>Putting a file on a shared drive is not copyright infringement. Putting one there with intent to distribute maybe, but simply putting it there is not.
I doubt the RIAA is spending significant efforts to deal with a single file on a given shared drive. I imagine they are after the shitloads of pirate bootlegs on P2P systems designed to trade shitloads of movies and music. Putting a load of ripped movies or stack of albums up and making it available to a huge number of people on the Internet is the issue. Creating a fake scenario where "one file was on your PC within your house so you could access it from downstairs" is a strawman argument and rather tired.
>>Fair use outweighs practical ability of anyone to commit a crime.
If you quote me, you should leave it in context, not ramble on about something else.
>Fair use says I can put a copy of a music file on shared drive so that I can access it from another computer in my house...or at my office. You are assuming that because I have a file on a shared drive, it is my intent to commit a crime. That is an assumption we should not be making.
I am (of course) not assuming that. Were you to put all your content in a P2P upload directory, then yes that assumption would be valid, because that's why the directory exists and there is no other purpose for it.
>No it is illegal to film a movie, not to possess a camera. Having a camera with me is not the same as putting clothes in a handbag at the store. It is sad you can't tell the difference.
No, having a camera is not shoplifting. I can agree with the obvious. Sneaking a video camera into a theater is a crime in some places (and prosecuted most places) because, like the P2P upload directory, there is no other reasonable purpose for it. I find it personally annoying to think I'd have to hide a camcorder and risk getting hassled if I were to decide to watch a movie on a day that I happened to be using one, but I'm not too retarded to understand why theaters are getting painfully strict about it, given how little respect bootleggers demonstrate by throwing movies up the day they come out.
The teen in me likes the subversion, and I like the idea of sampling things, but in the last decade copyright infringement has turned from casual swapping into a business-like attack on the creative people who generate our pop culture. I've just lost a lot of respect for people who steal with such brazen efficiency simply to steal.
I've played around with filming movies with a camcorder, and I've swapped music files, but I'd rather pay to kick in something toward perpetuating the content I like than support a system designed to leach the fuck out of anyone creating entertainment. It just seems out of hand.
>If I leave my keys in the car I am not facilitating a crime. Now if a kid comes along, drives off in the car, and hits someone or something that is a crime and is also a different matter.
Yeah actually you are; look up liability. Or leave your keys in your car and learn to hate cops after you get a ticket when reporting it stolen. Actions taken by somebody after stealing your car are wholly unrelated.
>>To tie in the RIAA argument, if you had reams of printed IP that didn't belong to you, and you left it laying in piles on your yard, and were publishing new copies as fast as people could come by and take copies, well, you'd be distributing content that didn't belong to you, wouldn't you?
>No, not if I didn't intend for people to take the piles and treated people who came on my yard as a trespassers as soon as I found out they were there. I would instead say people were -stealing- my piles of paper with printed IP on it.
That's because you are one of those people who can only understand the theft of media, and your own IP, but not the IP of anyone else. If you burned a pirate collection of music to a CD-R and designed fancy liner notes for it as a gift, and somebody stole the CD-R from you, and copied the liner notes you created to mass distribute it, I bet you'd be unhappy about both the CD going missing and that somebody ripped off your ideas.
But that is probably only as far as you seem to get it - which is the whole Digg mentality thing.
If I'm coming across as too strikingly opinionated and defensive, it's only because I'm defending an unpopular perspective.
I find it kind of inconsistent that the same populist mob who thinks there's nothing wrong with mass duplicating & distributing movies/music and whatever, are the same people that screams a high moral outrage if somebody, say, copies the layout of their website. A very common Digg mentality.
Questioning whether it is a serious/violent crime or not, or if it is a civil or criminal matter has little relevance with the subject of whether it is unreasonable for the RIAA to demand people not public serve up illegal copies of its content.
All I'm saying is that shouting down reasonable demands of IP holders is counterproductive for people interested in establishing fair use. For people who don't have any illusion of respecting other people's work: shout on. However, those people will just cloud the issues and make it easier to dismiss demands for fair use as "grey area piracy," or to to enact unreasonable laws like the DCMA, which destroy fair use as a side effect.
Well it seems like the original Bill of Rights worked out well as a follow up to the US Constitution, so maybe your reasoning is specious.
Rights tend to get extended once the bearer discovers how nice they are. Notice how copyrights have been extended to the point where they don't serve their original purpose [Disney consumes public domain material, and has since encased its derivative works in perpetual copyright].
I'd prefer the law explicitly protect users fair use rights rather than serve the profiteering needs of our corporate overlords.
I got it. I don't think it's that difficult to figure out the message if you are reasonable.
"A file not shared until accessed" is little different that an (illegally) possessed gun that need not be shot (or even pointed at somebody); it's not the actual sharing that is the problem, it's the clear intent to commit a crime.
Magic word: Intent.
If I copy a crap load of stuff that doesn't belong to me into a shared drive, I intend for people to get it. If I hand a hooker $50 and my pants are down, I intend to get serviced. If I leave the house with a kilo of pot, I intend to make some serious sales. Intent.
If that's beyond your capacity to understand, well, it must be time for me to lower my expectations of my fellow man's reasoning ability. Again.
A Windows box's C$ share with a blank admin password and Internet access... Bullshit. Such a machine would be committing so much crime in the area of spam/phishing/virus distribution that the RIAA probably won't be your biggest problem.
Copyright infringement does do harm. Is it okay to steal from Walmart? If so, then we can agree to disagree. I've copied stuff, I jaywalk, I speed, and I've defrauded Walmart before, but that does not make them not wrong or not prosecutable, even if they are fairly minor things that didn't kill anybody.
> Should it be illegal to have photocopiers in libraries?
Fair use outweighs practical ability of anyone to commit a crime.
>Should it be illegal to install Microsoft Office using a cd burner?
Boggle - wtf?
>Should it be illegal to posess a video camera at a movie screening?
It is. Same as one could be prosecuted for putting clothes in your handbag at a clothing store.
>Should it be illegal to leave your door unlocked? What about doing so and leaving a sign that says your door is unlocked?
In some places you can be charged with leaving your keys in your car (after your car is stolen, bummer!), because you are actively being irresponsible and facilitating a crime, even if it was only because you are exercising poor judgement. It makes more work for the cops. Hardly connected to the issue at hand tho.
> Should it be illegal for stores to leave stuff out where shoplifters can get at it?
To tie in the RIAA argument, if you had reams of printed IP that didn't belong to you, and you left it laying in piles on your yard, and were publishing new copies as fast as people could come by and take copies, well, you'd be distributing content that didn't belong to you, wouldn't you?
Which is exactly the issue: confusing [fair use] with [obvious piracy] is the problem.
If you can't discern the difference between what the RIAA is going after [widespread P2P piracy] and limited sharing [fair use], then keep up the ignorant shitstorm of defending piracy long enough and fair use rights will die as a casualty.
Good job attacking that strawman tho. You are so much smarter than straw.
If you own content that you are distributing or other wise have permission to publish it, the RIAA (et all) OBVIOUSLY DOESN'T CARE. They are OBVOUSLY not going after people sharing their OWN stuff or INDIE stuff. They are acting to protect their OWN stuff.
DUH.
You can quibble about the definition of shared/published/accessable, but the issue at hand is obviously PUBLISHING things you don't have a right to distribute.
If a file sits on a server, is its shared availability in some quantum uncertainty state until somebody downloads it? How ridiculous.
If copyright is a civil matter, why is the FBI and Interpol sprayed all over on piracy warnings? Does the FBI help out with civil matters often?
Putting books next to a copier might be "helpful" to somebody who wanted to make copies, but it isn't illegal, and the issue in this case seems to be an implied motive behind having files in your P2P outbox.
If I copy a bunch of Metallica MP3s into an FTP pub directory, my webserver, or my P2P upload bin, I'm not enabling someone else to commit an infraction, I'm actively publishing materials I don't have the right to distribute.
It's similar to having a pound of weed found in your car's trunk. It would give the cop the idea that you have stepped beyond possession and into the area of intent to sell.
MP3s aren't illegal to possess (like weed), but it isn't right to be widely distributing them, so the clearly implied intent is the same.
What I find worrisome is that "enabling P2P style distribution to widely publish copyright content" is an obvious intent to break the law; I don't want that mixed up into a grey area with the idea of using a VCR, an iPod, DVR or computer to use/mix/share content on a very small scale. THAT is fair use.
I don't want fair use destroyed by both sides (corporations and P2P users) of the issue not getting that there is a difference between reasonable and absurd.
It is not reasonable to suggest that the RIAA can't protect their Britney IP by trying to stop people from publishing it. It is unreasonable to suggest that a kid can't make a mix tape that dubs in the same pop song to show at school.
Yes, putting copyright or bootleg content in a shared directory is intent to break the law.
- Would you argue that B&E isn't a crime until you pick something up and leave the property? - Is pointing a gun at somebody not a crime if you don't shoot them (or say you had no intention to)? - How about having kiddie porn on your PC, is that ok as long as you don't have any kids tied up in your basement being filmed? What about if you are a "journalist doing research on child abuse"?
What's wrong with society when ANYONE who is caught doing anything is suddenly a victim?
And what argument is there to support distributing content that is not yours to distribute? Is it hard to discern the difference between putting bootleg stuff in a shared folder, and having a shared folder? Or serving up stuff that is not bootleg? Jesus what idiocy!
What we really need is clearly codified user 'bill of rights' that spell out (and defend) exactly what fair use rights are. Until then, childish arguments that suggest that illegal bootlegging and mass distribution of copyright material is somehow a "free speech" or "privacy" issue is just hurting the cause of people who want FAIR use, not piracy disguised under a layer of self righteous ignorance.
I had a user with a IBM ThinkPad who decided to set its BIOS password, then forgot what it was.
IBM insisted there was no way to flash/unlock or otherwise repair the problem. They required us to send the laptop in and have the entire logic board replaced.
Seems like a poor design, but certainly nobody ever saw her locked documents.
Disney wasn't frozen - unless Hell froze over
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
Disney being in a block of ice in a secret castle room is a myth.
It'll be a cold day in hell when Walt Disney's head becomes frozen.
ISupply has been getting a lot of press about their analysis of how much manufacturers pay for parts, but where is the evidence that suggests iSupply has any inside information?
Their analysis on Apple's part costs for the Core Duo processor are simply, "we guessed Apple gets a 10% discount," but they offer no basis for that. Apple apparently negotiated a 50% volume discount over retail in Flash RAM from Samsung. iSupply gives no suggestion where they get their 10% figure, so for all we know, they just pulled it out of their ass.
The sensationalism surrounding iSupply's reports (available in full for a fee) make it clear that, while iSupply is in the business of selling information, it has all the integrity of a tabloid like World Weekly News or the Enquirer.
First they released sensationalist PR that suggested that Apple was making crazy money on the iPod Nano (now pay to read the whole report!), and now they release sensationalist PR that suggests that Apple is almost losing money on the Intel based iMac (now pay to read the whole report!). The truth is clearly not as extreme as their PR flacks spun it in either case.
Of course, on its own, a simple guess on the total cost of parts doesn't sound very exciting. But even with a sensationalist headline, a simple guess on the total cost of parts isn't very valuable.
Journalism in general has been coasting along for some time on the reputation of a former institution that earned credibility based on dutiful, responsible reporting standards and a self imposed ethic. Professional journalism is been replaced by cheaper PR editors (within newspapers charged with first making a profit rather than providing a public service) and independent bloggers who scribble whatever comes to mind without bothering to check facts (or assume their recollection of reality is the same as a report based on facts from attributed, verifiable sources).
The lines between [opinion/conjecture] or [commercial/political messages] and [unbiased and objective journalism] are being blurred to the point where the general public doesn't seem to even remember that they are different things.
iSupply is a good example of presenting your personal blog/business as if it were a credible news report.
Until iSupply can provide some basis that suggests they have any real insight into secret pricing deals, their figures are worthless. So far, all they've released is guess work based on what appears to be poor assumptions.
Payola is the "corruption" of pimping out the finite timeslots available in a broadcast to play the songs you're paid to play, rather than playing songs that are picked by (i guess) virtue or popularity, and then making it look like the "ad" you just played was not really an ad.
In the case of iTunes, there is infinite (or at least no scarcity) of presentation - you can put up links to buy any songs you want. Also, there is no charade of presenting the music promotion as something other than music promotion.
68k to PPC: 1) Last generation of 68k Macs was custom-weird-NuBus. 2) First generation of PPC Macs was the same + PPC 3) Second generation of PPC Macs was PPC + Old World PCI 4) G3 PPC Macs were PPC + New World PCI
ie: Apple first put PPC into their old Mac design, then fixed the bus, then brought everything else up to date.
Result: Users who bought the last generation of 68k Macs ended up with rapidly obsolete, dead end crap. Users who bought the first generation of PPC Macs are ended up with new wine in an old wineskin. Users who waited for the second or third generation of PPC Macs were far better off (although it was a LONG wait)
PPC to Intel 1) Second to last generation of PPC Macs was PPC + PCI-X 2) Last generation of PPC hardware was PPC + PCIe 3) First generation of Intel = nearly identical to existing PPC, but with Core Duo
ie: this time around, Apple completed their transition to a modern bus & hardware prior to introducing the Intel chips.
Result: Users who buy the last generation of G5's are not really screwed with old crap. Users who buy the first generation of Intel Macs are not screwed with old crap or handicapped potential performance. Users who wait for the second generation of Intel Macs will not benefit as much.
Certainly nobody is under the illusion that PCs in general are ever immune to rapid obsolescence, but I think the transition planning this time around is far better executed.
Yeah these new elevators are great if you are a priest. But what if you are a hunter? Nobody will want you in their group, and you'll be stuck at the lobby meeting stone for hours.
MacWorld demo people, although trained not to demonstrate or allow rebooting the new Macs on display, did remark that they booted up really fast.
In the video, the G5 likely had more RAM installed, which would make it POST considerably slower. The boot time, however, is probably very representative of how much faster the Intel iMac is at booting. Other reasons the Core Duo may have booted so fast compared to the G5:
- Two processor cores!
- Mac OS X is expressly designed to boot fast by bringing up as much as possible in parallel. That's part of the point of launchd: to identify dependancies and kickstart multiple things at once. This is also why Apple gave up on displaying what was being booted in 10.4, and now just shows a progress bar (which is unrelated to what's actually happening, and only timed to match the previous boot time as a relative indicator). Reporting what servers are being launched would take longer than actually starting them. This parallelism would clearly benefit from multiple processor cores in the Core Duo.
- the G5 may have been booting for the first time, or they may have deleted the cache in an attempt to make the test "fair," not realizing that the cache has a huge impact on boot times. Among other things, Mac OS X caches the kernel extensions so that the next boot only stops to numerate which kexts to load if something in hardware has changed. If you wipe your cache files (/Library/Cache, ~/Library/Cache and System/Library/Cache), the next boot will take a lot longer while boot performance caching is rebuilt.
- other hardware may have been unfairly compared: how fast was the G5's drive? was something wrong with it? was the G5's drive full, and struggling to find space for cache files? was it bound to a directory server, and stalling on boot while looking for the server? was it full of 3rd party software, kexts, startup items, etc?
The video doesn't reveal anything about the demonstrators competence at setting up fair comparison, or their motivation, so we don't know.
Recall the comparison of database servers running on OS X server vs Linux, where they intended to be fair but their assumptions about how to do so were actually really bad?
Or look at the Ars review and benchmarks of the new iMac Core Duo vs the iMac G5. He does an array of benchmarks where the G5 has 1 GB of RAM, and the Intel iMac has 512MB! Sorry Ars, but that's just plain incompetent. Your benchmarks are WORTHLESS to even skim over. How about benchmarking the G5 iMac with 512 and 1 GB installed, and reporting if that makes any difference?!
OS X supplies a telnet daemon and supports Appletalk but, importantly, THEY ARE NOT ON BY DEFAULT. There are also more secure alternatives to both which are provided and the default options.
Yes security and convenience are design trade offs. Too much of either can a problem. In Windows, the problem is too much attention to convenience. I don't understand why that's so hard to get across, because there is no opinion or controversy involved. You 'quite agree that Windows has a "bad security record".'
SMB being inherently insecure most certainly does count against Windows NT's security model, since Windows doesn't ship SMB as a disabled alternative alongside a more secure replacement protocol, but rather turns it on in every way. That's partly why a PC put on the Internet is p0wned within 15 minutes. This does not happen to a Mac.
Further, check best practices to see whether SMB is something you want open on the Internet. Microsoft's answer? Rename SMB to CIFS - Common Internet File system. Sounds like a company that DOESN'T F-ING GET SECURITY to me!
What I actually said, was that Microsoft could have used their market clout to release an entirely new version of Windows that fixed the problems they created in the 90s, and could have delivered it by now. It would have demanded some painful transition, but would have been a DOS to NT type jump in modernizing the PC landscape. Instead, they frittered away half a decade and are poised to deliver an anemic service pack to XP with a fancy graphics compositor (which is now nothing new, thanks to Apple).
The pain their users will endure will not give them anything but the same crap, new costs, and some frilly 1.0 graphics - graphics that look like crap in a mixed mode legacy environment anyway. Since Vista won't generally run on todays hardware anyway, why drag a crapload of legacy software crap into it, crap which is not tacked on as a time limited compatibility mode (Classic) but integrated throughout as a core part of the system that will now be there FOREVER?
What a huge missed opportunity! That's why I compare 5 years Apple with 5 years of Microsoft: both were stuck with some old crap, but Apple finally got it, the other apparently never will.
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Yeah and you clearly know nothing about Quartz compositor and its performance. Q-E and Q3D-E promise to better use an available graphics processor, but were not some hack to solve poor graphics performance. Quartz is no slower than Window's current graphics software, apart from the fact that Quartz is actually compositing and handling alpha channels and scaling vectors systemwide, a lot of extra work that Windows can't even do.
At this point, you're taking issue with me presenting clear examples of known Windows problems, but you are just flinging unsubstantiated lies to make no point at all. Do you even have any point? You accuse me with having a bias - well duh, I can clearly see how Apple is poised to do some damage and Microsoft has totally fucked up. My annoyance with your good and evil name calling is that it doesn't matter. Who cares about 1995? I'm not trying to score points on past performance, I'm talking about today and tomorrow.
My point all along has been: if Vista is patching the same crap flaws from 15 years ago, it does not bode well for the "upgrade," since the amount of legacy Microsoft is trying to drag around is clearly - unquestionably - hurting their ability to be innovative and deliver technology.
You like to bring up Macs in a tit-for-tat comparison, but Apple handily solved their real problems with the classic Mac OS, problems that were no secret and were much maligned, serious deficits that needed attention: multitasking, multiprocessing, memory protection, modern security features, modern developer frameworks, modern media support for realtime audio/video, etc.
Those were not things that needed new inventions to fix. "Modern" OS features had been around and in practice for years outside of the naive desktop Mac/PC environmen
Several MacWorld demo people assured me that the new Intel Macs do in fact, support both option-boot startup and firewire target mode. They were apparently trained to not allow users to restart the prototype Macs however.
The MacWorld article cited nearby is nearly information free on the subject. It says "features such as the Open Firmware password remain under EFI, [as well as TDM, etc]" which is a poor way of saying Apple migrated features common to OF Macs to EFI.
Restated: Apple's implementation of EFI is customized. Intel's standard EFI does not include firewire target disk mode.
I'm actually kinda disappointed that Apple didn't go further. Option-Booting could have been extended to a really fancy boot manager with a utility partition that allowed you to do such things as repair installed disks, or offer a USB target disk mode, or even better, a network disk mode, that turns your Mac into an instant Bonjour, GigE, embedded file server, even wirelessly. That would be a handy enabling technology!
Didn't realize you were such a troll. You have an answer for everything, it's just than none of your answers amount to anything, or are in any context.
It's actually more interesting to dissect your arguments than to discuss Windows development; I think it's interesting to see how people bluster when they have to support a fundamentalist doctrine, instead of having the capacity for a discussion. Your retaliations follow the same principles as a chat with Bill ORilley or a televangelist.
1) You repeat things I said earlier, as if you are arguing an (obvious) point against me.
- I say "Windows is from an earlier time when security wasn't seen as critical, for use in a LAN environment" they traded ease of use for security. - You say, no way, how? - I give several obvious examples, then give up because the idea that Microsoft traded ease of use for security is not even controversial. Microsoft documentation on every security vulnerability readily admits this. - You say: "your examples aren't enough, they are from an earlier time when security wasn't seen as critical, and those products for use in a LAN environment." You sir, are a blustermaster!
2) After it's obvious you can't respond to a specific discussion point, you change the subject in a way that suggests my comments were out of the context we were talking about.
-So "SMB is not even part of WinNT", because network file sharing is not part of the kernel, or because it also worked under DOS? It shipped with WindowsNT, wide open and turned on. That makes SMB flaws Windows flaws. Windows File Sharing is quite obviously a Windows component. One can exploit simple LanMan passwords and then connect to its automatically activated C$ shares. Notice how Mac and Linux installations frequently include Samba for SMB compatibility, but it's not on out of the box.
3) You present complete bullshit as your 'supporting facts.'
- Quartz was "dog slow even on the highest end machines and is still sluggish today" - Well no, while OS X performance has increased in a lot of areas, Quartz was the thing that was fast from the beta. Remember the hyper animated dock? Ars demo of 16 translucent layers of windows on top of a playing QT movie? There plenty of things to cry about in OS X (like the Finder). FUD attacks on Quartz hold less water than Microsoft's scotch tape and cheesecloth. But you say that to defend Microsoft's half decade lull in shipping anything but vapor. - Oh and here's another "Who cares about vaporware promises, XP is so great, it doesn't need anything!!" Except that what XP really needs isn't a flashy translucent graphic layer, but rather some attention to its wet toilet paper security, and that Microsoft's vision for 2004 was built upon a database file system, blah blah blah. Way to avoid everything by saying that WinNT is the immaculate conception. Praise be!
4) Instead of agreeing with any point anywhere, you keep bringing the discussion into pointless argument territory.
- You can't just agree that Microsoft's security problems are a significant problem, and then go on to address how you think things will play of differently in the future; you have to dismiss everything and return to tit-for-tat good and evil associations. At this point in 2006, I think we should be able to look back a decade and laugh at both System 7 and WinNT, but you need to foster this bullshit idea that Microsoft is infallible as the Pope, and that its OS is under as much unwarranted persecution as Christmas in America. Thank you Mr O'Rilley.
What, you don't have Internet access to Google? Examples of easy admin vs. security, where security lost out:
LANMan clear text passwords SMB authentication Always on Windows messenger service (not IM, the original broadcast admin chit chat) Other services installed wide open by default Easy open file access, like say, the automatic C$ type admin shares
Asking for examples of where NT and DOS put ease of use ahead of security is like asking for examples of parts of the Titanic that sunk. What a retarded question.
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But wait -
When Apple designs the world's first windowing system with real alpha channel translucency, vector scaling everywhere, and windows as texture surfaces, it's a simple "slap" action?
Microsoft has been struggling to deliver their modern graphics subsystem over the last half decade! Why don't they ask Apple how to slap it in? Slap!! Windows Vista has Tiger graphics!
Of course, Apple didn't have Quartz on the back burner for 5 years, it was shipping. And it worked. Since then, they've added significant improvements.
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If you want to dial back to 1994, then yes: the Mac OS had a simple console OS. But was it a DOS app? Haha, hardly. Apple struggled from 1991 to 1996 to deliver something with modern operating system features, and then gave up and bought a proven enterprise class OS from NeXT. A decade later, successive versions of Mac OS X has shipped features Microsoft has only talked about since 2000.
Back to Windows: Microsoft delivered competitive OS features in NT 3.5, then watered them down in NT 4, and continued to bring in successive layers of legacy to get games working, DOS emulation, and further performance by weakening the original design principles of NT so that it would work as a Win95/98/Me replacement.
And since 2000, Microsoft hasn't delivered much at all.
Also, remember that the "from scratch" that Microsoft used to write Windows NT included such gems as the recently discovered WMF vulnerability, and other critical flaws like shatter attack Interactive Services, and the horrific shared services hack that Windows has to rely upon because launching a new process is so inefficient and expensive.
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The real issue for Microsoft is that Apple dicked away a half decade of development ten years ago, narrowly recovered from their Copland fiasco, and has since recovered to a much stronger position with a modern OS; Microsoft is still very much inside their half decade of developmental incompetence, their modern OS lead is a decade old and showing its age (as you pointed out), and all their risk lies ahead.
Unix file permissions are not what I had in mind when describing "modern security features." Instead, Mac OS X builds upon a fairly paranoid security model that also resulted in SSH, Kerberos, AES, etc. Much of the work on "how to provide security" has already been done. "All" Apple had to do was incorporate secure software and security principles that have already been audited and built by various BSD and other open source projects.
That model that gave us SSH is not the same model that Microsoft used to design, say, SMB way back when. Of course, Microsoft has security professionals who know how to build secure software; it's retrofitting it in that is so problematic.
As for OS X user security: no machine is secure from the actions of a privileged user. Since most OS X installs are run by non-security professionals logged in as administrative users, there is no end to the potential for users to download and execute potentially harmful code.
Nobody is blaming Windows for anything on the order of "trojans installed by administrators," as you troll with regard to Safari disk images. No OS could be reasonably usable if there was absolutely no potential for an administrator to do something unintended.
Window's notable security crises are caused by legacy code (or poorly written modern code) which - by faulty design - frequently allows remote users to exploit flaws that give them full control of everything. Window's ubiquity makes the prospect for actual (not merely theoretical) exploitation more common, and rewarding, so you are certainly right to say that "when Microsoft does something like this, millions of machines get raped."
There is also a clear business model behind "raping" Windows boxes for spam delivery and virus distribution. But this should make security all the more of a priority for Microsoft. Their monopoly position also makes Microsoft more accountable for their errors, since they are clearly, as you point out, more likely to be actually exploited.
If the world was fully populated by Macs, malware writers would definitely be targeting the platform. But they wouldn't benefit from decades of rotten code written before we knew and cared anything about security. And they'd be facing all the security prowess of OpenBSD and the rest of the security community, not kicking through the wet toilet paper that Microsoft used in securing IE, Outlook, GDI, SMB, and every other corner of Windows.
You must be aware that everything (not just PC OS's) is potentially under attack from criminals: banks, telephone and data systems, cars, houses. If popularity alone brought about pants-down security exploits, we'd see all the big makers of everything going through the same embarrassment as Microsoft. But we don't. Occasionally, we see big companies screwing up, but nobody I can think of has perpetuated a system that fsks up their consumers on the level of Microsoft, beyond, say Big Tobacco.
A security model is like a business plan - you can't "not have one," although you might have a woefully inadequate one, or perhaps little thought given to one, before starting your project/business.
Microsoft's security model for NT gave more thought to making things convenient for administrators that to making products that would be resilient to outside attacks.
"Perfect" isn't ever an engineering goal. The problem with Windows NT/2000/XP and the legacy imported from Win3.1/95 is not that it "isn't perfect" but that little consideration has gone to real security audits and planning.
Microsoft (Gates) has stated before that their focus is on features, not bug fixes. Prior to the last half decade, Microsoft wasn't losing significant sales because of security problems. Today they are, both from Linux/UNIX on the server side and now Mac OS X on the the consumer desktop side.
Security has changed from a theoretical problem into an easy to comprehend one: your PC stops working, you get SPAM, you get scammed, you have to clean out spyware, etc.
Suddenly "security" has become a feature that sells, and Microsoft, without a comprehensive security plan in place, has had to face the daunting task of fixing a range of security problems in Windows products in a way that doesn't break other features.
Microsoft can employ all manner of best practices to tack on security in Vista, but as one poster described, adding security to Windows is like attempting to make cheesecloth waterproof using scotch tape.
If, 5 years ago, Microsoft had used their considerable clout as "THE OS VENDOR for PCs" to start over and rethink 'how Windows should work,' they could very likely have developed a new Windows product, available now, that could handily match or beat the security and other features in any desktop or server OS.
This would have required obsolescing a lot of legacy, but Microsoft very likely could have pulled it off. Instead, they announced a lot of vaporware with an availability that was perpetually two years out - for HALF A DECADE.
After five full years of Copland-style development efforts, they have dropped nearly all of their forward looking features and are now planning to deliver some significant security patches and a new graphics engine for Windows XP.
In the meantime, Apple, with a tiny fraction Microsoft's clout, market and developer resources, built Mac OS X with a strong focus on providing modern security features, a complete retrofitting and modernization of their existing legacy OS (Carbon), and a modernized incorporation of NeXT's object based frameworks. They released 5 major versions in that same timeframe, with more than 30 significant updates in between.
Vista's key features only match those Apple has delivered and refined over the last half decade. Microsoft has dropped from the "only real OS in town" to a "possible runner up" in the desktop OS market.
But far more problematically, Microsoft's Vista inherits tons of legacy that is ripe for exploitation. So while Microsoft can roll out miles of scotch tape, Window's core is still cheesecloth, and its ability to hold water will continue to be problematic.
You can speculate about new security "sandboxing," but Vista's new code is entirely unproven, and its old code is known to be problematic. That does not bode well for their security outlook over the next two years, just as Apple is rapidly ascending as a platform to be taken seriously.
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I wasn't defining "crime."
Wow you really tore that strawman to shreds!
>Putting a file on a shared drive is not copyright infringement. Putting one there with intent to distribute maybe, but simply putting it there is not.
I doubt the RIAA is spending significant efforts to deal with a single file on a given shared drive. I imagine they are after the shitloads of pirate bootlegs on P2P systems designed to trade shitloads of movies and music. Putting a load of ripped movies or stack of albums up and making it available to a huge number of people on the Internet is the issue. Creating a fake scenario where "one file was on your PC within your house so you could access it from downstairs" is a strawman argument and rather tired.
>>Fair use outweighs practical ability of anyone to commit a crime.
If you quote me, you should leave it in context, not ramble on about something else.
>Fair use says I can put a copy of a music file on shared drive so that I can access it from another computer in my house...or at my office. You are assuming that because I have a file on a shared drive, it is my intent to commit a crime. That is an assumption we should not be making.
I am (of course) not assuming that. Were you to put all your content in a P2P upload directory, then yes that assumption would be valid, because that's why the directory exists and there is no other purpose for it.
>No it is illegal to film a movie, not to possess a camera. Having a camera with me is not the same as putting clothes in a handbag at the store. It is sad you can't tell the difference.
No, having a camera is not shoplifting. I can agree with the obvious. Sneaking a video camera into a theater is a crime in some places (and prosecuted most places) because, like the P2P upload directory, there is no other reasonable purpose for it. I find it personally annoying to think I'd have to hide a camcorder and risk getting hassled if I were to decide to watch a movie on a day that I happened to be using one, but I'm not too retarded to understand why theaters are getting painfully strict about it, given how little respect bootleggers demonstrate by throwing movies up the day they come out.
The teen in me likes the subversion, and I like the idea of sampling things, but in the last decade copyright infringement has turned from casual swapping into a business-like attack on the creative people who generate our pop culture. I've just lost a lot of respect for people who steal with such brazen efficiency simply to steal.
I've played around with filming movies with a camcorder, and I've swapped music files, but I'd rather pay to kick in something toward perpetuating the content I like than support a system designed to leach the fuck out of anyone creating entertainment. It just seems out of hand.
>If I leave my keys in the car I am not facilitating a crime. Now if a kid comes along, drives off in the car, and hits someone or something that is a crime and is also a different matter.
Yeah actually you are; look up liability. Or leave your keys in your car and learn to hate cops after you get a ticket when reporting it stolen. Actions taken by somebody after stealing your car are wholly unrelated.
>>To tie in the RIAA argument, if you had reams of printed IP that didn't belong to you, and you left it laying in piles on your yard, and were publishing new copies as fast as people could come by and take copies, well, you'd be distributing content that didn't belong to you, wouldn't you?
>No, not if I didn't intend for people to take the piles and treated people who came on my yard as a trespassers as soon as I found out they were there. I would instead say people were -stealing- my piles of paper with printed IP on it.
That's because you are one of those people who can only understand the theft of media, and your own IP, but not the IP of anyone else. If you burned a pirate collection of music to a CD-R and designed fancy liner notes for it as a gift, and somebody stole the CD-R from you, and copied the liner notes you created to mass distribute it, I bet you'd be unhappy about both the CD going missing and that somebody ripped off your ideas.
But that is probably only as far as you seem to get it - which is the whole Digg mentality thing.
If I'm coming across as too strikingly opinionated and defensive, it's only because I'm defending an unpopular perspective.
I find it kind of inconsistent that the same populist mob who thinks there's nothing wrong with mass duplicating & distributing movies/music and whatever, are the same people that screams a high moral outrage if somebody, say, copies the layout of their website. A very common Digg mentality.
Questioning whether it is a serious/violent crime or not, or if it is a civil or criminal matter has little relevance with the subject of whether it is unreasonable for the RIAA to demand people not public serve up illegal copies of its content.
All I'm saying is that shouting down reasonable demands of IP holders is counterproductive for people interested in establishing fair use. For people who don't have any illusion of respecting other people's work: shout on. However, those people will just cloud the issues and make it easier to dismiss demands for fair use as "grey area piracy," or to to enact unreasonable laws like the DCMA, which destroy fair use as a side effect.
Rights tend to get extended once the bearer discovers how nice they are. Notice how copyrights have been extended to the point where they don't serve their original purpose [Disney consumes public domain material, and has since encased its derivative works in perpetual copyright].
I'd prefer the law explicitly protect users fair use rights rather than serve the profiteering needs of our corporate overlords.
I published an article: "Will Macs run Windows?" That looks at what stands in the way now, and the likely workarounds to come.
. html
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Jan06.IntelMacsWin1
I always like corrections or comments.
the message?
I got it. I don't think it's that difficult to figure out the message if you are reasonable.
"A file not shared until accessed" is little different that an (illegally) possessed gun that need not be shot (or even pointed at somebody); it's not the actual sharing that is the problem, it's the clear intent to commit a crime.
Magic word: Intent.
If I copy a crap load of stuff that doesn't belong to me into a shared drive, I intend for people to get it. If I hand a hooker $50 and my pants are down, I intend to get serviced. If I leave the house with a kilo of pot, I intend to make some serious sales. Intent.
If that's beyond your capacity to understand, well, it must be time for me to lower my expectations of my fellow man's reasoning ability. Again.
Wow its like the Strawman Killing Fields today.
A Windows box's C$ share with a blank admin password and Internet access... Bullshit. Such a machine would be committing so much crime in the area of spam/phishing/virus distribution that the RIAA probably won't be your biggest problem.
Copyright infringement does do harm. Is it okay to steal from Walmart? If so, then we can agree to disagree. I've copied stuff, I jaywalk, I speed, and I've defrauded Walmart before, but that does not make them not wrong or not prosecutable, even if they are fairly minor things that didn't kill anybody.
> Should it be illegal to have photocopiers in libraries?
Fair use outweighs practical ability of anyone to commit a crime.
>Should it be illegal to install Microsoft Office using a cd burner?
Boggle - wtf?
>Should it be illegal to posess a video camera at a movie screening?
It is. Same as one could be prosecuted for putting clothes in your handbag at a clothing store.
>Should it be illegal to leave your door unlocked? What about doing so and leaving a sign that says your door is unlocked?
In some places you can be charged with leaving your keys in your car (after your car is stolen, bummer!), because you are actively being irresponsible and facilitating a crime, even if it was only because you are exercising poor judgement. It makes more work for the cops. Hardly connected to the issue at hand tho.
> Should it be illegal for stores to leave stuff out where shoplifters can get at it?
To tie in the RIAA argument, if you had reams of printed IP that didn't belong to you, and you left it laying in piles on your yard, and were publishing new copies as fast as people could come by and take copies, well, you'd be distributing content that didn't belong to you, wouldn't you?
Which is exactly the issue: confusing [fair use] with [obvious piracy] is the problem.
If you can't discern the difference between what the RIAA is going after [widespread P2P piracy] and limited sharing [fair use], then keep up the ignorant shitstorm of defending piracy long enough and fair use rights will die as a casualty.
Good job attacking that strawman tho. You are so much smarter than straw.
If you own content that you are distributing or other wise have permission to publish it, the RIAA (et all) OBVIOUSLY DOESN'T CARE. They are OBVOUSLY not going after people sharing their OWN stuff or INDIE stuff. They are acting to protect their OWN stuff.
DUH.
You can quibble about the definition of shared/published/accessable, but the issue at hand is obviously PUBLISHING things you don't have a right to distribute.
If a file sits on a server, is its shared availability in some quantum uncertainty state until somebody downloads it? How ridiculous.
If copyright is a civil matter, why is the FBI and Interpol sprayed all over on piracy warnings? Does the FBI help out with civil matters often?
Putting books next to a copier might be "helpful" to somebody who wanted to make copies, but it isn't illegal, and the issue in this case seems to be an implied motive behind having files in your P2P outbox.
If I copy a bunch of Metallica MP3s into an FTP pub directory, my webserver, or my P2P upload bin, I'm not enabling someone else to commit an infraction, I'm actively publishing materials I don't have the right to distribute.
It's similar to having a pound of weed found in your car's trunk. It would give the cop the idea that you have stepped beyond possession and into the area of intent to sell.
MP3s aren't illegal to possess (like weed), but it isn't right to be widely distributing them, so the clearly implied intent is the same.
What I find worrisome is that "enabling P2P style distribution to widely publish copyright content" is an obvious intent to break the law; I don't want that mixed up into a grey area with the idea of using a VCR, an iPod, DVR or computer to use/mix/share content on a very small scale. THAT is fair use.
I don't want fair use destroyed by both sides (corporations and P2P users) of the issue not getting that there is a difference between reasonable and absurd.
It is not reasonable to suggest that the RIAA can't protect their Britney IP by trying to stop people from publishing it. It is unreasonable to suggest that a kid can't make a mix tape that dubs in the same pop song to show at school.
What's with the teenage responses?
Yes, putting copyright or bootleg content in a shared directory is intent to break the law.
- Would you argue that B&E isn't a crime until you pick something up and leave the property?
- Is pointing a gun at somebody not a crime if you don't shoot them (or say you had no intention to)?
- How about having kiddie porn on your PC, is that ok as long as you don't have any kids tied up in your basement being filmed? What about if you are a "journalist doing research on child abuse"?
What's wrong with society when ANYONE who is caught doing anything is suddenly a victim?
And what argument is there to support distributing content that is not yours to distribute? Is it hard to discern the difference between putting bootleg stuff in a shared folder, and having a shared folder? Or serving up stuff that is not bootleg? Jesus what idiocy!
What we really need is clearly codified user 'bill of rights' that spell out (and defend) exactly what fair use rights are. Until then, childish arguments that suggest that illegal bootlegging and mass distribution of copyright material is somehow a "free speech" or "privacy" issue is just hurting the cause of people who want FAIR use, not piracy disguised under a layer of self righteous ignorance.
EFI isn't the only problem for the new Macs to run Windows. I wrote an article that looks at a range of problems: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Jan06.IntelMacsWin1. html
I had a user with a IBM ThinkPad who decided to set its BIOS password, then forgot what it was.
IBM insisted there was no way to flash/unlock or otherwise repair the problem. They required us to send the laptop in and have the entire logic board replaced.
Seems like a poor design, but certainly nobody ever saw her locked documents.
Disney being in a block of ice in a secret castle room is a myth.
It'll be a cold day in hell when Walt Disney's head becomes frozen.
ISupply has been getting a lot of press about their analysis of how much manufacturers pay for parts, but where is the evidence that suggests iSupply has any inside information?
Their analysis on Apple's part costs for the Core Duo processor are simply, "we guessed Apple gets a 10% discount," but they offer no basis for that. Apple apparently negotiated a 50% volume discount over retail in Flash RAM from Samsung. iSupply gives no suggestion where they get their 10% figure, so for all we know, they just pulled it out of their ass.
The sensationalism surrounding iSupply's reports (available in full for a fee) make it clear that, while iSupply is in the business of selling information, it has all the integrity of a tabloid like World Weekly News or the Enquirer.
First they released sensationalist PR that suggested that Apple was making crazy money on the iPod Nano (now pay to read the whole report!), and now they release sensationalist PR that suggests that Apple is almost losing money on the Intel based iMac (now pay to read the whole report!). The truth is clearly not as extreme as their PR flacks spun it in either case.
Of course, on its own, a simple guess on the total cost of parts doesn't sound very exciting. But even with a sensationalist headline, a simple guess on the total cost of parts isn't very valuable.
Journalism in general has been coasting along for some time on the reputation of a former institution that earned credibility based on dutiful, responsible reporting standards and a self imposed ethic. Professional journalism is been replaced by cheaper PR editors (within newspapers charged with first making a profit rather than providing a public service) and independent bloggers who scribble whatever comes to mind without bothering to check facts (or assume their recollection of reality is the same as a report based on facts from attributed, verifiable sources).
The lines between [opinion/conjecture] or [commercial/political messages] and [unbiased and objective journalism] are being blurred to the point where the general public doesn't seem to even remember that they are different things.
iSupply is a good example of presenting your personal blog/business as if it were a credible news report.
Until iSupply can provide some basis that suggests they have any real insight into secret pricing deals, their figures are worthless. So far, all they've released is guess work based on what appears to be poor assumptions.
Payola is the "corruption" of pimping out the finite timeslots available in a broadcast to play the songs you're paid to play, rather than playing songs that are picked by (i guess) virtue or popularity, and then making it look like the "ad" you just played was not really an ad.
In the case of iTunes, there is infinite (or at least no scarcity) of presentation - you can put up links to buy any songs you want. Also, there is no charade of presenting the music promotion as something other than music promotion.
The notable difference:
68k to PPC:
1) Last generation of 68k Macs was custom-weird-NuBus.
2) First generation of PPC Macs was the same + PPC
3) Second generation of PPC Macs was PPC + Old World PCI
4) G3 PPC Macs were PPC + New World PCI
ie: Apple first put PPC into their old Mac design, then fixed the bus, then brought everything else up to date.
Result:
Users who bought the last generation of 68k Macs ended up with rapidly obsolete, dead end crap.
Users who bought the first generation of PPC Macs are ended up with new wine in an old wineskin.
Users who waited for the second or third generation of PPC Macs were far better off (although it was a LONG wait)
PPC to Intel
1) Second to last generation of PPC Macs was PPC + PCI-X
2) Last generation of PPC hardware was PPC + PCIe
3) First generation of Intel = nearly identical to existing PPC, but with Core Duo
ie: this time around, Apple completed their transition to a modern bus & hardware prior to introducing the Intel chips.
Result:
Users who buy the last generation of G5's are not really screwed with old crap.
Users who buy the first generation of Intel Macs are not screwed with old crap or handicapped potential performance.
Users who wait for the second generation of Intel Macs will not benefit as much.
Certainly nobody is under the illusion that PCs in general are ever immune to rapid obsolescence, but I think the transition planning this time around is far better executed.
Yeah these new elevators are great if you are a priest. But what if you are a hunter? Nobody will want you in their group, and you'll be stuck at the lobby meeting stone for hours.
MacWorld demo people, although trained not to demonstrate or allow rebooting the new Macs on display, did remark that they booted up really fast.
In the video, the G5 likely had more RAM installed, which would make it POST considerably slower. The boot time, however, is probably very representative of how much faster the Intel iMac is at booting. Other reasons the Core Duo may have booted so fast compared to the G5:
- Two processor cores!
- Mac OS X is expressly designed to boot fast by bringing up as much as possible in parallel. That's part of the point of launchd: to identify dependancies and kickstart multiple things at once. This is also why Apple gave up on displaying what was being booted in 10.4, and now just shows a progress bar (which is unrelated to what's actually happening, and only timed to match the previous boot time as a relative indicator). Reporting what servers are being launched would take longer than actually starting them. This parallelism would clearly benefit from multiple processor cores in the Core Duo.
- the G5 may have been booting for the first time, or they may have deleted the cache in an attempt to make the test "fair," not realizing that the cache has a huge impact on boot times. Among other things, Mac OS X caches the kernel extensions so that the next boot only stops to numerate which kexts to load if something in hardware has changed. If you wipe your cache files (/Library/Cache, ~/Library/Cache and System/Library/Cache), the next boot will take a lot longer while boot performance caching is rebuilt.
- other hardware may have been unfairly compared: how fast was the G5's drive? was something wrong with it? was the G5's drive full, and struggling to find space for cache files? was it bound to a directory server, and stalling on boot while looking for the server? was it full of 3rd party software, kexts, startup items, etc?
The video doesn't reveal anything about the demonstrators competence at setting up fair comparison, or their motivation, so we don't know.
Recall the comparison of database servers running on OS X server vs Linux, where they intended to be fair but their assumptions about how to do so were actually really bad?
Or look at the Ars review and benchmarks of the new iMac Core Duo vs the iMac G5. He does an array of benchmarks where the G5 has 1 GB of RAM, and the Intel iMac has 512MB! Sorry Ars, but that's just plain incompetent. Your benchmarks are WORTHLESS to even skim over. How about benchmarking the G5 iMac with 512 and 1 GB installed, and reporting if that makes any difference?!
OS X supplies a telnet daemon and supports Appletalk but, importantly, THEY ARE NOT ON BY DEFAULT. There are also more secure alternatives to both which are provided and the default options.
Yes security and convenience are design trade offs. Too much of either can a problem. In Windows, the problem is too much attention to convenience. I don't understand why that's so hard to get across, because there is no opinion or controversy involved. You 'quite agree that Windows has a "bad security record".'
SMB being inherently insecure most certainly does count against Windows NT's security model, since Windows doesn't ship SMB as a disabled alternative alongside a more secure replacement protocol, but rather turns it on in every way. That's partly why a PC put on the Internet is p0wned within 15 minutes. This does not happen to a Mac.
Further, check best practices to see whether SMB is something you want open on the Internet. Microsoft's answer? Rename SMB to CIFS - Common Internet File system. Sounds like a company that DOESN'T F-ING GET SECURITY to me!
What I actually said, was that Microsoft could have used their market clout to release an entirely new version of Windows that fixed the problems they created in the 90s, and could have delivered it by now. It would have demanded some painful transition, but would have been a DOS to NT type jump in modernizing the PC landscape. Instead, they frittered away half a decade and are poised to deliver an anemic service pack to XP with a fancy graphics compositor (which is now nothing new, thanks to Apple).
The pain their users will endure will not give them anything but the same crap, new costs, and some frilly 1.0 graphics - graphics that look like crap in a mixed mode legacy environment anyway. Since Vista won't generally run on todays hardware anyway, why drag a crapload of legacy software crap into it, crap which is not tacked on as a time limited compatibility mode (Classic) but integrated throughout as a core part of the system that will now be there FOREVER?
What a huge missed opportunity! That's why I compare 5 years Apple with 5 years of Microsoft: both were stuck with some old crap, but Apple finally got it, the other apparently never will.
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Yeah and you clearly know nothing about Quartz compositor and its performance. Q-E and Q3D-E promise to better use an available graphics processor, but were not some hack to solve poor graphics performance. Quartz is no slower than Window's current graphics software, apart from the fact that Quartz is actually compositing and handling alpha channels and scaling vectors systemwide, a lot of extra work that Windows can't even do.
At this point, you're taking issue with me presenting clear examples of known Windows problems, but you are just flinging unsubstantiated lies to make no point at all. Do you even have any point? You accuse me with having a bias - well duh, I can clearly see how Apple is poised to do some damage and Microsoft has totally fucked up. My annoyance with your good and evil name calling is that it doesn't matter. Who cares about 1995? I'm not trying to score points on past performance, I'm talking about today and tomorrow.
My point all along has been: if Vista is patching the same crap flaws from 15 years ago, it does not bode well for the "upgrade," since the amount of legacy Microsoft is trying to drag around is clearly - unquestionably - hurting their ability to be innovative and deliver technology.
You like to bring up Macs in a tit-for-tat comparison, but Apple handily solved their real problems with the classic Mac OS, problems that were no secret and were much maligned, serious deficits that needed attention: multitasking, multiprocessing, memory protection, modern security features, modern developer frameworks, modern media support for realtime audio/video, etc.
Those were not things that needed new inventions to fix. "Modern" OS features had been around and in practice for years outside of the naive desktop Mac/PC environmen
Several MacWorld demo people assured me that the new Intel Macs do in fact, support both option-boot startup and firewire target mode. They were apparently trained to not allow users to restart the prototype Macs however.
The MacWorld article cited nearby is nearly information free on the subject. It says "features such as the Open Firmware password remain under EFI, [as well as TDM, etc]" which is a poor way of saying Apple migrated features common to OF Macs to EFI.
Restated: Apple's implementation of EFI is customized. Intel's standard EFI does not include firewire target disk mode.
I'm actually kinda disappointed that Apple didn't go further. Option-Booting could have been extended to a really fancy boot manager with a utility partition that allowed you to do such things as repair installed disks, or offer a USB target disk mode, or even better, a network disk mode, that turns your Mac into an instant Bonjour, GigE, embedded file server, even wirelessly. That would be a handy enabling technology!
Didn't realize you were such a troll. You have an answer for everything, it's just than none of your answers amount to anything, or are in any context.
It's actually more interesting to dissect your arguments than to discuss Windows development; I think it's interesting to see how people bluster when they have to support a fundamentalist doctrine, instead of having the capacity for a discussion. Your retaliations follow the same principles as a chat with Bill ORilley or a televangelist.
1) You repeat things I said earlier, as if you are arguing an (obvious) point against me.
- I say "Windows is from an earlier time when security wasn't seen as critical, for use in a LAN environment" they traded ease of use for security.
- You say, no way, how?
- I give several obvious examples, then give up because the idea that Microsoft traded ease of use for security is not even controversial. Microsoft documentation on every security vulnerability readily admits this.
- You say: "your examples aren't enough, they are from an earlier time when security wasn't seen as critical, and those products for use in a LAN environment." You sir, are a blustermaster!
2) After it's obvious you can't respond to a specific discussion point, you change the subject in a way that suggests my comments were out of the context we were talking about.
-So "SMB is not even part of WinNT", because network file sharing is not part of the kernel, or because it also worked under DOS? It shipped with WindowsNT, wide open and turned on. That makes SMB flaws Windows flaws. Windows File Sharing is quite obviously a Windows component.
One can exploit simple LanMan passwords and then connect to its automatically activated C$ shares.
Notice how Mac and Linux installations frequently include Samba for SMB compatibility, but it's not on out of the box.
3) You present complete bullshit as your 'supporting facts.'
- Quartz was "dog slow even on the highest end machines and is still sluggish today"
- Well no, while OS X performance has increased in a lot of areas, Quartz was the thing that was fast from the beta. Remember the hyper animated dock? Ars demo of 16 translucent layers of windows on top of a playing QT movie? There plenty of things to cry about in OS X (like the Finder). FUD attacks on Quartz hold less water than Microsoft's scotch tape and cheesecloth. But you say that to defend Microsoft's half decade lull in shipping anything but vapor.
- Oh and here's another "Who cares about vaporware promises, XP is so great, it doesn't need anything!!" Except that what XP really needs isn't a flashy translucent graphic layer, but rather some attention to its wet toilet paper security, and that Microsoft's vision for 2004 was built upon a database file system, blah blah blah. Way to avoid everything by saying that WinNT is the immaculate conception. Praise be!
4) Instead of agreeing with any point anywhere, you keep bringing the discussion into pointless argument territory.
- You can't just agree that Microsoft's security problems are a significant problem, and then go on to address how you think things will play of differently in the future; you have to dismiss everything and return to tit-for-tat good and evil associations. At this point in 2006, I think we should be able to look back a decade and laugh at both System 7 and WinNT, but you need to foster this bullshit idea that Microsoft is infallible as the Pope, and that its OS is under as much unwarranted persecution as Christmas in America. Thank you Mr O'Rilley.
What, you don't have Internet access to Google? Examples of easy admin vs. security, where security lost out:
LANMan clear text passwords
SMB authentication
Always on Windows messenger service (not IM, the original broadcast admin chit chat)
Other services installed wide open by default
Easy open file access, like say, the automatic C$ type admin shares
Asking for examples of where NT and DOS put ease of use ahead of security is like asking for examples of parts of the Titanic that sunk. What a retarded question.
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But wait -
When Apple designs the world's first windowing system with real alpha channel translucency, vector scaling everywhere, and windows as texture surfaces, it's a simple "slap" action?
Microsoft has been struggling to deliver their modern graphics subsystem over the last half decade! Why don't they ask Apple how to slap it in? Slap!! Windows Vista has Tiger graphics!
Of course, Apple didn't have Quartz on the back burner for 5 years, it was shipping. And it worked. Since then, they've added significant improvements.
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If you want to dial back to 1994, then yes: the Mac OS had a simple console OS. But was it a DOS app? Haha, hardly. Apple struggled from 1991 to 1996 to deliver something with modern operating system features, and then gave up and bought a proven enterprise class OS from NeXT. A decade later, successive versions of Mac OS X has shipped features Microsoft has only talked about since 2000.
Back to Windows: Microsoft delivered competitive OS features in NT 3.5, then watered them down in NT 4, and continued to bring in successive layers of legacy to get games working, DOS emulation, and further performance by weakening the original design principles of NT so that it would work as a Win95/98/Me replacement.
And since 2000, Microsoft hasn't delivered much at all.
Also, remember that the "from scratch" that Microsoft used to write Windows NT included such gems as the recently discovered WMF vulnerability, and other critical flaws like shatter attack Interactive Services, and the horrific shared services hack that Windows has to rely upon because launching a new process is so inefficient and expensive.
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The real issue for Microsoft is that Apple dicked away a half decade of development ten years ago, narrowly recovered from their Copland fiasco, and has since recovered to a much stronger position with a modern OS; Microsoft is still very much inside their half decade of developmental incompetence, their modern OS lead is a decade old and showing its age (as you pointed out), and all their risk lies ahead.
Sorry you don't like my writing style.
Unix file permissions are not what I had in mind when describing "modern security features." Instead, Mac OS X builds upon a fairly paranoid security model that also resulted in SSH, Kerberos, AES, etc. Much of the work on "how to provide security" has already been done. "All" Apple had to do was incorporate secure software and security principles that have already been audited and built by various BSD and other open source projects.
That model that gave us SSH is not the same model that Microsoft used to design, say, SMB way back when. Of course, Microsoft has security professionals who know how to build secure software; it's retrofitting it in that is so problematic.
As for OS X user security: no machine is secure from the actions of a privileged user. Since most OS X installs are run by non-security professionals logged in as administrative users, there is no end to the potential for users to download and execute potentially harmful code.
Nobody is blaming Windows for anything on the order of "trojans installed by administrators," as you troll with regard to Safari disk images. No OS could be reasonably usable if there was absolutely no potential for an administrator to do something unintended.
Window's notable security crises are caused by legacy code (or poorly written modern code) which - by faulty design - frequently allows remote users to exploit flaws that give them full control of everything. Window's ubiquity makes the prospect for actual (not merely theoretical) exploitation more common, and rewarding, so you are certainly right to say that
"when Microsoft does something like this, millions of machines get raped."
There is also a clear business model behind "raping" Windows boxes for spam delivery and virus distribution. But this should make security all the more of a priority for Microsoft. Their monopoly position also makes Microsoft more accountable for their errors, since they are clearly, as you point out, more likely to be actually exploited.
If the world was fully populated by Macs, malware writers would definitely be targeting the platform. But they wouldn't benefit from decades of rotten code written before we knew and cared anything about security. And they'd be facing all the security prowess of OpenBSD and the rest of the security community, not kicking through the wet toilet paper that Microsoft used in securing IE, Outlook, GDI, SMB, and every other corner of Windows.
You must be aware that everything (not just PC OS's) is potentially under attack from criminals: banks, telephone and data systems, cars, houses. If popularity alone brought about pants-down security exploits, we'd see all the big makers of everything going through the same embarrassment as Microsoft. But we don't. Occasionally, we see big companies screwing up, but nobody I can think of has perpetuated a system that fsks up their consumers on the level of Microsoft, beyond, say Big Tobacco.
A security model is like a business plan - you can't "not have one," although you might have a woefully inadequate one, or perhaps little thought given to one, before starting your project/business.
Microsoft's security model for NT gave more thought to making things convenient for administrators that to making products that would be resilient to outside attacks.
"Perfect" isn't ever an engineering goal. The problem with Windows NT/2000/XP and the legacy imported from Win3.1/95 is not that it "isn't perfect" but that little consideration has gone to real security audits and planning.
Microsoft (Gates) has stated before that their focus is on features, not bug fixes. Prior to the last half decade, Microsoft wasn't losing significant sales because of security problems. Today they are, both from Linux/UNIX on the server side and now Mac OS X on the the consumer desktop side.
Security has changed from a theoretical problem into an easy to comprehend one: your PC stops working, you get SPAM, you get scammed, you have to clean out spyware, etc.
Suddenly "security" has become a feature that sells, and Microsoft, without a comprehensive security plan in place, has had to face the daunting task of fixing a range of security problems in Windows products in a way that doesn't break other features.
Microsoft can employ all manner of best practices to tack on security in Vista, but as one poster described, adding security to Windows is like attempting to make cheesecloth waterproof using scotch tape.
If, 5 years ago, Microsoft had used their considerable clout as "THE OS VENDOR for PCs" to start over and rethink 'how Windows should work,' they could very likely have developed a new Windows product, available now, that could handily match or beat the security and other features in any desktop or server OS.
This would have required obsolescing a lot of legacy, but Microsoft very likely could have pulled it off. Instead, they announced a lot of vaporware with an availability that was perpetually two years out - for HALF A DECADE.
After five full years of Copland-style development efforts, they have dropped nearly all of their forward looking features and are now planning to deliver some significant security patches and a new graphics engine for Windows XP.
In the meantime, Apple, with a tiny fraction Microsoft's clout, market and developer resources, built Mac OS X with a strong focus on providing modern security features, a complete retrofitting and modernization of their existing legacy OS (Carbon), and a modernized incorporation of NeXT's object based frameworks. They released 5 major versions in that same timeframe, with more than 30 significant updates in between.
Vista's key features only match those Apple has delivered and refined over the last half decade. Microsoft has dropped from the "only real OS in town" to a "possible runner up" in the desktop OS market.
But far more problematically, Microsoft's Vista inherits tons of legacy that is ripe for exploitation. So while Microsoft can roll out miles of scotch tape, Window's core is still cheesecloth, and its ability to hold water will continue to be problematic.
You can speculate about new security "sandboxing," but Vista's new code is entirely unproven, and its old code is known to be problematic. That does not bode well for their security outlook over the next two years, just as Apple is rapidly ascending as a platform to be taken seriously.