Use iTunes, set disk burning preferences to "data disk", select your whole library, click on "Burn" and make sure you have a small pile of DVDs available. If you keep your iTunes library outside your home directory, most likely your home directory is less than a DVD, so that is no problem either.
'' The GPL has its problems when a GPLed application has a plugin functionality, because then the plugins have to be GPLed, too, or else they cannot be used. ''
I think you are wrong.
The plugin on its own would be rather useless, but as long as you distribute it without the GPLed application, and as long as it doesn't contain GPLed code, it can be distributed under any license that the copyright holder wishes to use. Now an end user puts together the GPLed application and the plugin, thus creating a derivative work of both. We may assume that the plugin allows creation of the derivative work (otherwise it would be quite pointless), and the GPLed application definitely allows you to create derivative works without any obligation as long as the derivative work isn't distributed.
A study by Hans Eysenck during World War II in the British arms industry, where people had some real good motivation to work long hours, showed that workers working 48 hours a week had higher productivity than workers working 57 hours a week. And that was not "productivity per work hour", it was absolute productivity. They did more work in 48 hours than in 57 hours.
'' Holy crap. Apple consider 60 hours a week normal? ''
We don't know what Apple considers normal. We know that Apple is willing to interfere with the business of a supplier if that supplier makes it workforce work more than 60 hours a week. Next time you have to go to a hospital, ask the doctor who is treating you how many hours a week he or she is working, just to get a bit of perspective. Or maybe you have a look on the internet how many hours employees at EA have been working to supply you with the latest video games.
Most importantly, instead of reading the BBC page (or without bothering to read anything), go to the Apple website where you find Apple's report that this is all based on: You will find that the highest number of complaints by employees is against the fact that sometimes there isn't enough overtime!
'' Wouldn't it be smart of Apple to pay these guys a consulting fee to spend a few days with their networking geeks and see if A) they can replicate it on an Airport card, and B) if there's a way to patch the problem, if it exists, in the OS? The hackers get paid, Apple patches a potential security flaw... everybody wins. ''
That is assuming these guys actually _have_ found a flaw.
What I am sure Apple has done is to have someone check each single line of the code to see if there are any dangers. Actually, the best method would be: Programmer A takes the source code, and adds ten bugs. Programmer B, who hasn't written the code, checks it. Afterwards you can see how many of the ten artificial bugs and how many other problems have been found.
'' Just giving 20 mins to this story get "FUD" tag and we go -1 levels by some Mac zealot moderator;) ''
I think there should be an automatic moderation to -2 levels for any post that predicts "I will be moderated down because some zealots don't like my opinion".
'' It seems pretty ridiculous to say "We guarantee our OS is secure [unless you use hardware that wasn't made by us]." Well, then the OS isn't secure. If 3rd-party drivers can break your security, it wasn't really there to begin with, now was it? ''
The problem with this argument is that we have no idea what the "exploit" actually was (if there was any; I mean these guys have been caught lying, so why would you believe anything? )
My suspicion is that the WiFi card + driver can be convinced to set up a wireless connection from the outside, without being told so by the user. Now you might have set up your computer in a way that is inherently insecure, under the assumption that it is not connected to anything and therefore nothing can happen. If this computer then enters into a connection without being told to do so, you have a problem (the user knew all the time that a connection was dangerous, but had no intention to set up any connections). Something like this would be an "attack" that would work against any operating system, but it would be just an exploit of user stupidity, nothing else.
'' Anyone who thought about it for more than a second or two would have realised that it was never going to be a vulnerability in the default MacBook Pro hardware or drivers. If it wasn't, why would they need to introduce a third-party wireless adapter at all? ''
Remember that when the "researchers" were confronted with this very reasonable argument, they claimed that they didn't demonstrate their "exploit" with the standard hardware because (as they claimed) "Apple had leaned on them". At that time I thought: If I was in that position, and Apple "leaned" on me, they could do as much leaning as they wanted, I would demonstrate that I can crack a standard Macintosh, as sold to customers. On the other hand, if Apple "leaned" on me by waving huge amounts of banknotes at me, I would have taken the money; and I wouldn't have used a Macintosh at all, but would have showed how vulnerable Windows is!
We were told that all Macs are vulnerable. And not only all Macs, but also all Linux machines, and all Windows machines. It seems this was not the case. Apparently there is no exploit at all against a bog standard Macbook with built-in wireless, and that covers about 99.999 percent. Using an external card was essential to the exploit, the claimed "pressure from Apple" was just made up. Remember, these guys _did_ claim that a Macintosh with built-in wireless adapter was vulnerable, and they didn't demonstrate that because of pressure from Apple! I didn't believe it then, nobody should have ever believed it without evidence, and now they have been caught with their lies.
Shame on everyone who reported it without checking the facts.
'' Pretty funny about the primary concern being vibration. My company had a person check their laptop on a flight a few years back, and SURPRISE it never appeared at the other end of the flight. ''
One eBay Powerseller with more than twelve thousand happy customers was the wife of a Heathrow baggage handler.
'' Seriously, though. $150 a year for your OS. It seems a bit shady to me. Do you apple fans have plans to skip eve/odd releases or something? ''
First, it is $129. Second, it is $99.50 if you have two Macs at your home (or one at home, and one kid at university), down to $40 if you have five Macs. And, of course, every Macintosh user has the choice to upgrade as often as Windows users do - last time in 2001, I think, the next time in 2007. Which means going straight from MacOS 9 to Leopard.
You can use mach_absolute_time which returns time since the machine was started in 64 bit integer nanoseconds (derived from rdtsc or mftb/mftbu depending on the machine), that gives you time information for about 100 years (the 64 bit would be enough for 600 or 700 years, but rdtsc will overflow after about 100 years). The filesystem uses 64 bit integers with 48 bit for seconds, and 16 bit for fractions. That should last for about 2000 years.
'' In the instance: d = log10(0.0001);
i = (int)d; the microsoft compiler generates the following code: ''
Doesn't really matter what code which compiler produced; the programmer should be shot on sight.
The floating-point number 0.0001 cannot possibly be equal to the real number 0.0001, it will necessarily be either a little bit smaller or a little bit larger.
d = log10 (0.0001) will set d to a value which may be coincidence be equal to 4.0, or may be slightly larger, or slightly smaller. Which one depends on the exact details of how the log10 function is implemented and the floating point format used, and it is in no way defined by the C language.
i = (int) d will therefore set i to -3 or -4, and which one is completely unspecified by the C language. An implementation that sets i to -3 is not wrong, it just exposes the stupidity of the programmer.
'' How does it hurt google for it's name to used as a verb? ''
Same as it hurt Xerox that their name was used as a verb. Once it becomes part of the language, it can lose its trademark status. Like Xerox, Google doesn't really care if you use the word, they are just legally obliged to send you a threatening letter.
'' I remember an old question from grad school: Why might you add a bunch of floating point numbers starting with the smallest? ''
There are to ways to get higher precision:
1. Instead of adding the numbers starting with the smallest, you continuously add the two smallest numbers, then put the result back into the list of numbers to be added. For example if you add 2^20 numbers, all around 1, you'll have 2^19 sums around 2, 2^18 sums around 4, 2^17 sums around 8 etc. The average result is only 20, therefore the average rounding error is quite small. By adding all numbers sequentially, you would on the average get a result of 2^19, so much higher rounding error.
2. Implement double precision addition: If x >= y >= 0, and you calculate s = x + y, then you get the exact error by calculating (s - x) - y if all operations are performed with the same precision. So all you need to do is add up the values and add up the rounding errors separately. For best results, combine both methods.
'' Now as Intel has shown, given enough efforts and money even x86 the poorest CISC ISA ever (VAX ISA was much nicer than x86 ISA: more registers, orthogonal design) can be competitive and sofware compatibility makes the rest.. ''
This was heavily discussed a while ago on comp.arch. Conclusion: VAX instruction set was an absolute nightmare for hardware designers; while today the problem of making x86 fast in spite of the instruction set is basically solved, making a VAX fast would have taken superhuman efforts.
''First, why do people in the US have to fight for legal fees when they win a lawsuit? When will it become an automatic part of american civil law? Responsibility for all legal fees when a case is lost will certainly put the brakes on the litigious culture of the US and all its frivolous lawsuits.''
It works quite similar to that in German courts. First of all, the court decides how much money is argued about (if I say I want you to pay $1 mil, then we argue about $1 mil). Then he takes a chart, which says: For a one million dollar case, plaintiffs lawyers can charge $20000, defendant lawyers can charge $20000, court charges $20000 (actual numbers could be different). You can't stretch out a case infinitely because the judge won't let you create three years work for $20000. In the end, the court decides who was guilty and what has to be paid. Now say you wanted $1000000, and the judge says that you win, but the million dollar was nonsense, you get only 10000. Since I have to pay one percent of what you demanded, I also pay one percent of the court cost, one percent of your lawyer, one percent of my lawyer, and you pay the rest. Obviously people know that, so they don't try to get unreasonable amounts. If you win the case as a defendant, you pay nothing, but you might end up paying little even if you lose. And the lawyer cost is limited.
Still bollocks. The articles that you quote are again just repeating the same stuff, from the same source, without any attempt of verification. It doesn't matter how many publications repeat it, all we have is an unverified claim.
And all this has no other source than the word of the so-called hackers involved. There is no evidence whatsoever that they ever talked to Apple except that they claim they did. There is no evidence whatsoever that Airport is vulnerable except that they claim it is.
''This is not a simple matter of exploiting a serivce. The machine might does not even need any publicly accessible services for this attack to be effective.'' That is the claim being made, and it would be frightening if true. We have not seen any reliable evidence of this so far.
''We all know that wireless cards require soft firmware and drivers in the OS these days. The point is that it's possible to exploit the drivers with specially crafted packets and make the OS run arbitrary code that it thinks is the Wireless driver.'' That is the claim that has been made. We have not seen any reliable evidence of this so far. I think it would be quite easy to own a Macintosh running MacOS X if you use an external card needing a driver, and you install your own, specially crafted driver on the machine that will do exactly what you want. We have no evidence that this works when using the preinstalled Apple driver or the manufacturer's driver for the card.
''Running code at the level of the OS brings with it full control over the machine. The OS trusts the drivers 100% on almost every system I've used. This means your newly running code can take full control of the machine, and probably even download more code, sniff on you, etc. '' May be true, but there is no evidence that you can take control of a driver as it was claimed.
''It should be possible to exploit this attack even if the machine is connected to a trusted network. All you need to do is send it packets on that network (or pretend to be on that network).'' And possibly go to the machine you want to exploit first with a CD in your hand, and install your replacement drivers.
''The demo might have been vague, but it still points out some serious flaws with wireless systems on modern operating systems - anyone can send you packets and the OS trusts the software processing those packets 100%...'' The demo may have been vague because it was a hoax. So far this seems much more probable to me.
Your post is very misleading. You write that "it still worked on the macbook's internal airport card" with a reference to the highly respected arstechnica.com. However, if you read the arstechnica article, all it contains is that a reader told them that the hackers claimed that it works with an airport card. So the only evidence that we actually have for this is an article claiming hearsay about an unsubstantiated claim. Bollocks to that.
What is more likely: (A) A vulnerability exists in at least two WiFi implementations (some external card, and Apple's internal Airport), which allows to compromise systems independent of which operating system is running, or (B) two guys who want their fifteen minutes of fame doctor a video, claiming that they can crack any Mac with WiFi within 60 seconds, conveniently being so vague that nobody can verify or refute their claim, adding in a bit of conspiracy theory (pressure from Apple) on top of it?
'' Looks like I can get the top of the line Quad Mac Pro for just $16,256 (plus tax). That includeds the MODEM people (I always insist on frugality and have no concievable use for expensive 'high speed' internet). ''
I went to the Dell UK website, and tried to configure the most expensive Dell Workstation I could find. A single Dell Precision 390, one dual-core Conroe Extreme at 2.93 GHz, 8 GB RAM, four 500 GB harddisks, for £11,355 including tax, no shipping. A Mac Pro with two dual-core Woodcrest at 3.00 GHz, 8 GB RAM, four 500 GB harddisks, costs only £4,859. I couldn't believe it. Even with 16 GB RAM, the Mac Pro is only £7,019.
Slashdot Mirror
Use iTunes, set disk burning preferences to "data disk", select your whole library, click on "Burn" and make sure you have a small pile of DVDs available. If you keep your iTunes library outside your home directory, most likely your home directory is less than a DVD, so that is no problem either.
'' The GPL has its problems when a GPLed application has a plugin functionality, because then the plugins have to be GPLed, too, or else they cannot be used. ''
I think you are wrong.
The plugin on its own would be rather useless, but as long as you distribute it without the GPLed application, and as long as it doesn't contain GPLed code, it can be distributed under any license that the copyright holder wishes to use. Now an end user puts together the GPLed application and the plugin, thus creating a derivative work of both. We may assume that the plugin allows creation of the derivative work (otherwise it would be quite pointless), and the GPLed application definitely allows you to create derivative works without any obligation as long as the derivative work isn't distributed.
A study by Hans Eysenck during World War II in the British arms industry, where people had some real good motivation to work long hours, showed that workers working 48 hours a week had higher productivity than workers working 57 hours a week. And that was not "productivity per work hour", it was absolute productivity. They did more work in 48 hours than in 57 hours.
'' Holy crap. Apple consider 60 hours a week normal? ''
We don't know what Apple considers normal. We know that Apple is willing to interfere with the business of a supplier if that supplier makes it workforce work more than 60 hours a week. Next time you have to go to a hospital, ask the doctor who is treating you how many hours a week he or she is working, just to get a bit of perspective. Or maybe you have a look on the internet how many hours employees at EA have been working to supply you with the latest video games.
Most importantly, instead of reading the BBC page (or without bothering to read anything), go to the Apple website where you find Apple's report that this is all based on: You will find that the highest number of complaints by employees is against the fact that sometimes there isn't enough overtime!
'' Wouldn't it be smart of Apple to pay these guys a consulting fee to spend a few days with their networking geeks and see if A) they can replicate it on an Airport card, and B) if there's a way to patch the problem, if it exists, in the OS? The hackers get paid, Apple patches a potential security flaw... everybody wins. ''
That is assuming these guys actually _have_ found a flaw.
What I am sure Apple has done is to have someone check each single line of the code to see if there are any dangers. Actually, the best method would be: Programmer A takes the source code, and adds ten bugs. Programmer B, who hasn't written the code, checks it. Afterwards you can see how many of the ten artificial bugs and how many other problems have been found.
'' Just giving 20 mins to this story get "FUD" tag and we go -1 levels by some Mac zealot moderator ;) ''
I think there should be an automatic moderation to -2 levels for any post that predicts "I will be moderated down because some zealots don't like my opinion".
'' It seems pretty ridiculous to say "We guarantee our OS is secure [unless you use hardware that wasn't made by us]." Well, then the OS isn't secure. If 3rd-party drivers can break your security, it wasn't really there to begin with, now was it? ''
The problem with this argument is that we have no idea what the "exploit" actually was (if there was any; I mean these guys have been caught lying, so why would you believe anything? )
My suspicion is that the WiFi card + driver can be convinced to set up a wireless connection from the outside, without being told so by the user. Now you might have set up your computer in a way that is inherently insecure, under the assumption that it is not connected to anything and therefore nothing can happen. If this computer then enters into a connection without being told to do so, you have a problem (the user knew all the time that a connection was dangerous, but had no intention to set up any connections). Something like this would be an "attack" that would work against any operating system, but it would be just an exploit of user stupidity, nothing else.
'' Anyone who thought about it for more than a second or two would have realised that it was never going to be a vulnerability in the default MacBook Pro hardware or drivers. If it wasn't, why would they need to introduce a third-party wireless adapter at all? ''
Remember that when the "researchers" were confronted with this very reasonable argument, they claimed that they didn't demonstrate their "exploit" with the standard hardware because (as they claimed) "Apple had leaned on them". At that time I thought: If I was in that position, and Apple "leaned" on me, they could do as much leaning as they wanted, I would demonstrate that I can crack a standard Macintosh, as sold to customers. On the other hand, if Apple "leaned" on me by waving huge amounts of banknotes at me, I would have taken the money; and I wouldn't have used a Macintosh at all, but would have showed how vulnerable Windows is!
We were told that all Macs are vulnerable. And not only all Macs, but also all Linux machines, and all Windows machines. It seems this was not the case. Apparently there is no exploit at all against a bog standard Macbook with built-in wireless, and that covers about 99.999 percent. Using an external card was essential to the exploit, the claimed "pressure from Apple" was just made up. Remember, these guys _did_ claim that a Macintosh with built-in wireless adapter was vulnerable, and they didn't demonstrate that because of pressure from Apple! I didn't believe it then, nobody should have ever believed it without evidence, and now they have been caught with their lies.
Shame on everyone who reported it without checking the facts.
'' From what I have seen a typical electronics store here devotes some 5 to 10% of the digital audio player shelve space to iPods. ''
And what percentage of the cupboard space below the display shelves?
'' Pretty funny about the primary concern being vibration. My company had a person check their laptop on a flight a few years back, and SURPRISE it never appeared at the other end of the flight. ''
One eBay Powerseller with more than twelve thousand happy customers was the wife of a Heathrow baggage handler.
Took them 2 1/2 years to find out.
'' Seriously, though. $150 a year for your OS. It seems a bit shady to me. Do you apple fans have plans to skip eve/odd releases or something? ''
First, it is $129. Second, it is $99.50 if you have two Macs at your home (or one at home, and one kid at university), down to $40 if you have five Macs. And, of course, every Macintosh user has the choice to upgrade as often as Windows users do - last time in 2001, I think, the next time in 2007. Which means going straight from MacOS 9 to Leopard.
You can use mach_absolute_time which returns time since the machine was started in 64 bit integer nanoseconds (derived from rdtsc or mftb/mftbu depending on the machine), that gives you time information for about 100 years (the 64 bit would be enough for 600 or 700 years, but rdtsc will overflow after about 100 years). The filesystem uses 64 bit integers with 48 bit for seconds, and 16 bit for fractions. That should last for about 2000 years.
'' In the instance:
d = log10(0.0001);
i = (int)d;
the microsoft compiler generates the following code: ''
Doesn't really matter what code which compiler produced; the programmer should be shot on sight.
The floating-point number 0.0001 cannot possibly be equal to the real number 0.0001, it will necessarily be either a little bit smaller or a little bit larger.
d = log10 (0.0001) will set d to a value which may be coincidence be equal to 4.0, or may be slightly larger, or slightly smaller. Which one depends on the exact details of how the log10 function is implemented and the floating point format used, and it is in no way defined by the C language.
i = (int) d will therefore set i to -3 or -4, and which one is completely unspecified by the C language. An implementation that sets i to -3 is not wrong, it just exposes the stupidity of the programmer.
'' How does it hurt google for it's name to used as a verb? ''
Same as it hurt Xerox that their name was used as a verb. Once it becomes part of the language, it can lose its trademark status. Like Xerox, Google doesn't really care if you use the word, they are just legally obliged to send you a threatening letter.
'' I remember an old question from grad school: Why might you add a bunch of floating point numbers starting with the smallest? ''
There are to ways to get higher precision:
1. Instead of adding the numbers starting with the smallest, you continuously add the two smallest numbers, then put the result back into the list of numbers to be added. For example if you add 2^20 numbers, all around 1, you'll have 2^19 sums around 2, 2^18 sums around 4, 2^17 sums around 8 etc. The average result is only 20, therefore the average rounding error is quite small. By adding all numbers sequentially, you would on the average get a result of 2^19, so much higher rounding error.
2. Implement double precision addition: If x >= y >= 0, and you calculate s = x + y, then you get the exact error by calculating (s - x) - y if all operations are performed with the same precision. So all you need to do is add up the values and add up the rounding errors separately. For best results, combine both methods.
'' Now as Intel has shown, given enough efforts and money even x86 the poorest CISC ISA ever (VAX ISA was much nicer than x86 ISA: more registers, orthogonal design) can be competitive and sofware compatibility makes the rest.. ''
This was heavily discussed a while ago on comp.arch. Conclusion: VAX instruction set was an absolute nightmare for hardware designers; while today the problem of making x86 fast in spite of the instruction set is basically solved, making a VAX fast would have taken superhuman efforts.
''First, why do people in the US have to fight for legal fees when they win a lawsuit? When will it become an automatic part of american civil law? Responsibility for all legal fees when a case is lost will certainly put the brakes on the litigious culture of the US and all its frivolous lawsuits.''
It works quite similar to that in German courts. First of all, the court decides how much money is argued about (if I say I want you to pay $1 mil, then we argue about $1 mil). Then he takes a chart, which says: For a one million dollar case, plaintiffs lawyers can charge $20000, defendant lawyers can charge $20000, court charges $20000 (actual numbers could be different). You can't stretch out a case infinitely because the judge won't let you create three years work for $20000. In the end, the court decides who was guilty and what has to be paid. Now say you wanted $1000000, and the judge says that you win, but the million dollar was nonsense, you get only 10000. Since I have to pay one percent of what you demanded, I also pay one percent of the court cost, one percent of your lawyer, one percent of my lawyer, and you pay the rest. Obviously people know that, so they don't try to get unreasonable amounts. If you win the case as a defendant, you pay nothing, but you might end up paying little even if you lose. And the lawyer cost is limited.
'' Well, extrapolating the facts from different sources seem to point to following theory: ''
There are no "different sources". There is one source, which got duplicated.
Still bollocks. The articles that you quote are again just repeating the same stuff, from the same source, without any attempt of verification. It doesn't matter how many publications repeat it, all we have is an unverified claim.
And all this has no other source than the word of the so-called hackers involved. There is no evidence whatsoever that they ever talked to Apple except that they claim they did. There is no evidence whatsoever that Airport is vulnerable except that they claim it is.
''This is not a simple matter of exploiting a serivce. The machine might does not even need any publicly accessible services for this attack to be effective.''
That is the claim being made, and it would be frightening if true. We have not seen any reliable evidence of this so far.
''We all know that wireless cards require soft firmware and drivers in the OS these days. The point is that it's possible to exploit the drivers with specially crafted packets and make the OS run arbitrary code that it thinks is the Wireless driver.''
That is the claim that has been made. We have not seen any reliable evidence of this so far. I think it would be quite easy to own a Macintosh running MacOS X if you use an external card needing a driver, and you install your own, specially crafted driver on the machine that will do exactly what you want. We have no evidence that this works when using the preinstalled Apple driver or the manufacturer's driver for the card.
''Running code at the level of the OS brings with it full control over the machine. The OS trusts the drivers 100% on almost every system I've used. This means your newly running code can take full control of the machine, and probably even download more code, sniff on you, etc. ''
May be true, but there is no evidence that you can take control of a driver as it was claimed.
''It should be possible to exploit this attack even if the machine is connected to a trusted network. All you need to do is send it packets on that network (or pretend to be on that network).''
And possibly go to the machine you want to exploit first with a CD in your hand, and install your replacement drivers.
''The demo might have been vague, but it still points out some serious flaws with wireless systems on modern operating systems - anyone can send you packets and the OS trusts the software processing those packets 100%...''
The demo may have been vague because it was a hoax. So far this seems much more probable to me.
Your post is very misleading. You write that "it still worked on the macbook's internal airport card" with a reference to the highly respected arstechnica.com. However, if you read the arstechnica article, all it contains is that a reader told them that the hackers claimed that it works with an airport card. So the only evidence that we actually have for this is an article claiming hearsay about an unsubstantiated claim. Bollocks to that.
What is more likely: (A) A vulnerability exists in at least two WiFi implementations (some external card, and Apple's internal Airport), which allows to compromise systems independent of which operating system is running, or (B) two guys who want their fifteen minutes of fame doctor a video, claiming that they can crack any Mac with WiFi within 60 seconds, conveniently being so vague that nobody can verify or refute their claim, adding in a bit of conspiracy theory (pressure from Apple) on top of it?
'' Looks like I can get the top of the line Quad Mac Pro for just $16,256 (plus tax). That includeds the MODEM people (I always insist on frugality and have no concievable use for expensive 'high speed' internet). ''
I went to the Dell UK website, and tried to configure the most expensive Dell Workstation I could find. A single Dell Precision 390, one dual-core Conroe Extreme at 2.93 GHz, 8 GB RAM, four 500 GB harddisks, for £11,355 including tax, no shipping. A Mac Pro with two dual-core Woodcrest at 3.00 GHz, 8 GB RAM, four 500 GB harddisks, costs only £4,859. I couldn't believe it. Even with 16 GB RAM, the Mac Pro is only £7,019.