Well I dunno. But I do know that seeing all those American fighters made my Dad's friend realise that the UK wasn't likely to get invaded by the Nazis.
Taiwan is a democracy though, and China is a nasty police state.
I'm in Taiwan at the moment, and I've been to China a few times and they are as different as night and day.
At work Taiwanese people are always seem to be debating various solutions to technical problems whereas the Chinese seem to be in 'keep your head down, avoid trouble with the Powers That Be and try to bullshit/cheat outsiders' mode. Outside work the Taiwanese are very friendly and the Chinese are still pretty buttoned down.
Here everyone advocates the same 'keep your head down' approach when you're actually in China, otherwise bad things can happen to you
My point is that you can see that the Taiwanese get shit done, and the Chinese don't, once you get past the bullshit. I actually think all the obvious signs of development in China are as fake as the old collective farms and miraculous increases in steel production back in the 50's.
Now you could say that Taiwan industrialized before it was a democracy, but Taiwan pre 1989 and China now are not really comparable. China's a horrible fascist state, and Taiwan was more like one of those banana republics. Sure obvious dissidents were locked up, but I don't think it was as efficiently totalitarian as China has been since the revolution.
China and Japan are not really the same though. China builds electronics in big factories that are really indistinguishable from the old collective farms and communist era factories. I.e. they are good at getting lots of people to do a simple task. The advent of capitalism means that they make things for export and the old communist system of jobs for life, free healthcare and so on has been abolished.
One of my colleagues, who was born in China, told me that the factory workers are often not paid by the factory owner and if they demonstrate the local party will send goons to silence them. Most of the factory owners are foreign, usually Taiwanese and all the design is done outside China. Basically China is a massively feudal place.
Now Japan, even in the 1950's wasn't like this. The Japanese had good domestic engineering companies even in the 1930's. Most of them were bombed to bits in World War II, but Japan was a modern society 50 years before the fascists took over, and became one again quite quickly again after the Americans rebooted it. And post war it wasn't too surprising that they concentrated on consumer electronics now that America had taken over responsibility for Japan's security.
Now up until very recently for example, it was a very equal, well educated and essentially middle class society, a bit like an Asian version of Sweden. Equality has dropped a bit, but the essentially middle classness of the place hasn't changed. That's the sort of society you need to produce engineering companies. It's also very different to China, which has never really got past feudalism. Feudal societies aren't egalitarian enough to be good at designing consumer electronics, because that implies that (young, poor) engineers need to be able to tell the (old, rich) owners how to get things done. In a feudal society the orders flow in only one way, from the top down.
My Dad has a Nokia 2630. It's like the one you linked to, except it has Bluetooth. It cost about USD30-40 - supermarkets buy up things like this in bulk and sell them off at a deep discount. It's actually a remarkable piece of low cost engineering, and probably quite sufficient for the vast majority of people.
You shouldn't underestimate the military power of democracies though. My one of my Dad's colleagues at university worked at Los Alamos. Two American military guys, turned up at his house in England and said he was needed for a project related to the war effort. This was during the Battle of Britain. He said at that point the papers were talking about how the Germans had 1000 planes say, and the British had 800 but on the other hand the British were fighting at home so to speak which gave them an advantage.
Anyhow he flew to America and got a train cross country. As from the train he spotted airfields essentially full of American military aircraft, easily more than the numbers of English and German fighters combined.
Before he got to Los Alamos, he knew the US/UK would win the war.
Actually I think cellphone technology is the way to do this.
You'd take an ARM core and put it on one chip along with the peripherals like Wifi. For power use, AA batteries. Ram and Rom would be cheap mobile phone class multi chip package containing DRAM and flash. Actually mobile phones use a technique called POP, package on package where the MCP is stuck on top of the custom chip containing the CPU and peripherals. Keyboard is a chiclet one like mobile phones use. OS would be an ARM Linux variant. Most embedded ARM designs have USB and some are USB hosts. You could use that to connect to a USB flash disk which gives you expansion.
There are mobile phones with a small color display for around USD 20 build price. If you want to run Linux you'd need more RAM, but DRAM is cheap these days.
Actually the hardest bit is the display, even a netbook sized one is probably more expensive than you can afford. I expect this thing will be more like a graphing calculator/mobile phone form factor than a laptop one, just because of the cost of the display.
Of course, you could have a largish, cheap, but lousy mono STN display like the original laptops had. Of course in a few years a largish, cheap, but non lousy OLED display will be possible.
"I think Americans should be exposed to every point of view," he said. "I happen to believe in evolution.... I respect those who think the world was created in seven days. Should it be taught as a science class? Probably not."
If you post comments on sites like Indymedia debunking their paranoid worldview they allways get removed by a moderator. Conspiracy theorists are in practice much keener on censorship than the governments they rant against.
What's ironic about this is that it shows what a threat to a free society these people are. Now this sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself on the surface but consider. Marx had a very conspiratorial view of democracy, he claimed that it was manipulated by the bourgeoisie, hence the term 'bourgeois liberalism'. When Marxists came to power in Russia that gave them a theoretical justification for repressing the whole bourgeois class. Similarly Hitler thought that society was manipulated by the Jews and thus tried to wipe them out when he was in power.
Cliques of people that all believe in some powerful group manipulating society will always go after that group once they are in power.
Of course at the moment the conspiracy theorists are divided and are marginalised politically because most people simply laugh at them, but I'd say the government is right to be keeping tabs on them to make sure they stay that way.
I do like the idea of NSA types working in a "black tower". Very Tolkien.
Maybe it's partisan of me, but I've seen Olberman ranting like Bill O'Reilly and now I just tend to ignore what he says, just like I ignore Bill and Rush.
Plus as you say, this interview doesn't seem to contain anything particularly sensational to me. At this point I'd be very surprised if the NSA weren't searching wiretaps for keywords and data mining credit card records.
http://www.slate.com/id/2146475/ To summarize, then: In February 1999 one of Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear goons paid a visit to Niger, but his identity was not noticed by Joseph Wilson, nor emphasized in his "report" to the CIA, nor mentioned at all in his later memoir. British intelligence picked up the news of the Zahawie visit from French and Italian sources and passed it on to Washington. Zahawie's denials of any background or knowledge, in respect of nuclear matters, are plainly laughable based on his past record, and he is still taken seriously enough as an expert on such matters to be invited (as part of a Jordanian delegation) to Hans Blix's commission on WMD. Two very senior and experienced diplomats in the field of WMDs and disarmament, both of them from countries by no means aligned with the Bush administration, have been kind enough to share with me their disquiet at his activities. What responsible American administration could possibly have viewed any of this with indifference?
The subsequent mysteriously forged documents claiming evidence of an actual deal made between Zahawie and Niger were circulated well after the first British report (and may have been intended to discredit it) and have been deemed irrelevant by two independent inquiries in London. The original British report carefully said that Saddam had "sought" uranium, not that he had acquired it. The possible significance of a later return visit - this time by a minister from Niger to Baghdad in 2001 - has not as yet been clarified by the work of the Iraq Survey Group.
This means that both pillars of the biggest scandal-mongering effort yet mounted by the "anti-war" movement - the twin allegations of a false story exposed by Wilson and then of a state-run vendetta undertaken against him and the lady wife who dispatched him on the mission - are in irretrievable ruins. The truth is the exact polar opposite. The original Niger connection was both authentic and important, and Wilson's utter failure to grasp it or even examine it was not enough to make Karl Rove even turn over in bed. All the work of the supposed "outing" was inadvertently performed by Wilson's admirer Robert Novak. Of course, one defends the Bush administration at one's own peril. Thanks largely to Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, our incompetent and divided government grew so nervous as to disown the words that appeared in the 2003 State of the Union address. But the facts are still the facts, and it is high time that they received one-millionth of the attention that the "Plamegate" farce has garnered.
Bios do decompress themselves, at least for the menus. Maybe the SATA locking code would be uncompressed, I'm not sure.
I still think you're underestimating the complexity of finding the code in the Bios and patching it. A human could do it, automating the process is not so trivial. There are after all a lot of ways to send a command to a drive, even a drive one one interface (there are two at the moment, AHCI for native SATA and ATA for IDE and SATA in emulation mode). If you asked two people to do it, they would each produce slightly different code and hacking it out would require a different set of bytes being patched.
If you just scan for the command byte, you'd probably get a lot of hits. Change 'em all and you'll brick the machine.
Awdflash is updated regularly, according to this guy
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/jefn/bootblock.html Always ensure that you use the correct version of Awdflash.exe! Phoenix/Award regularly updates Awdflash.exe program to support ever-changing hardware.
See, all boards with an Award Bios can't be flashed in the exact same way.
You couldn't use this in malware since you need to boot into Dos.
Asus have a Bios update tool which runs unders Windows which they make sure works on all their boards
It's not like all of their boards use the same instructions to do the update though. An update tool needs to have a driver, essentially for each board it supports. That's the reason awdflash and the Windows Bios flash tools often have to be updated when they launch a new board.
CIH spreads under the Portable Executable file format under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME. CIH does not spread under Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista. Non Microsoft operating systems are not affected. CIH infects Portable Executable files by splitting the bulk of its code into small slivers inserted into the inter-section gaps commonly seen in PE files, and writing a small re-assembly routine and table of its own code segments' locations into unused space in the tail of the PE header. This earned CIH another name, "Spacefiller". The size of the virus is around 1 kilobyte, but due to its novel multiple-cavity infection method, infected files do not grow at all. It uses methods of jumping from processor ring 3 to 0 to hook system calls.
The payload, which is considered extremely dangerous, first involves the virus overwriting the first megabyte (1024KB) of the hard drive with zeroes, beginning at sector 0. This deletes the contents of the partition table, and may cause the machine to hang.
The second payload tries to write to the Flash BIOS. Due to what may be an unintended feature of this code, BIOSes that can be successfully written to by the virus have critical boot-time code replaced with junk. This routine only works on some machines. Much emphasis has been put on machines with motherboards based on the Intel 430TX chipset, but by far the most important variable in CIH's success in writing to a machine's BIOS is the type of Flash ROM chip in the machine. Different Flash ROM chips (or chip families) have different write-enable routines specific to those chips. CIH makes no attempt to test for the Flash ROM type in its victim machines, and has only one write-enable sequence.
Note it only worked in 16 bit Windows. Now the 430TX chipset looks like it has the Bios connected to the ISA bus.
Environmentally light bulbs are a process. The bulbs are released. Some people, most in fact have insufficiently sensitive eyes. They will fall down the stairs, die and fail to breed. Over the millenia humans will evolve big ass eyes like this tarsier
Q) How many envirommentalists does it take to change a lightbulb? A) Do you know how much energy is wasted by lighting every year? Polar bears are drowning because of selfish people like you!
I went to Camodia(sic) and it wasn't anything like Jello Biafra's song... Overall it was a very disappointing experience
Jello Biafra's song was about life under a government that killed 25% of the population of the country. You presumably didn't visit the country when Pol Pot was in power since it was one big work camp. Actually even if you had have done so then, they would probably have assigned you a minder and made sure you didn't see anything too nasty happening, rather like the North Koreans did during the 90's famine, or the North Vietnamese did when they huge numbers of South Vietnames off to a camps after they annexed South Vietnam in 1975. Actually come to think of it all murderous totalitarian regimes tend to be a bit wary of showing tourists their concentration camps, for some reason.
So if you go on holidays looking to see lots of people being killed for some twisted reason, you will most likely be disappointed. Still you can always jack off to pictures of the concentration camps the Allies liberated, which are uncensored, you sick fuck.
Such a hack would be easy for a weekend video game cracker to create.
I, for one, don't like this spec one bit.
They'd have to do that for each Bios though. You're need to decompress the Bios (Bios specific algorithm), find the ATA code, patch it, fix any checksums, recompress the Bios and then reflash it.
Reflashing is tricky to do on an arbitary machine too because you need to do it for chipset - the flash chip programming algorithm depends on the flash chip used and the io ports to turn on Vpp are depend on motherboard chipset.
And if people started to do that, the motherboard vendors would just build in some sort of anti reprogramming protection. Not hard to do really, you just make sure that Vpp, the flash programming voltage, is turned off until some motherboard model specific password is written to a hardware register. Or the Bios vendors could have a secure Bios where some code in an OTP (One time programmable flash block) could decompress code from reprogammable flash blocks and verify a signature before starting it. This is a hard thing to hack. The trusted code contains a public key and knows how to verify a signature. The private key used to generate a signature is kept secret by the motherboard vendor.
Now it's not really clear how secure various Bioses are. Some desktop motherboards have hardware jumpers to disable Vpp in hardware. I don't know of any laptops that do this, but the chipset might implement security.
Actually there's a deeper problem. The chipset is designed to allow you to use one physical flash chip for both the system and video Bios. Each motherboard ODM probably does the packing in a slightly different way. Hell, if they just pack one image after another and the images are different sizes depending on version, you'd need to figure that out too. You could work out which bits of flash are system bios and which are video by reading the chipset registers of course, but then you'd have to write code for all possible chipsets.
Seriously, this is much harder than you think, even if there is absolutely no security implemented. The fundamental problem is that writing to the Bios is not standardised. The motherboard ODM will take a Bios from Award or Phoenix as a developers kit which is a mixture of source and object code, add some code from the chipset vendor to initialize the chipset, do the same thing with the video Bios code from the GPU vendor, and build an image from that. They'll also write a Bios flasher utility. E.g. the Asus one won't work on a Acer. Hell the Asus one might be model specific too. ODMs will change flash chip vendor every so often if they can strike a good deal.
Each combination of laptop model, Bios version, chipset, flash chip and ODM is a different test case.
Reddit.com doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as digg. Actually for technical stuff it's quite a bit more tolerable than slashdot. Fanboys seem to have spammed the politics section to death though.
Second they said it produced explosive winds, up to 5 km/s. (Or "fucking unbelievably fast" in imperial units;) Because the air heats from 500 degrees to 1200 degrees on the hot side within hours, and expands, rushing towards the colder side.
The wind speed is higher than the conditions at the hypocenter when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki
The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. The explosion generated heat estimated at 3,900 degrees Celsius (7,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and winds that were estimated at 1005 km/h (624 mph).
If there are any aliens on that planet they must be badass shitkicking sons of bitches. Ideal recruits for my Imperial Guard.
Very true. It amazes me that middle class anarchists believe that if the current society is obliterated it will be a net gain for them because a more equitable society will replace it. Historically you're much more likely to end up with a some sort of Pol Pot style nightmare.
So you been to school For a year or two And you know youve seen it all In daddys car Thinkin youll go far Back east your type dont crawl
Play ethnicky jazz To parade your snazz On your five grand stereo Braggin that you know How the niggers feel cold And the slums got so much soul
Its time to taste what you most fear Right guard will not help you here Brace yourself, my dear
Its a holiday in cambodia Its tough, kid, but its life Its a holiday in cambodia Dont forget to pack a wife
Youre a star-belly sneech You suck like a leach You want everyone to act like you Kiss ass while you bitch So you can get rich But your boss gets richer off you
Well youll work harder With a gun in your back For a bowl of rice a day Slave for soldiers Till you starve Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one Now you can go where they get things done What you need, my son.
Is a holiday in cambodia Where people dress in black A holiday in cambodia Where youll kiss ass or crack
Pol pot, pol pot, pol pot, pol pot, etc.
And its a holiday in cambodia Where youll do what youre told A holiday in cambodia Where the slums got so much soul
Their Outlook Web Access application is decidedly more feature-filled for IE than it is for Firefox, for example.
That's because they added features to IE to speed up OWA. Including, interstingly enough XMLHttpRequest, the basis of Ajax. What's interesting is that Microsoft supported this in IE 5 in 1999 via an ActiveX control. Mozilla implemented it as a native object in 2002. Opera copied Mozilla's implementation in Opera 8 in 2005. Finally Microsoft added support for the Mozilla/Opera native object implementation in IE 7 in 2006.
The WWWC published a spec for XMLHTTPRequest in 2008.
So it's not true that Microsoft "don't follow standards". They actually support functionality before the painfully sluggish WWWC standardise it. So in fact do Mozilla, it's just that the WWWC end up making the Mozilla implementation the standard.
And they support OWA on Firefox, they just don't make as feature filled. That seems ok to me. It's not like they tie OWA to IE. I.e. you have an advantage of using IE with OWA, but they don't force you to.
When I was in Korea there was an English punk fanzine that run a phrasebook every now and again. One of the entries was "Dog eating savages!", clearly a handy phrase to know in Korean.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I dunno. But I do know that seeing all those American fighters made my Dad's friend realise that the UK wasn't likely to get invaded by the Nazis.
Taiwan is a democracy though, and China is a nasty police state.
I'm in Taiwan at the moment, and I've been to China a few times and they are as different as night and day.
At work Taiwanese people are always seem to be debating various solutions to technical problems whereas the Chinese seem to be in 'keep your head down, avoid trouble with the Powers That Be and try to bullshit/cheat outsiders' mode. Outside work the Taiwanese are very friendly and the Chinese are still pretty buttoned down.
Here everyone advocates the same 'keep your head down' approach when you're actually in China, otherwise bad things can happen to you
My point is that you can see that the Taiwanese get shit done, and the Chinese don't, once you get past the bullshit. I actually think all the obvious signs of development in China are as fake as the old collective farms and miraculous increases in steel production back in the 50's.
Now you could say that Taiwan industrialized before it was a democracy, but Taiwan pre 1989 and China now are not really comparable. China's a horrible fascist state, and Taiwan was more like one of those banana republics. Sure obvious dissidents were locked up, but I don't think it was as efficiently totalitarian as China has been since the revolution.
China and Japan are not really the same though. China builds electronics in big factories that are really indistinguishable from the old collective farms and communist era factories. I.e. they are good at getting lots of people to do a simple task. The advent of capitalism means that they make things for export and the old communist system of jobs for life, free healthcare and so on has been abolished.
One of my colleagues, who was born in China, told me that the factory workers are often not paid by the factory owner and if they demonstrate the local party will send goons to silence them. Most of the factory owners are foreign, usually Taiwanese and all the design is done outside China. Basically China is a massively feudal place.
Now Japan, even in the 1950's wasn't like this. The Japanese had good domestic engineering companies even in the 1930's. Most of them were bombed to bits in World War II, but Japan was a modern society 50 years before the fascists took over, and became one again quite quickly again after the Americans rebooted it. And post war it wasn't too surprising that they concentrated on consumer electronics now that America had taken over responsibility for Japan's security.
Now up until very recently for example, it was a very equal, well educated and essentially middle class society, a bit like an Asian version of Sweden. Equality has dropped a bit, but the essentially middle classness of the place hasn't changed. That's the sort of society you need to produce engineering companies. It's also very different to China, which has never really got past feudalism. Feudal societies aren't egalitarian enough to be good at designing consumer electronics, because that implies that (young, poor) engineers need to be able to tell the (old, rich) owners how to get things done. In a feudal society the orders flow in only one way, from the top down.
My Dad has a Nokia 2630. It's like the one you linked to, except it has Bluetooth. It cost about USD30-40 - supermarkets buy up things like this in bulk and sell them off at a deep discount. It's actually a remarkable piece of low cost engineering, and probably quite sufficient for the vast majority of people.
You shouldn't underestimate the military power of democracies though. My one of my Dad's colleagues at university worked at Los Alamos. Two American military guys, turned up at his house in England and said he was needed for a project related to the war effort. This was during the Battle of Britain. He said at that point the papers were talking about how the Germans had 1000 planes say, and the British had 800 but on the other hand the British were fighting at home so to speak which gave them an advantage.
Anyhow he flew to America and got a train cross country. As from the train he spotted airfields essentially full of American military aircraft, easily more than the numbers of English and German fighters combined.
Before he got to Los Alamos, he knew the US/UK would win the war.
America: Fuck yeah!
You have to admit that a lot of them had it coming or were unfortunate enough to be in the CEP of someone that did though.
Actually I think cellphone technology is the way to do this.
You'd take an ARM core and put it on one chip along with the peripherals like Wifi. For power use, AA batteries. Ram and Rom would be cheap mobile phone class multi chip package containing DRAM and flash. Actually mobile phones use a technique called POP, package on package where the MCP is stuck on top of the custom chip containing the CPU and peripherals. Keyboard is a chiclet one like mobile phones use. OS would be an ARM Linux variant. Most embedded ARM designs have USB and some are USB hosts. You could use that to connect to a USB flash disk which gives you expansion.
There are mobile phones with a small color display for around USD 20 build price. If you want to run Linux you'd need more RAM, but DRAM is cheap these days.
Actually the hardest bit is the display, even a netbook sized one is probably more expensive than you can afford. I expect this thing will be more like a graphing calculator/mobile phone form factor than a laptop one, just because of the cost of the display.
Of course, you could have a largish, cheap, but lousy mono STN display like the original laptops had. Of course in a few years a largish, cheap, but non lousy OLED display will be possible.
Like there was any alternative. Whatever Hitler does, it won't be as scary as the Jewish Communists who eat bread baked from blood of Aryan children
Oh and
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2006/07/john-mccain-on-evolution.html
"I think Americans should be exposed to every point of view," he said. "I happen to believe in evolution. ... I respect those who think the world was created in seven days. Should it be taught as a science class? Probably not."
If you post comments on sites like Indymedia debunking their paranoid worldview they allways get removed by a moderator. Conspiracy theorists are in practice much keener on censorship than the governments they rant against.
What's ironic about this is that it shows what a threat to a free society these people are. Now this sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself on the surface but consider. Marx had a very conspiratorial view of democracy, he claimed that it was manipulated by the bourgeoisie, hence the term 'bourgeois liberalism'. When Marxists came to power in Russia that gave them a theoretical justification for repressing the whole bourgeois class. Similarly Hitler thought that society was manipulated by the Jews and thus tried to wipe them out when he was in power.
Cliques of people that all believe in some powerful group manipulating society will always go after that group once they are in power.
Of course at the moment the conspiracy theorists are divided and are marginalised politically because most people simply laugh at them, but I'd say the government is right to be keeping tabs on them to make sure they stay that way.
I do like the idea of NSA types working in a "black tower". Very Tolkien.
Maybe it's partisan of me, but I've seen Olberman ranting like Bill O'Reilly and now I just tend to ignore what he says, just like I ignore Bill and Rush.
Plus as you say, this interview doesn't seem to contain anything particularly sensational to me. At this point I'd be very surprised if the NSA weren't searching wiretaps for keywords and data mining credit card records.
Look at this
http://www.slate.com/id/2146475/
To summarize, then: In February 1999 one of Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear goons paid a visit to Niger, but his identity was not noticed by Joseph Wilson, nor emphasized in his "report" to the CIA, nor mentioned at all in his later memoir. British intelligence picked up the news of the Zahawie visit from French and Italian sources and passed it on to Washington. Zahawie's denials of any background or knowledge, in respect of nuclear matters, are plainly laughable based on his past record, and he is still taken seriously enough as an expert on such matters to be invited (as part of a Jordanian delegation) to Hans Blix's commission on WMD. Two very senior and experienced diplomats in the field of WMDs and disarmament, both of them from countries by no means aligned with the Bush administration, have been kind enough to share with me their disquiet at his activities. What responsible American administration could possibly have viewed any of this with indifference?
The subsequent mysteriously forged documents claiming evidence of an actual deal made between Zahawie and Niger were circulated well after the first British report (and may have been intended to discredit it) and have been deemed irrelevant by two independent inquiries in London. The original British report carefully said that Saddam had "sought" uranium, not that he had acquired it. The possible significance of a later return visit - this time by a minister from Niger to Baghdad in 2001 - has not as yet been clarified by the work of the Iraq Survey Group.
This means that both pillars of the biggest scandal-mongering effort yet mounted by the "anti-war" movement - the twin allegations of a false story exposed by Wilson and then of a state-run vendetta undertaken against him and the lady wife who dispatched him on the mission - are in irretrievable ruins. The truth is the exact polar opposite. The original Niger connection was both authentic and important, and Wilson's utter failure to grasp it or even examine it was not enough to make Karl Rove even turn over in bed. All the work of the supposed "outing" was inadvertently performed by Wilson's admirer Robert Novak. Of course, one defends the Bush administration at one's own peril. Thanks largely to Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, our incompetent and divided government grew so nervous as to disown the words that appeared in the 2003 State of the Union address. But the facts are still the facts, and it is high time that they received one-millionth of the attention that the "Plamegate" farce has garnered.
Ha ha, you have been meta trolled.
Bios do decompress themselves, at least for the menus. Maybe the SATA locking code would be uncompressed, I'm not sure.
I still think you're underestimating the complexity of finding the code in the Bios and patching it. A human could do it, automating the process is not so trivial. There are after all a lot of ways to send a command to a drive, even a drive one one interface (there are two at the moment, AHCI for native SATA and ATA for IDE and SATA in emulation mode). If you asked two people to do it, they would each produce slightly different code and hacking it out would require a different set of bytes being patched.
If you just scan for the command byte, you'd probably get a lot of hits. Change 'em all and you'll brick the machine.
Awdflash is updated regularly, according to this guy
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/jefn/bootblock.html
Always ensure that you use the correct version of Awdflash.exe! Phoenix/Award regularly updates Awdflash.exe program to support ever-changing hardware.
See, all boards with an Award Bios can't be flashed in the exact same way.
You couldn't use this in malware since you need to boot into Dos.
Asus have a Bios update tool which runs unders Windows which they make sure works on all their boards
http://support.asus.com/technicaldocuments/technicaldocuments_content.aspx?no=714
It's not like all of their boards use the same instructions to do the update though. An update tool needs to have a driver, essentially for each board it supports. That's the reason awdflash and the Windows Bios flash tools often have to be updated when they launch a new board.
And you have to support AMI Bioses too.
Actually someone tried this before
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH#Virus_specifics
CIH spreads under the Portable Executable file format under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME. CIH does not spread under Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista. Non Microsoft operating systems are not affected. CIH infects Portable Executable files by splitting the bulk of its code into small slivers inserted into the inter-section gaps commonly seen in PE files, and writing a small re-assembly routine and table of its own code segments' locations into unused space in the tail of the PE header. This earned CIH another name, "Spacefiller". The size of the virus is around 1 kilobyte, but due to its novel multiple-cavity infection method, infected files do not grow at all. It uses methods of jumping from processor ring 3 to 0 to hook system calls.
The payload, which is considered extremely dangerous, first involves the virus overwriting the first megabyte (1024KB) of the hard drive with zeroes, beginning at sector 0. This deletes the contents of the partition table, and may cause the machine to hang.
The second payload tries to write to the Flash BIOS. Due to what may be an unintended feature of this code, BIOSes that can be successfully written to by the virus have critical boot-time code replaced with junk. This routine only works on some machines. Much emphasis has been put on machines with motherboards based on the Intel 430TX chipset, but by far the most important variable in CIH's success in writing to a machine's BIOS is the type of Flash ROM chip in the machine. Different Flash ROM chips (or chip families) have different write-enable routines specific to those chips. CIH makes no attempt to test for the Flash ROM type in its victim machines, and has only one write-enable sequence.
Note it only worked in 16 bit Windows. Now the 430TX chipset looks like it has the Bios connected to the ISA bus.
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/290562.pdf
It mentions a hardware write
Environmentally light bulbs are a process. The bulbs are released. Some people, most in fact have insufficiently sensitive eyes. They will fall down the stairs, die and fail to breed. Over the millenia humans will evolve big ass eyes like this tarsier
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/4502/ohnoab6.jpg
Which reminds me of a joke
Q) How many envirommentalists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A) Do you know how much energy is wasted by lighting every year? Polar bears are drowning because of selfish people like you!
Hmm, let's see. You said.
I went to Camodia(sic) and it wasn't anything like Jello Biafra's song ... Overall it was a very disappointing experience
Jello Biafra's song was about life under a government that killed 25% of the population of the country. You presumably didn't visit the country when Pol Pot was in power since it was one big work camp. Actually even if you had have done so then, they would probably have assigned you a minder and made sure you didn't see anything too nasty happening, rather like the North Koreans did during the 90's famine, or the North Vietnamese did when they huge numbers of South Vietnames off to a camps after they annexed South Vietnam in 1975. Actually come to think of it all murderous totalitarian regimes tend to be a bit wary of showing tourists their concentration camps, for some reason.
So if you go on holidays looking to see lots of people being killed for some twisted reason, you will most likely be disappointed. Still you can always jack off to pictures of the concentration camps the Allies liberated, which are uncensored, you sick fuck.
Such a hack would be easy for a weekend video game cracker to create.
I, for one, don't like this spec one bit.
They'd have to do that for each Bios though. You're need to decompress the Bios (Bios specific algorithm), find the ATA code, patch it, fix any checksums, recompress the Bios and then reflash it.
Reflashing is tricky to do on an arbitary machine too because you need to do it for chipset - the flash chip programming algorithm depends on the flash chip used and the io ports to turn on Vpp are depend on motherboard chipset.
And if people started to do that, the motherboard vendors would just build in some sort of anti reprogramming protection. Not hard to do really, you just make sure that Vpp, the flash programming voltage, is turned off until some motherboard model specific password is written to a hardware register. Or the Bios vendors could have a secure Bios where some code in an OTP (One time programmable flash block) could decompress code from reprogammable flash blocks and verify a signature before starting it. This is a hard thing to hack. The trusted code contains a public key and knows how to verify a signature. The private key used to generate a signature is kept secret by the motherboard vendor.
Now it's not really clear how secure various Bioses are. Some desktop motherboards have hardware jumpers to disable Vpp in hardware. I don't know of any laptops that do this, but the chipset might implement security.
Actually there's a deeper problem. The chipset is designed to allow you to use one physical flash chip for both the system and video Bios. Each motherboard ODM probably does the packing in a slightly different way. Hell, if they just pack one image after another and the images are different sizes depending on version, you'd need to figure that out too. You could work out which bits of flash are system bios and which are video by reading the chipset registers of course, but then you'd have to write code for all possible chipsets.
Seriously, this is much harder than you think, even if there is absolutely no security implemented. The fundamental problem is that writing to the Bios is not standardised. The motherboard ODM will take a Bios from Award or Phoenix as a developers kit which is a mixture of source and object code, add some code from the chipset vendor to initialize the chipset, do the same thing with the video Bios code from the GPU vendor, and build an image from that. They'll also write a Bios flasher utility. E.g. the Asus one won't work on a Acer. Hell the Asus one might be model specific too. ODMs will change flash chip vendor every so often if they can strike a good deal.
Each combination of laptop model, Bios version, chipset, flash chip and ODM is a different test case.
Reddit.com doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as digg. Actually for technical stuff it's quite a bit more tolerable than slashdot. Fanboys seem to have spammed the politics section to death though.
Second they said it produced explosive winds, up to 5 km/s. (Or "fucking unbelievably fast" in imperial units;) Because the air heats from 500 degrees to 1200 degrees on the hot side within hours, and expands, rushing towards the colder side.
The wind speed is higher than the conditions at the hypocenter when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#The_bombing_2
The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. The explosion generated heat estimated at 3,900 degrees Celsius (7,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and winds that were estimated at 1005 km/h (624 mph).
If there are any aliens on that planet they must be badass shitkicking sons of bitches. Ideal recruits for my Imperial Guard.
You could still have a mix of OSs. E.g some Linux, some Windows, different OS versions and so on.
Very true. It amazes me that middle class anarchists believe that if the current society is obliterated it will be a net gain for them because a more equitable society will replace it. Historically you're much more likely to end up with a some sort of Pol Pot style nightmare.
As Jello Biafra put it in Holiday in Cambodia
So you been to school
For a year or two
And you know youve seen it all
In daddys car
Thinkin youll go far
Back east your type dont crawl
Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin that you know
How the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul
Its time to taste what you most fear
Right guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear
Its a holiday in cambodia
Its tough, kid, but its life
Its a holiday in cambodia
Dont forget to pack a wife
Youre a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you
Well youll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son.
Is a holiday in cambodia
Where people dress in black
A holiday in cambodia
Where youll kiss ass or crack
Pol pot, pol pot, pol pot, pol pot, etc.
And its a holiday in cambodia
Where youll do what youre told
A holiday in cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul
So if someone say nuked the Fannie Mae servers then millions of people would get free homes?
Their Outlook Web Access application is decidedly more feature-filled for IE than it is for Firefox, for example.
That's because they added features to IE to speed up OWA. Including, interstingly enough XMLHttpRequest, the basis of Ajax. What's interesting is that Microsoft supported this in IE 5 in 1999 via an ActiveX control. Mozilla implemented it as a native object in 2002. Opera copied Mozilla's implementation in Opera 8 in 2005. Finally Microsoft added support for the Mozilla/Opera native object implementation in IE 7 in 2006.
The WWWC published a spec for XMLHTTPRequest in 2008.
So it's not true that Microsoft "don't follow standards". They actually support functionality before the painfully sluggish WWWC standardise it. So in fact do Mozilla, it's just that the WWWC end up making the Mozilla implementation the standard.
And they support OWA on Firefox, they just don't make as feature filled. That seems ok to me. It's not like they tie OWA to IE. I.e. you have an advantage of using IE with OWA, but they don't force you to.
SHOW, HO! (6) Anagram: an onomatopoeic word, the sound something makes as it passes rapidly over your head
http://www.crossword-dictionary.com/anagram.asp?wrd=show+ho
No need for that. You can subscribe to this RSS feed
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/rss.xml
This is funny too
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/robots.txt
When I was in Korea there was an English punk fanzine that run a phrasebook every now and again. One of the entries was "Dog eating savages!", clearly a handy phrase to know in Korean.