux BECAUSE it's so EASY to get MacOSX to do everything I want it to, right on my non-Apple PC.
Well, buy any laptop with Intel CPU and graphics (it's budget, so forget about a real GPU) and install MacOSX Pirate Edition. There, solved.
ONE hour to tweak a Linux distro as tight as MacOSX? Your time is worth much, much more than $1300 an hour. Your time could make SuSE replace Apple. Yeah, 15% market share in a year, that's how much for the Messiah who figured out how to configure the distro Just Right?
That everything works? I mean EVERYTHING. Temperature sensors and webcam and all... No, you lie. No one can do that. In under a year? No, you said under one hour. YEAH RIGHT.
Oh off the top of my stoner head. Was $200? Go find an $200 UMPC now. My point stands.
No, it's not. The Asus eee suck at web broswing I'm typing this from a MacBook and its 1280px horizontal size is NOT ENOUGH for some sites. So, a screen that's 800px wide, for web surfing? They're CRAZY.
Usable UMPCs are beyond $2000, and they suck. GMA950 and all. Fit a REAL monitor into an Eee and I'll buy one.
Or I'l find some way to get me an XO. It' its own Internet infrastruture. WHEN WILL YOU UNDERSTAND? No more cables, guaranteed last-mile conectivity, NO COST, and it's for kids. Kids who will grow up with the whole of hman knowledge at their fingertips? That will solve one of the two worst problems about school : rote learning. You simply CAN NOT ask kids to learn anything by rote when they KNOW they can find ANY information whasoever with a few skills that complement the "relevancy" algorithms of search engines.
"Free, perfect, instant copies of any data."
$100 and it's its own Internet infrastructure.
That is perfect.
ClamAV is never updated and DEAD.
Proactive security? That's called a firewall for you. Filter unrequested packets first, to protect from the really dangerous malware, that which installs itself using real vulnerabilities. Then, save all your documents in an OpenBSD-based server with a CMS. Back it up twice a day.
Connect to it with Windows clients that re-install themselves clean at every boot-up, with FireFox and Adblock, until you've replaced them all with Macs. There, solved.
MacOSX Kalyway Edition?
So that you never need to worry about malware ever again...
That's why there exists one laptop model that's perfect for chidren, is as rugged as a Toughbook, costs nothing, can almost run on solar, connects itself to others of its kind, making them a FREE Internet infrastructure like WiFi promised to be, and now HP tries to sell an overpriced POS like that...
You know what? VIA processors suck. Their craphics cards (No, they're not GPUs at all - are they even faster than an S3 Trio?) can't run games, what's called "run games", not "get under one fps with all the options to zero, but runs"
And they're fucing expensive.
I want a XO laptop. I'd happily spend $400 for it, too.
But when Negroponte will realize that the only way to ever get to th goal of One Laptop Per Child, he'll have to SELL them to people so that those sales subsidize his sending zillions of laptops to all kids. Because govenments are corrupt enough that the business division of HP knows enough Govt bouyers that they can sell overpriced crap to US schools, when the best alternative is a FIFTH OF THE PRICE.
What about marketers' perception of reality?
That can be fixed in under two seconds (after twenty hours of web search to learn how to do Just That). BIOSes can be modified from the OS, and there WILL be some way to update them.
Even the LiveCD is a solution to a non-existing problem. It won't fix the huge majority of phishing scams, like "enter your account details on paypall.com" or "money transfers now go through bankofamerika.cjb.net".
The bank would better tell their customers "If you're using Windows for using with our online banking, then it's your fault when (not if) you get scammed."
Everyone at Diebold wanted out before the 2005 election, and the sole reason they continued is that their CEO is (was?) a Republican who'd sworn to help GWB get re-elected. Didn't he, amidst a maelstrom of vote fraud, by a feeble tiny margin?
So there. They're not even it it for the money. And don't anyone dare to tell me that they didn't make any! A private entity would've had efficient e-voting all over the country for a tenth of the price at big most.
Which is to say, it's not the overhead of the non-free way, you True Believer in the Free Software Magic Bullet. It's because it's the State. Because it's public money. Private entities don't go around spilling the slosh of buckets of money. They have to earn it womehow. The State rackets whatever it can get away with. Then happily pays hugely inflated prices to whichever private entity they get the most money from. Who's going to pay your buck-o-five? You are, multiple times.The larger costs are security and reliability problems that's gotten these overpriced machines banned despite sunken costs. Voters were willing to pay the price when they were lied to and they are willing to lick their wounds and get rid of the things now. It would be nice if the same machines could be fixed with free software. Well, they're Wintel PCs in big cases. I think Diebold probably made a LOT of money on it - initially. My guess is that they probably lost because they were forced to re-examine, re-implement, and re-certify the crap that they tried to pass off as secure voting machines. Now that the cat's out of the bag, it's understandable that Diebold would want to distance itself as much as possible. Like hell they will. "Re-examine, re-implement, re-certify" - they're fuckin' idiots. I could program a voting system for the whole world, with zero holes, in a month. Anyone with basic programming skills can do Just That.
Counting votes is a solved problem. If the US can't do it right, it's because special interests want voting to stay unreliable and their will is SO much more powerful than "Democracy".