Just spread the word. HTPCs sell themselves. It's just a matter of knowing what is possible.
I recommend HTPCs to people, and I point out that they don't need to buy new stuff. While it is nice to have DVI out and a video card that supports accelerated Flash, these are not required. Nor is the wireless keyboard/mouse or the special media centre software. You can just use an old machine. Windows XP and a web browser. It is easy.
Here in the UK, HTPCs have a second advantage beyond the convenience of on-demand viewing. If you only have a HTPC and no aerial connection, you don't have to pay your TV licence fee. You save at least £12/month - but you still get to watch most TV programmes, completely legally. And you save much more than that if having an HTPC means you can drop your satellite TV subscription.
I used to blame the politicians, but these days I think they're almost as powerless as the rest of us.
The No2ID campaigner Guy Herbert is quoted in the article as saying:
We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.
And that's it. These plans represent job security for civil servants. They mean bigger budgets, bigger offices, higher salaries, more staff. More bureaucrats will be needed to operate the system, to answer requests for information from it, and implement whatever mechanism of "accountability" is considered sufficient to safeguard privacy.
The people who are pushing this will never face an election. They will never be sacked. This is why the plans persist from government to government. Ministers come and go, but the civil service is permanent, and always attempting to expand. The bureaucrats lost their battle for ID cards, but they're still winning their war.
So, I think if we want to impose surveillance on anyone, we should start with the public servants. And the more responsibility they have, the more closely they should be watched. The only problem is, in order to do this, we're going to need to hire a few more bureaucrats...
Generally I think Opera is very good. Only a few sites have been a problem, and then only because of Flash. I have tried the Privoxy solution (suggested elsewhere) but found that it doesn't actually block very much. ODP is most likely exactly what I need.
Here's hoping. Some ad-heavy sites are almost unusable in Opera now, because of the sheer number of autoplaying Flash videos. Not mentioning any names...
Some confusion here. Latex is the next layer up. With Latex you have to use a text editor to write your source code, and then you "compile" it with Latex to get a PDF or whatever. You can use whatever you want as your text editor, even "ed".
I use "vim" for writing Latex source code. I know it's not the intention of the author, but his writing has challenged me to ask why I am still using "vim" when much better tools exist for writing documents (and programs). How can I laugh at his use of "ed", "the standard Unix editor" that dates back to the very beginning of Unix, when I too am using ancient software?
To be honest, I think it's habit now. I've learned to use "vim" well, and when I use Word and Visual Studio, the extra power tools that I get are not enough to make up for the lack of vim-ishness.
Counter-example: Macintosh computers. A hipster is only permitted to be without his Mac if he is carrying at least one iPhone. On a Mac, the only backwards, impractical tool in common use is iTunes.
That's very interesting. So another solution for the problems I've had with Flash is to get one of the GPUs listed on that page. Which would then be able to do hardware accelerated colourspace conversion -- in the way that Flash requires.
(This also explains why Adobe haven't solved the problem "properly", i.e. for all graphics cards, including the fairly old one that I'm currently using.)
I'd hope that Silverlight would do video properly, having been designed after it became clear that Flash was mostly being used as a video player. But I don't know for certain. Microsoft have their own share of bad design decisions.
Sadly, my local "Netflix" (Lovefilm) is still using Flash, as are the TV stations, and it has taken a HTPC upgrade to get reasonable performance. (The machine was fine for all other types of video content.)
I don't know why Flash can't do colourspace conversion in the other direction for apps intended as video players, i.e. convert static RGB format graphics, fonts and playback buttons into YUV space and then overlay them onto YUV video. This would allow Flash to make use of hardware acceleration for video. Software conversion would be a "one-time" operation instead of an "every frame" operation and Flash video playback would be almost as good as MPlayer/VLC/etc. But apparently that simple idea just can't be done. Meh.
Most of the on-demand video services use it, and for Flash, CPU power is very important.
Flash does colour space conversion in software due to a short-sighted legacy design decision, which is apparently irreversible. Therefore, a machine that can easily cope with hardware accelerated HD video will struggle with even SD video in Flash. You don't realise how useful hardware-accelerated colour space conversion is until you are forced to use the only modern video player that can't use it.
Flash performance is crucial question for any HTPC. If the machine can cope with Flash properly, it can cope with anything. But if it can't cope with Flash, then you have no access to a lot of on-demand video content, which sucks.
Apple is probably the only manufacturer with enough clout to force the on-demand video services to do it some other way - they'll submit special App Store applications just for AppleTV users - but that doesn't help anyone outside of the Apple ecosystem.
I feel that atheists often do not get what agnosticism is about. They do have faith; not faith that "there is no god" specifically, but rather faith that materialism is everything and there is no other level of reality. They may well be right, but there is no way to know. Hence agnosticism - literally "without mystic knowledge".
As to matters about ghosts and space teapots and unicorns - well, these are material rather than transcendant things, so if we searched everywhere and didn't find them, we could say for certain that they do not exist. However, if we searched the entire universe and found no god, we would only know that the material universe doesn't contain a god, which would not be the same as showing that there is no god.
Surprisingly, no. Archimedes actually used an initial version of the ARM architecture with 26 bit addressing. The high bits of the program counter register were used to store the CPU status and condition flags, giving an easy way to save/restore those flags across function calls. A clever trick, but unfortunately 64Mb of code address space wasn't enough for everyone, and so ARM moved to the fully 32-bit architecture in current use. For a transitional period, ARM CPUs supported both architectures, but that time is long gone now.
Sadly, this means that modern ARMs can only run Archimedes software through software emulation. I understand that a newer version of RISC OS does exist for the 32-bit architecture, but it's not compatible with older binaries. Programs have to be recompiled for it, and if written in assembly, partially rewritten! So, no "Sibelius 7" or "Lander"...
Amiga has been on the point of resurrection for nearly two decades now. It has never happened. The idea of an Apple-like rebirth was being seriously discussed in the late 90s: products were even planned. As a little historical curiousity, this video, Back for the Future, was doing the rounds amongst Amigans. It even seemed like it might happen for a while. But the "year of the Amiga desktop" has been and gone.
Like you say, Commodore is just a brand now. You can find Commodore machines in PC World. They are Windows PCs.
How could that possibly surprise anyone? Every real native culture in history -- Africans, Indians, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines -- reacted to their European colonial conquerors in exactly the same way!
I thought someone might mention that. And indeed I have thought about it too. But then I think about Sigourney Weaver's character (don't know the character's name) and ask why her knowledge of history didn't motivate her to find a peaceful solution. If you were in her shoes, you'd do that, right? Because you'd know that the Na'vi couldn't beat the humans. Maybe they could drive away the mining colony, who clearly weren't equipped to fight a war, but since the Unobtainium was crucial to human survival, the humans would return with whatever it took to defeat the Na'vi. Knowing all that, she never tried to explain it. She was there for years and taught them English, but never taught any human history, and never gave any explanation of the importance of the Unobtainium or the purpose of the mining colony. Why not? Did she try to explain? Did they refuse to listen?
I think the answer is covered by "space_jake" when he says "Same reason Bond villians never just put a bullet in Bond's head." If the film were a shades-of-grey historical account, you'd have the Na'vi's refusal to understand the humans, coupled with Weaver's inability to communicate, plus the desperation of the humans, struggling to survive but trying to remain human and not simply take things without asking. All of these things would come together to create the situation shown in the film. That would be more interesting and more realistic, but I suppose it wouldn't be as much fun as a clear divide between good guys and bad guys.
I think it's quite reasonable that the Unobtainium mining project might have been running for a century or more. A huge amount of effort had been put into it.
What's really surprising is that the Na'vi learned English, but never bothered to try to understand what the humans wanted in all the time they'd been there. If the Na'vi had just bothered to figure this out, then some sort of arrangement could surely have been reached. The humans made every effort to communicate with the Na'vi, even dressing up as them with the avatars, but it was all for nothing, as the Na'vi refused to believe that humans would ever attack them.
That's something that really didn't sit right with me. The Na'vi understood about hunting; the idea that a predator kills to survive. Could they not recognise the humans as predators, the Unobtanium as prey, and themselves as "in the way"? Could they not respond in one of the obvious ways - compromise, negotiation?
As it is, the Na'vi actions basically condemned them to future attacks from the humans, ones that would be much more lethal than mining explosives and light gunships.
That sounds better. I think the council here is pretty useless. I've complained about problems related to bins before and run into a wall of incomprehension.
I have noticed that some houses have larger bins than others, so I assume there is some way to get an upgrade.
For large waste items, including the things that can be recycled, the refuse/recycling dump is the only option, and it's only set up for car owners. Mind you, it was exactly the same even in the days of weekly collections - you always had to make your own arrangements for the big stuff.
In England it is quite rare (but not unusual) to see little collections of black refuse bags by the roadside in residential areas. Each bag has a small white ticket affixed to it, notifying the owner that their rubbish won't be collected unless it fits completely within the approved bin on the right day, which is once every two weeks. If the approved bin is overflowing, if its lid will not close, then the bags will be pulled out of it and left behind, each with a ticket attached. Sometimes they will remain there for weeks. Ironically, this is done "to help the environment". It certainly helps the local rat population; other parts of the environment may not be so lucky. The usual response is to put your rubbish in other people's bins, minus identifying documents, so they will have to deal with the mess that's left outside their houses when the city doesn't collect it (I don't do this, but it has happened to me a few times).
That sounds very clever, but it's wrong. Markets are actually an excellent example of intelligent design, because they are man-made. The emergent behaviour throughout the entire system is unpredictable and unplanned - but so what? The market is formed by its participants, all of whom are human, and all of whom are (to some extent) intelligent.
I think your mistake is thinking that intelligent design needs to encompass every aspect of a system. Not so. It merely describes the origins of that system. And the origin of a market is most definitely intelligent design. You could also have used the Internet as your example and got the same result - again, it's an intelligently designed system with chaotic and unplanned emergent behaviour.
I liked your example about the steel industry, but this really isn't a good stick to beat the fundies with, because they already recognise that created systems can be unpredictable. It's even written into their theology! Humans have free will and are allowed to disobey God - a great example of a creation that can step outside the plan of the designer.
I absolutely agree with what you've written about Greenpeace. Coal and oil power plants should be a tiny minority by now: almost all of the electrical energy used throughout the world should come from nuclear power stations. But alas it is not so. Greenpeace could have lobbied for nuclear power, but it didn't. It did its damndest to stop it.
On a related matter, I was dismayed to discover that the UK's Green Party are still fanatically anti-nuclear, in a way that many environmentalists have ceased to be, since it's become clear that (1) renewable energy isn't always the right solution, and (2) everything else other than nuclear puts an unmanageable amount of pollution right into the atmosphere. Their arguments against this are, to be blunt, really stupid.
For example, the UK Green Party spent page 10 of their 2010 manifesto arguing that nuclear power is bad because the number of people required to produce each watthour is much smaller than wind, coal and oil power stations. It didn't seem to have occured to them that this is a powerful argument for nuclear. Without even a hint of irony, this is immediately followed by a message about the benefits of energy efficiency.
You'd almost begin to think that they like pollution, since what would be the point of Greenpeace or a Green Party if there was no pollution?
That's interesting. For the benefit of other readers, it should be clarified that this attack is still possible even if the password is hashed, because a given hash value must be compared to the known correct value (as you stated below).
However the situation may be even worse than you suggest. The behaviour of the CPU may change as a result of setting that flag, perhaps causing its timing to change. For instance a cache miss may (or may not) occur, or memory accesses may be reordered, or a branch might be mispredicted.
From what you are saying, it sounds as if all of the password-related software needs to be very carefully designed to avoid any data dependent timing, because data dependence might expose information about the correct password (or password hash). This is difficult to do; even if a minimum execution time is enforced in some way, there will still be timing jitter, and that could also be data dependent.
Intuitively, I wouldn't think differences of a few hundred clock cycles would be detectable over the Internet, but maybe if you gather enough measurements... Interesting stuff anyway.
Ah, but plenty of people in the UK pay for Sky TV. It isn't cheap, and it's "more crap from a Murdoch company", but many think it's worth it. Look for satellite dishes on houses as you travel through the UK; they're very common. Although you can get free to air programmes via satellite, strangely the dish design is almost always the sort "given away" for "free" with a Sky TV receiver (and minimum subscription).
So it's not as if charging for "Murdoch crap" is always doomed to fail. Murdoch has done very well out of charging for his "crap". It is so crap that many people will pay twice - once for the BBC, which they may never watch, and again for the Sky TV subscription. And most of the Sky channels have adverts, so (in a way) they're actually paying three times. Presumably this is the sort of response he is hoping for, and if the price is right, maybe it will even make money one day.
Disclaimer, lest I am mistaken for a shill. I don't have Sky TV. Had it once, was poor value for money. I'm thinking of dropping the TV licence too, same reason.
Fair question. The issue is not that the code isn't debuggable, but rather that no two executions are the same. Consider trying to find an obscure bug by comparing two executions, as I recently needed to do with the QEMU simulator.
Just ignoring memory addresses isn't enough because their values have significance within the simulator's JIT engine. For example, if two translated basic blocks are far apart, then a different sort of jump is needed to go from one to the other in some sorts of machine code. ASLR means that subtly different code is produced in each case, hiding the actual bug within a haystack of irrelevant differences.
Fortunate, then, that it's easy to disable ASLR. My contention is that, as a security feature, it's pretty pointless.
Agreed, seems like security theatre to me. ASLR makes legitimate debugging a pain, and what's the benefit? It's the computing equivalent of airport security.
Furthermore, DEP sounds good, but my eyes were opened recently to return-oriented programming, which allows arbitrary exploits to run without ever modifying any executable code. And ASLR/DEP are useless when the exploits run as managed code anyway: a common attack vector ever since the first MS Word macro viruses.
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Just spread the word. HTPCs sell themselves. It's just a matter of knowing what is possible.
I recommend HTPCs to people, and I point out that they don't need to buy new stuff. While it is nice to have DVI out and a video card that supports accelerated Flash, these are not required. Nor is the wireless keyboard/mouse or the special media centre software. You can just use an old machine. Windows XP and a web browser. It is easy.
Here in the UK, HTPCs have a second advantage beyond the convenience of on-demand viewing. If you only have a HTPC and no aerial connection, you don't have to pay your TV licence fee. You save at least £12/month - but you still get to watch most TV programmes, completely legally. And you save much more than that if having an HTPC means you can drop your satellite TV subscription.
I used to blame the politicians, but these days I think they're almost as powerless as the rest of us.
The No2ID campaigner Guy Herbert is quoted in the article as saying:
We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.
And that's it. These plans represent job security for civil servants. They mean bigger budgets, bigger offices, higher salaries, more staff. More bureaucrats will be needed to operate the system, to answer requests for information from it, and implement whatever mechanism of "accountability" is considered sufficient to safeguard privacy.
The people who are pushing this will never face an election. They will never be sacked. This is why the plans persist from government to government. Ministers come and go, but the civil service is permanent, and always attempting to expand. The bureaucrats lost their battle for ID cards, but they're still winning their war.
So, I think if we want to impose surveillance on anyone, we should start with the public servants. And the more responsibility they have, the more closely they should be watched. The only problem is, in order to do this, we're going to need to hire a few more bureaucrats...
Thanks. This is not something I knew about Opera.
Generally I think Opera is very good. Only a few sites have been a problem, and then only because of Flash. I have tried the Privoxy solution (suggested elsewhere) but found that it doesn't actually block very much. ODP is most likely exactly what I need.
Here's hoping. Some ad-heavy sites are almost unusable in Opera now, because of the sheer number of autoplaying Flash videos. Not mentioning any names...
Some confusion here. Latex is the next layer up. With Latex you have to use a text editor to write your source code, and then you "compile" it with Latex to get a PDF or whatever. You can use whatever you want as your text editor, even "ed".
I use "vim" for writing Latex source code. I know it's not the intention of the author, but his writing has challenged me to ask why I am still using "vim" when much better tools exist for writing documents (and programs). How can I laugh at his use of "ed", "the standard Unix editor" that dates back to the very beginning of Unix, when I too am using ancient software?
To be honest, I think it's habit now. I've learned to use "vim" well, and when I use Word and Visual Studio, the extra power tools that I get are not enough to make up for the lack of vim-ishness.
Counter-example: Macintosh computers. A hipster is only permitted to be without his Mac if he is carrying at least one iPhone. On a Mac, the only backwards, impractical tool in common use is iTunes.
Thanks, I will remember this when it's time to replace the current HTPC. I am already convinced this is a better option than the Apple route.
That's very interesting. So another solution for the problems I've had with Flash is to get one of the GPUs listed on that page. Which would then be able to do hardware accelerated colourspace conversion -- in the way that Flash requires.
(This also explains why Adobe haven't solved the problem "properly", i.e. for all graphics cards, including the fairly old one that I'm currently using.)
I'd hope that Silverlight would do video properly, having been designed after it became clear that Flash was mostly being used as a video player. But I don't know for certain. Microsoft have their own share of bad design decisions.
Sadly, my local "Netflix" (Lovefilm) is still using Flash, as are the TV stations, and it has taken a HTPC upgrade to get reasonable performance. (The machine was fine for all other types of video content.)
I don't know why Flash can't do colourspace conversion in the other direction for apps intended as video players, i.e. convert static RGB format graphics, fonts and playback buttons into YUV space and then overlay them onto YUV video. This would allow Flash to make use of hardware acceleration for video. Software conversion would be a "one-time" operation instead of an "every frame" operation and Flash video playback would be almost as good as MPlayer/VLC/etc. But apparently that simple idea just can't be done. Meh.
How is its performance with Flash videos?
Most of the on-demand video services use it, and for Flash, CPU power is very important.
Flash does colour space conversion in software due to a short-sighted legacy design decision, which is apparently irreversible. Therefore, a machine that can easily cope with hardware accelerated HD video will struggle with even SD video in Flash. You don't realise how useful hardware-accelerated colour space conversion is until you are forced to use the only modern video player that can't use it.
Flash performance is crucial question for any HTPC. If the machine can cope with Flash properly, it can cope with anything. But if it can't cope with Flash, then you have no access to a lot of on-demand video content, which sucks.
Apple is probably the only manufacturer with enough clout to force the on-demand video services to do it some other way - they'll submit special App Store applications just for AppleTV users - but that doesn't help anyone outside of the Apple ecosystem.
For me, the impossibility of defining "god" is a good reason to be agnostic.
It's not about evidence (or lack thereof), it's about philosophy - specifically, the logical impossibility of knowing everything about existence.
Yes, this is why I am agnostic, too.
I feel that atheists often do not get what agnosticism is about. They do have faith; not faith that "there is no god" specifically, but rather faith that materialism is everything and there is no other level of reality. They may well be right, but there is no way to know. Hence agnosticism - literally "without mystic knowledge".
As to matters about ghosts and space teapots and unicorns - well, these are material rather than transcendant things, so if we searched everywhere and didn't find them, we could say for certain that they do not exist. However, if we searched the entire universe and found no god, we would only know that the material universe doesn't contain a god, which would not be the same as showing that there is no god.
Surprisingly, no. Archimedes actually used an initial version of the ARM architecture with 26 bit addressing. The high bits of the program counter register were used to store the CPU status and condition flags, giving an easy way to save/restore those flags across function calls. A clever trick, but unfortunately 64Mb of code address space wasn't enough for everyone, and so ARM moved to the fully 32-bit architecture in current use. For a transitional period, ARM CPUs supported both architectures, but that time is long gone now.
Sadly, this means that modern ARMs can only run Archimedes software through software emulation. I understand that a newer version of RISC OS does exist for the 32-bit architecture, but it's not compatible with older binaries. Programs have to be recompiled for it, and if written in assembly, partially rewritten! So, no "Sibelius 7" or "Lander"...
Amiga has been on the point of resurrection for nearly two decades now. It has never happened. The idea of an Apple-like rebirth was being seriously discussed in the late 90s: products were even planned. As a little historical curiousity, this video, Back for the Future, was doing the rounds amongst Amigans. It even seemed like it might happen for a while. But the "year of the Amiga desktop" has been and gone.
Like you say, Commodore is just a brand now. You can find Commodore machines in PC World. They are Windows PCs.
How could that possibly surprise anyone? Every real native culture in history -- Africans, Indians, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines -- reacted to their European colonial conquerors in exactly the same way!
I thought someone might mention that. And indeed I have thought about it too. But then I think about Sigourney Weaver's character (don't know the character's name) and ask why her knowledge of history didn't motivate her to find a peaceful solution. If you were in her shoes, you'd do that, right? Because you'd know that the Na'vi couldn't beat the humans. Maybe they could drive away the mining colony, who clearly weren't equipped to fight a war, but since the Unobtainium was crucial to human survival, the humans would return with whatever it took to defeat the Na'vi. Knowing all that, she never tried to explain it. She was there for years and taught them English, but never taught any human history, and never gave any explanation of the importance of the Unobtainium or the purpose of the mining colony. Why not? Did she try to explain? Did they refuse to listen?
I think the answer is covered by "space_jake" when he says "Same reason Bond villians never just put a bullet in Bond's head." If the film were a shades-of-grey historical account, you'd have the Na'vi's refusal to understand the humans, coupled with Weaver's inability to communicate, plus the desperation of the humans, struggling to survive but trying to remain human and not simply take things without asking. All of these things would come together to create the situation shown in the film. That would be more interesting and more realistic, but I suppose it wouldn't be as much fun as a clear divide between good guys and bad guys.
I think it's quite reasonable that the Unobtainium mining project might have been running for a century or more. A huge amount of effort had been put into it.
What's really surprising is that the Na'vi learned English, but never bothered to try to understand what the humans wanted in all the time they'd been there. If the Na'vi had just bothered to figure this out, then some sort of arrangement could surely have been reached. The humans made every effort to communicate with the Na'vi, even dressing up as them with the avatars, but it was all for nothing, as the Na'vi refused to believe that humans would ever attack them.
That's something that really didn't sit right with me. The Na'vi understood about hunting; the idea that a predator kills to survive. Could they not recognise the humans as predators, the Unobtanium as prey, and themselves as "in the way"? Could they not respond in one of the obvious ways - compromise, negotiation?
As it is, the Na'vi actions basically condemned them to future attacks from the humans, ones that would be much more lethal than mining explosives and light gunships.
That sounds better. I think the council here is pretty useless. I've complained about problems related to bins before and run into a wall of incomprehension.
I have noticed that some houses have larger bins than others, so I assume there is some way to get an upgrade.
For large waste items, including the things that can be recycled, the refuse/recycling dump is the only option, and it's only set up for car owners. Mind you, it was exactly the same even in the days of weekly collections - you always had to make your own arrangements for the big stuff.
In England it is quite rare (but not unusual) to see little collections of black refuse bags by the roadside in residential areas. Each bag has a small white ticket affixed to it, notifying the owner that their rubbish won't be collected unless it fits completely within the approved bin on the right day, which is once every two weeks. If the approved bin is overflowing, if its lid will not close, then the bags will be pulled out of it and left behind, each with a ticket attached. Sometimes they will remain there for weeks. Ironically, this is done "to help the environment". It certainly helps the local rat population; other parts of the environment may not be so lucky. The usual response is to put your rubbish in other people's bins, minus identifying documents, so they will have to deal with the mess that's left outside their houses when the city doesn't collect it (I don't do this, but it has happened to me a few times).
That sounds very clever, but it's wrong. Markets are actually an excellent example of intelligent design, because they are man-made. The emergent behaviour throughout the entire system is unpredictable and unplanned - but so what? The market is formed by its participants, all of whom are human, and all of whom are (to some extent) intelligent.
I think your mistake is thinking that intelligent design needs to encompass every aspect of a system. Not so. It merely describes the origins of that system. And the origin of a market is most definitely intelligent design. You could also have used the Internet as your example and got the same result - again, it's an intelligently designed system with chaotic and unplanned emergent behaviour.
I liked your example about the steel industry, but this really isn't a good stick to beat the fundies with, because they already recognise that created systems can be unpredictable. It's even written into their theology! Humans have free will and are allowed to disobey God - a great example of a creation that can step outside the plan of the designer.
I absolutely agree with what you've written about Greenpeace. Coal and oil power plants should be a tiny minority by now: almost all of the electrical energy used throughout the world should come from nuclear power stations. But alas it is not so. Greenpeace could have lobbied for nuclear power, but it didn't. It did its damndest to stop it.
On a related matter, I was dismayed to discover that the UK's Green Party are still fanatically anti-nuclear, in a way that many environmentalists have ceased to be, since it's become clear that (1) renewable energy isn't always the right solution, and (2) everything else other than nuclear puts an unmanageable amount of pollution right into the atmosphere. Their arguments against this are, to be blunt, really stupid.
For example, the UK Green Party spent page 10 of their 2010 manifesto arguing that nuclear power is bad because the number of people required to produce each watthour is much smaller than wind, coal and oil power stations. It didn't seem to have occured to them that this is a powerful argument for nuclear. Without even a hint of irony, this is immediately followed by a message about the benefits of energy efficiency.
You'd almost begin to think that they like pollution, since what would be the point of Greenpeace or a Green Party if there was no pollution?
That's interesting. For the benefit of other readers, it should be clarified that this attack is still possible even if the password is hashed, because a given hash value must be compared to the known correct value (as you stated below).
However the situation may be even worse than you suggest. The behaviour of the CPU may change as a result of setting that flag, perhaps causing its timing to change. For instance a cache miss may (or may not) occur, or memory accesses may be reordered, or a branch might be mispredicted.
From what you are saying, it sounds as if all of the password-related software needs to be very carefully designed to avoid any data dependent timing, because data dependence might expose information about the correct password (or password hash). This is difficult to do; even if a minimum execution time is enforced in some way, there will still be timing jitter, and that could also be data dependent.
Intuitively, I wouldn't think differences of a few hundred clock cycles would be detectable over the Internet, but maybe if you gather enough measurements... Interesting stuff anyway.
Ah, but plenty of people in the UK pay for Sky TV. It isn't cheap, and it's "more crap from a Murdoch company", but many think it's worth it. Look for satellite dishes on houses as you travel through the UK; they're very common. Although you can get free to air programmes via satellite, strangely the dish design is almost always the sort "given away" for "free" with a Sky TV receiver (and minimum subscription).
So it's not as if charging for "Murdoch crap" is always doomed to fail. Murdoch has done very well out of charging for his "crap". It is so crap that many people will pay twice - once for the BBC, which they may never watch, and again for the Sky TV subscription. And most of the Sky channels have adverts, so (in a way) they're actually paying three times. Presumably this is the sort of response he is hoping for, and if the price is right, maybe it will even make money one day.
Disclaimer, lest I am mistaken for a shill. I don't have Sky TV. Had it once, was poor value for money. I'm thinking of dropping the TV licence too, same reason.
Fair question. The issue is not that the code isn't debuggable, but rather that no two executions are the same. Consider trying to find an obscure bug by comparing two executions, as I recently needed to do with the QEMU simulator.
Just ignoring memory addresses isn't enough because their values have significance within the simulator's JIT engine. For example, if two translated basic blocks are far apart, then a different sort of jump is needed to go from one to the other in some sorts of machine code. ASLR means that subtly different code is produced in each case, hiding the actual bug within a haystack of irrelevant differences.
Fortunate, then, that it's easy to disable ASLR. My contention is that, as a security feature, it's pretty pointless.
Agreed, seems like security theatre to me. ASLR makes legitimate debugging a pain, and what's the benefit? It's the computing equivalent of airport security.
Furthermore, DEP sounds good, but my eyes were opened recently to return-oriented programming, which allows arbitrary exploits to run without ever modifying any executable code. And ASLR/DEP are useless when the exploits run as managed code anyway: a common attack vector ever since the first MS Word macro viruses.