Heh. We used to write fully functional terminal programs in less than 10k. Many BIOS have capacities of 256k, 512k, or even 1meg. There's more than enough extra room to plant the infrastructure to have a fully functional communication program with Xterm, Yterm, or Punter protocol transfer.
The mods can hit me offtopic all they like but the fact is that when a Brigadier General makes a statement which, in context, exposes his view that we'll be in Iraq for "at least several more years", you know the domestic monitoring situation will continue to get worse. Not better. And this will happen globally. Not just in the US.
It's not even about the OS anymore. Take my FIC PA-2013 mobo. There are LM75 sensors under the CPU chip. They're there. They're labelled on the mobo. They do not work. The mobo user's manual has a screenshot of a temperature settings page. I've never ever ever seen it on my system. The wires are there but the consumer released BIOS simply does not put the wires together.
People can say that their OS does not rely on BIOS all they like. The fact is that there are some things which require the right bits to be set to "1" rather than "0" to be accessible.
Last night on CNN... David Hobbs? (name? heck if I care who exactly it was) was interviewing a brigadier general on the latest reports that the US military is stretched too thin. I quote (paraphrase. it was last night) the brigadier general (maybe searching CNN for the reports of 26-Jan-06 will help with the name):
"Our men and women in Iraq will be able to maintain and win the war for at least several more years".
So much for getting out of the war anytime soon. Is anyone else sick and tired of living in a nation which is constantly at war with someone/something? I mean... how much more can your pocketbook take?
What frightened me most was when I found out that my monitor has 64kb of writeable memory--most monitors do. It doesn't take 64kb to save skew/size/color settings. Can you imagine being rooted by X accessing your monitor?
It's truly enlightening when you realize that your computer, most likely, is compromised in some form or another. It changes your point of view for everything that you do on the 'net.
You want to talk about broken hardware? I have an FIC PA-2013 mobo which has LM75 sensors under the CPU. They're labelled on the mobo. The sensor is there. But there never was a BIOS released which puts the wires together and makes them accessible to the rest of the system.
If you look in the user's manual there are screenshots of the BIOS configuration page showing the temperatures... that must've been a development screenshot because it was never made available to consumers.
One of the reasons why BIOS is flashable is to help the manufacturers. Oftentimes they have the hardware but they don't have the code written yet. Take the Dell D800 laptops for example. When they first shipped the external audio and S-video ports were nonfunctional because they hadn't written the software to put the wires together internally yet. It wasn't until rev. A13, maybe A14, of their BIOS that these ports were enabled. The D800 that I was privy to shipped with BIOS rev. A11.
You've really hit the nail on the head. Consider the state of consumer level security. Cookies? Does anyone really believe that cookies adhere to their "personally identifiable information" policy? Why is there no option to save your list of cookie sites? With respect to malware and viruses: Does everyone truly believe that the worst viruses do nothing more than propagate as proof of concept?
Consumer level security is a game of pointing the people to the right while stealing their wallet from the left. I saw proof of concept BIOS trojans as early as '99. You can't tell me that no one has been using them.
I'm glad people in the mainstream are beginning to notice this. I saw proof of concept BIOS trojan code as early as '99. It honestly changed my view of the internet, law enforcement, and all of society. While everyone else is busy labelling each other,"Paranoid conspiracy theorist" I've been sitting back thinking,"You dumbass. He's probably right." In all reality the NSA doesn't need wiretaps. If they really wanted you they'd have MS serve up a specially crafted banner ad when you check your Hotmail.
Real malware doesn't let itself be known. It sits in the background to aid the people watching you.
He's also the author of a well-known book on rootkits. It's a pretty good read. Maybe you should revise your ill-informed personal opinion.
He doesn't just write rootkits. He teaches seminars on how to write them. He's not a blackhat any more than the this guy. I guess that puts you on par with Oracle.
There's this theory that, in monetary terms, things are worth what people will actually pay for them, not what some anonymous schmoe thinks they "ought" to be worth.
That's the same theory that allows sweatshop labor, indentured servitude, and exploitation of children.
What we need is a legal precedent set to establish that, yes, a computer belongs solely to the person who shelled out the cash for it. No, it does not belong, in whole, part, or by EULA, to any idiot who manages to package their badware with some stupid search toolbar, screensaver, or desktop theme.
EULA. It's highly likely that they specifically disclaim any responsibility for anything related to the functionality or security of their product. It is the EULA which allows the maker of a flawed product to point the evil eye towards anyone who would have the audacity to point out the flaws.
Heh. I agree but... Have you read the EULA recently? I'm sure Oracle specifically disclaims any responsibility for anything that their software does, doesn't, might, or might not do.
This is precisely why EULAs were started--to shield commercial businesses from liability for producing (often knowingly) a seriously flawed product. EULAs are the devil.
The real solution has little to do with how many parties we have.
The real solution is to require the politicians to stick to the rules that bind them. It doesn't matter if we have one, two, three, or ten parties. Our politicians continually convince themselves that a Congressional interpretation or law--backed by a ruling passed by judges with obvious socio, political, and economic assocations--carries authority over the document which empowers them in the first place.
If you could rewrite the rules of Monopoly on the fly to suit your needs would it be possible not to win?
The maxim is stupid and evil. Republicans are evil: they are more than happy to use their political power to benefit themselves and their associates. Democrats are stupid: they live in a fantasy world where they can use their political power without being seduced by greed.
Where there are people who need to travel or engage in commerce there will always be roads built. We don't need government to accomplish this task. We do need an organized and coordinated effort but the government has proven in many ways that their involvement in infrastructure is an excuse to cash in on the resulting graft.
As a college freshman I took a World Politics class. The final paper was an assigned topic and mine was NAFTA. At the time NAFTA had not yet been passed. I knew that the prof was pro-NAFTA so I began writing the paper pro-NAFTA. I personally didn't know enough to make an informed decision one way or another. As I conducted research at the library, though, I found the overwhelming majority of information was anti-NAFTA. So, five or ten pages into it, I rewrote it all from scratch and made it a 30 page anti-NAFTA document.
The paper was returned with a C with the explanation that all of my points were a "straw man" which could easily be knocked down. I've since learned that, when debating potential disadvantages of any not yet implemented plan, just about anything can be decried as a straw man. I'd like to say that my paper was correct in predicting that NAFTA would be an impotent flop, at best, and a big corporate handout, at worst. It may be (if I still had it around) but, from the other side of the fence, you don't hear anyone on the street echoing the professor's assertion that NAFTA would revolutionize trade in the Americas, create tens of thousands of jobs, and lower prices for all consumer goods which are traded in the Americas. Mainly NAFTA was something which came and went like any other law which was flavor-of-the-day for the newspapers.
The fact is that professors do let their personal slants and opinions creep into their lectures and that it does affect grading. In my case I got shafted, not because I didn't agree with the prof, but because there simply wasn't enough reliable evidence to back his point of view--even though my intent was to fall in line with him. My situation was not extreme (I still scored a B+ in the class) but, even if it had been, I wasn't about to try and lodge a complaint over it. The professor wasn't tenured at the time but it was quite apparent that he was well liked by his colleagues. Attempting to lodge a complaint against him would've been a fast track to getting the cold shoulder from all other professors and maybe even a fast track out of the school.
I can't say that I agree with the approach that this alumnus is taking but the problem does exist.
Lack of complaints doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. Consider the mechanisms of retaliation and the natural resistance from the examining board.
I can most easily draw a parallel with the corporate world: as a low-level employee, attempting to lodge a complaint against your manager with a higher manager or with HR is equivalent to political, and possibly career, suicide unless the person you're complaining about has already been targeted by their superiors (in which case the complaint is a pawn in someone else's game). If you try to complain about someone in a relatively comfortable position of political office power, though, you'd be better off turning in a resignation.
what you are talking about is an unenforceable contract enacted by the university for its own benefit without providing consideration to the student
I'm not going to spend the night searching for actual links but, in many cases, the contract enacted by the university for its own benefit is seen, legally, to be the same as an employment agreement: the law no longer applies the moment you sign the line. I'm not saying its right. I'm saying that's how it is. We're all free to draw our conclusions about the motivations behind the courts and attorneys who support it.
Considerations for WiFi access points, choice of operating systems, use of cellular telephones, getting satellite TV in a dorm room, and the selective acceptance of SIGs into the official student governing body come to mind as examples.
I had no problem with the arguments. My point of contention was that the language used fits the topic of discussion perfectly.
Objective discourse is lost the moment jargon and name-calling begins. "Neoconservative fetishists" is a combination of jargon (neoconservative) and name-calling (fetishists). The proper objective way to state the poster's line would be "Many people seeking to support McCarthy's actions are throwing this around nowadays as though it were a foregone conclusion." The use of "neoconservative fetishists" is obvious flamebait.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. We used to write fully functional terminal programs in less than 10k. Many BIOS have capacities of 256k, 512k, or even 1meg. There's more than enough extra room to plant the infrastructure to have a fully functional communication program with Xterm, Yterm, or Punter protocol transfer.
The mods can hit me offtopic all they like but the fact is that when a Brigadier General makes a statement which, in context, exposes his view that we'll be in Iraq for "at least several more years", you know the domestic monitoring situation will continue to get worse. Not better. And this will happen globally. Not just in the US.
It's not even about the OS anymore. Take my FIC PA-2013 mobo. There are LM75 sensors under the CPU chip. They're there. They're labelled on the mobo. They do not work. The mobo user's manual has a screenshot of a temperature settings page. I've never ever ever seen it on my system. The wires are there but the consumer released BIOS simply does not put the wires together.
People can say that their OS does not rely on BIOS all they like. The fact is that there are some things which require the right bits to be set to "1" rather than "0" to be accessible.
Last night on CNN... David Hobbs? (name? heck if I care who exactly it was) was interviewing a brigadier general on the latest reports that the US military is stretched too thin. I quote (paraphrase. it was last night) the brigadier general (maybe searching CNN for the reports of 26-Jan-06 will help with the name):
"Our men and women in Iraq will be able to maintain and win the war for at least several more years".
So much for getting out of the war anytime soon. Is anyone else sick and tired of living in a nation which is constantly at war with someone/something? I mean... how much more can your pocketbook take?
What frightened me most was when I found out that my monitor has 64kb of writeable memory--most monitors do. It doesn't take 64kb to save skew/size/color settings. Can you imagine being rooted by X accessing your monitor?
It's truly enlightening when you realize that your computer, most likely, is compromised in some form or another. It changes your point of view for everything that you do on the 'net.
You want to talk about broken hardware? I have an FIC PA-2013 mobo which has LM75 sensors under the CPU. They're labelled on the mobo. The sensor is there. But there never was a BIOS released which puts the wires together and makes them accessible to the rest of the system.
If you look in the user's manual there are screenshots of the BIOS configuration page showing the temperatures... that must've been a development screenshot because it was never made available to consumers.
One of the reasons why BIOS is flashable is to help the manufacturers. Oftentimes they have the hardware but they don't have the code written yet. Take the Dell D800 laptops for example. When they first shipped the external audio and S-video ports were nonfunctional because they hadn't written the software to put the wires together internally yet. It wasn't until rev. A13, maybe A14, of their BIOS that these ports were enabled. The D800 that I was privy to shipped with BIOS rev. A11.
You've really hit the nail on the head. Consider the state of consumer level security. Cookies? Does anyone really believe that cookies adhere to their "personally identifiable information" policy? Why is there no option to save your list of cookie sites? With respect to malware and viruses: Does everyone truly believe that the worst viruses do nothing more than propagate as proof of concept?
Consumer level security is a game of pointing the people to the right while stealing their wallet from the left. I saw proof of concept BIOS trojans as early as '99. You can't tell me that no one has been using them.
I'm glad people in the mainstream are beginning to notice this. I saw proof of concept BIOS trojan code as early as '99. It honestly changed my view of the internet, law enforcement, and all of society. While everyone else is busy labelling each other,"Paranoid conspiracy theorist" I've been sitting back thinking,"You dumbass. He's probably right." In all reality the NSA doesn't need wiretaps. If they really wanted you they'd have MS serve up a specially crafted banner ad when you check your Hotmail.
Real malware doesn't let itself be known. It sits in the background to aid the people watching you.
He's also the author of a well-known book on rootkits. It's a pretty good read. Maybe you should revise your ill-informed personal opinion.
He doesn't just write rootkits. He teaches seminars on how to write them. He's not a blackhat any more than the this guy. I guess that puts you on par with Oracle.
Funny you say that and you plug a DNS hosting company in your sig. Conflict of interest? Holy cats that's so transparent.
What we need is a legal precedent set to establish that, yes, a computer belongs solely to the person who shelled out the cash for it. No, it does not belong, in whole, part, or by EULA, to any idiot who manages to package their badware with some stupid search toolbar, screensaver, or desktop theme.
That was the first thing I thought about, too, but I couldn't remember where I had seen it. Thanks for posting the link. :)
I smell a conspiracy to drive up the prices of computer hardware.
EULA. It's highly likely that they specifically disclaim any responsibility for anything related to the functionality or security of their product. It is the EULA which allows the maker of a flawed product to point the evil eye towards anyone who would have the audacity to point out the flaws.
EULAs must die.
Heh. I agree but... Have you read the EULA recently? I'm sure Oracle specifically disclaims any responsibility for anything that their software does, doesn't, might, or might not do.
This is precisely why EULAs were started--to shield commercial businesses from liability for producing (often knowingly) a seriously flawed product. EULAs are the devil.
Stewie rules. He's a modern day edition of The Brain (from Pinky and The Brain) without all the bumbling.
In reality, yes. In a courtroom, however...
I'm inclined to be suspicious of the motives behind this release as well.
The real solution has little to do with how many parties we have.
The real solution is to require the politicians to stick to the rules that bind them. It doesn't matter if we have one, two, three, or ten parties. Our politicians continually convince themselves that a Congressional interpretation or law--backed by a ruling passed by judges with obvious socio, political, and economic assocations--carries authority over the document which empowers them in the first place.
If you could rewrite the rules of Monopoly on the fly to suit your needs would it be possible not to win?
s/selfish/evil/g
The maxim is stupid and evil. Republicans are evil: they are more than happy to use their political power to benefit themselves and their associates. Democrats are stupid: they live in a fantasy world where they can use their political power without being seduced by greed.
Where there are people who need to travel or engage in commerce there will always be roads built. We don't need government to accomplish this task. We do need an organized and coordinated effort but the government has proven in many ways that their involvement in infrastructure is an excuse to cash in on the resulting graft.
As a college freshman I took a World Politics class. The final paper was an assigned topic and mine was NAFTA. At the time NAFTA had not yet been passed. I knew that the prof was pro-NAFTA so I began writing the paper pro-NAFTA. I personally didn't know enough to make an informed decision one way or another. As I conducted research at the library, though, I found the overwhelming majority of information was anti-NAFTA. So, five or ten pages into it, I rewrote it all from scratch and made it a 30 page anti-NAFTA document.
The paper was returned with a C with the explanation that all of my points were a "straw man" which could easily be knocked down. I've since learned that, when debating potential disadvantages of any not yet implemented plan, just about anything can be decried as a straw man. I'd like to say that my paper was correct in predicting that NAFTA would be an impotent flop, at best, and a big corporate handout, at worst. It may be (if I still had it around) but, from the other side of the fence, you don't hear anyone on the street echoing the professor's assertion that NAFTA would revolutionize trade in the Americas, create tens of thousands of jobs, and lower prices for all consumer goods which are traded in the Americas. Mainly NAFTA was something which came and went like any other law which was flavor-of-the-day for the newspapers.
The fact is that professors do let their personal slants and opinions creep into their lectures and that it does affect grading. In my case I got shafted, not because I didn't agree with the prof, but because there simply wasn't enough reliable evidence to back his point of view--even though my intent was to fall in line with him. My situation was not extreme (I still scored a B+ in the class) but, even if it had been, I wasn't about to try and lodge a complaint over it. The professor wasn't tenured at the time but it was quite apparent that he was well liked by his colleagues. Attempting to lodge a complaint against him would've been a fast track to getting the cold shoulder from all other professors and maybe even a fast track out of the school.
I can't say that I agree with the approach that this alumnus is taking but the problem does exist.
Lack of complaints doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. Consider the mechanisms of retaliation and the natural resistance from the examining board.
I can most easily draw a parallel with the corporate world: as a low-level employee, attempting to lodge a complaint against your manager with a higher manager or with HR is equivalent to political, and possibly career, suicide unless the person you're complaining about has already been targeted by their superiors (in which case the complaint is a pawn in someone else's game). If you try to complain about someone in a relatively comfortable position of political office power, though, you'd be better off turning in a resignation.
Considerations for WiFi access points, choice of operating systems, use of cellular telephones, getting satellite TV in a dorm room, and the selective acceptance of SIGs into the official student governing body come to mind as examples.
I had no problem with the arguments. My point of contention was that the language used fits the topic of discussion perfectly.
Objective discourse is lost the moment jargon and name-calling begins. "Neoconservative fetishists" is a combination of jargon (neoconservative) and name-calling (fetishists). The proper objective way to state the poster's line would be "Many people seeking to support McCarthy's actions are throwing this around nowadays as though it were a foregone conclusion." The use of "neoconservative fetishists" is obvious flamebait.