how is the reduction in disk cache size resulting from having no virtual memory to speak of affecting your runtime?
That might be a concern for Vista users, but IIRC Windows XP and earlier use a tiny disk cache of only ~8MB anyway, a holdover from the olden days. I don't think you're going to accidentally squeeze that out of RAM.
I think there's a registry edit you can make to enlarge it, though.
On machines that fail WGA, Auto-update functions fine; manually updating from the Microsoft website is disabled.
However, XP's autoupdate is not particularly reliable with service packs. It's more likely to sit in the tray saying "click here to install SP2" than actually install itself, even if the machine is set to "Automatically download and install updates". And users always ignore tray warnings; it's just another bubble between Weatherbug and VirusProtectPro.
Couldn't the registrars run that algorithm ahead of time and ban (or track down) new registrations for those domains?
Not without the seed/magic number. Without it, they're reduced to manipulating the system clock on a compromised box to predict the domains.
There's also the problem of the sheer number of 8-character domains srizbi can generate. 4 new domains every 3 days for an infinite number of years. You could just ban/all/ 8 character domains, but no one wants to do that.
Fireeye sunk over $1500 into registering a couple hundred of those domains before they figured out that the domains were dynamically generated based on the date.
I don't think the burger comparison is even worth pursuing; that was a $5 burger at a fast food outlet, and theoretically an employee who took the time to make a good one could have given you a burger that looked like the advertised one.
As a member of the exclusive club of former fast-food employees, I can tell you that it's not only theoretically possible, but occasionally required! Fast food places are regularly audited by their parent company - if you're working the kitchen when corporate comes to audit, you'll be expected to assemble a burger that looks exactly like the advertisement, down to the placement of the pickles and those neat overlapping onions, in under 15 seconds. If you screw it up, the auditor will ream you, and show you how to do it right.
In Apple's case, no corporate auditor could have recreated that advertisement.
Because Srizbi has an algorithm that generates new pseudo-random domain names based on the current date. If the hard-coded C&C server ever goes down, the bot herder can calculate what domain names Srizbi will be looking to in the near future, and register them to reclaim the botnet (and push an update that changes the hard-coded server)
problem with blue frog was that, while it did work, it leeched other people's bandwidth to perform dDoS with.
You're wrong.
the bluefrog client submitted one complaint report for each relevant spam that client's machine received. If you didn't receive that spam and forward it to Blue Frog, your box wouldn't send out anything. Likewise, no one else's box would send out complaints for spam that you received.
Some could describe it as a ddos, but blue frog actually throttled itself to keep from knocking people off the internet. Complaints were sent out gradually over a couple of days, rather than having all the clients respond at once.
In the course of invesigating Srizbi, researchers had 250,000 bots under their control for a span of a few days. Sending the uninstall command was one of several ways they could have crippled this small portion of Srizbi. But honestly, no citizen has the legal authority to make changes to hundreds of thousands of other people's PCs. Maybe if some law enforcement agencies would get involved, that would be nice. Or at least give blanket immunity to researchers who would do so.
Srizbi has an algorithm to generate a pseudo-random domain name from the current date, and looks to that domain for command & control instructions.
The author of the bot has the same algorithm, and can calculate the domain names days and weeks out. Thus, if their c&c server is knocked off the internet, the bot herder just has to register a few domain names that Srizbi will be looking to in the near future.
This has nothing to do with the domain names of the bots themselves, or of the target machines.
You mean when you call your ISP's support line, they actually make someone try and fix the problem?
My ISP's answer is always "we'll open a ticket and get back to you by e-mail". Then, a few hours later, an E-mail comes saying they're closing my support ticket and denying a problem exists. And the problem will continue for days.
That, or they'll give some answer acknowledging a problem exists, but refusing to do anything about it. Only pulling 300kbps over your 5Mbps connection? Sorry, we sold you bandwidth, not throughput.
The lack of Adblock Plus is all that's keeping me from completely uninstalling Firefox on my windows box.
After browsing under the protection of Adblock for so long, it's nearly impossible to go back. I load up Chrome, and am utterly astounded at the sheer amount of crap on my screen (and noise from my speakers, what the hell is up with that crap) Although in Firefox, I really should have noticed the growing swaths of white-space, and realized that it was only empty because I was blocking the ads.
Or rather, they just didn't install a second browser at all, since the only browser kinda HAS to be the default.
I believe he was making a historical reference. IE was not bundled in desktop Windows until 98, and and in the workstation version until Windows 2000. 95 and NT 4 shipped without any browser; if one was provided at all, it was by an OEM or an ISP. Otherwise, you would have to buy a boxed copy in a store, for Real Money, or find a way to download a copy of the increasingly obsolete Mosaic.
Back then, most ISP's that did not have their own monolithic AOL style interface would give you Netscape 2 or 3. MS countered by trying to get OEMs to ship IE 2/3 on new Windows 95 machines. After a service pack or two they bundled it with OEM copies of Windows 95, with no uninstaller (but you could manually delete it). They also bundled early versions of IE with Plus, Office, Encarta, and all the other stuff that people usually order on a new PC, to get OEMs to put it on.
I was curious about this a while back. Turns out my battery charger (the cheapest one available at Fry's) does not draw enough power to even register on my Kill-A-Watt. Wattage reads as 0, and KwH after a full 8 hour charge of 2 dead NiMh AA batteries reads 0.00.
I think it's safe to say it's a negligible amount.
We should see a lower power draw than the GameCube since the components have undergone a die shrink
But it's not JUST die-shrunk. It's also clocked significantly faster, which should bring power consumption back up.
CPU Gamecube: 485 MHZ, 180nm Wii: 730 MHZ, 90nm
GPU: Gamecube: 160MHZ, 180nm Wii: 240 MHZ, 90nm
Die shrink or no, that's ~50% faster. As you mention, the bluetooth and 802.11 radios are also non-trival power draws that have been added.
It's worth mentioning that 16.4w for a 700 Mhz G3 with a reasonably fully featured graphics chip is not too shabby, even if the graphics are limited to 480p.
I'll plug my old GCN into a kill-a-watt sometime tonight and post the results.
You have a system in London that supports 4.5 million riders a day, in a city of 7.3 million. That's nearly 2/3 of the population.
Here in America, most of our major metropolitan areas have abortive mass transit systems that support closer to 1/10th of their population. Diesel buses are the workhorses of our transit systems and carry the vast majority of our transit commuters. Most are standing-room-only, thanks to the gas prices of the past few years and infrequent service. Most of our metro areas are just now starting to build small light-rail transit lines to supplement the bus service.
Be thankful you don't live in the Atlanta or Phoenix areas. At least you can get to "some back of beyond town" on your system. On ours, you're lucky if it's even theoretically possible to do a weekday commute.
The delay in bringing up the backup server was probably because they were waiting for the old IP to get flushed out of DNS server caches. They probably knew it wasn't going to last long before they got shut off, so they wanted to make sure every bot could find them while they were up.
It appears that the new C&C server listed in the article, 62.176.17.200, has been blackholed by my ISP's routers. I'm on a Qwest "business/office" ADSL line. Any similar reports from other ISP's?
Or is it actually down?
If most American ISPs are blocking it, Rustock is dead, or at least in a coma. TFA implied that the IP address was being distributed to the bot, not the domain name.
This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.
For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.
It's a good thing ASRock only makes desktop motherboards, then.
I mean, theoretically you could install their utility on any machine that supports S3 or S4, but they've most likely tied it to their hardware somehow.
Actually, Radio Shack's electronic components are almost pure profit. Local/regional management tries to discourage sales of them, however, because Radio Shack uses "Dollars per ticket" internally as their primary performance metric. Component sales, despite being marked up 1,000% or more, drag the dollars per ticket number way down and hurt the bonuses of management.
Methanol is freely available, and is used as a fuel in many racing cars, from the professional levels to the hobbyists. This is because it doesn't ignite as easily, thus allowing engine modifications that increase compression to levels that would ordinarily require 110+ octane gasoline, cheaply increasing performance. All that is required to use it in a gasoline engine is a (large) adjustment to the air/fuel ratio.
You can buy it by the barrel or by the gallon at any number of places. The biggest danger with it is that a methanol flame is colorless; it burns invisibly. At racing events, this is actually seen as a safety feature, as a methanol fire produces no black clouds of smoke to obscure the view of drivers and safety crews.
It does make you wonder what the 30% "other" is though.
Everything with less than 1% gets lumped in there. that "Vinyl AC'97 Audio", which is the VIA chipset integrated audio, barely made 1%, says a lot. Everyone who bought an off-brand generic 5.1 card to replace their 2 channel onboard audio is probably in the "other" category, with the wide variety of sound cards availiable. Also, see how many times the Realtek 5.1 chip shows up, which is probably the most popular onboard audio, under different names? Manufacturers lack of consistency with sound card naming are bumping their own cards into "other".
Take a look at 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio monitors, which they claim make up 26% of all monitors. And within widescreen 34% claim 24" or larger (24" @ 15%+ over 24" @ 19%).
That equates to 9% of all users using a 24"+ screen. Yet if you compare that to the primary display resolution table, a mere 2.29% are running 1920x1200 or larger. 1920x1200 is the native resolution on 24"-26" screens, with 30" being 2560x1600 (and not represented at all in the chart).
9% of people using modestly sized flat-panel TV's as monitors while they game would easily explain that.
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how is the reduction in disk cache size resulting from having no virtual memory to speak of affecting your runtime?
That might be a concern for Vista users, but IIRC Windows XP and earlier use a tiny disk cache of only ~8MB anyway, a holdover from the olden days. I don't think you're going to accidentally squeeze that out of RAM.
I think there's a registry edit you can make to enlarge it, though.
On machines that fail WGA, Auto-update functions fine; manually updating from the Microsoft website is disabled.
However, XP's autoupdate is not particularly reliable with service packs. It's more likely to sit in the tray saying "click here to install SP2" than actually install itself, even if the machine is set to "Automatically download and install updates". And users always ignore tray warnings; it's just another bubble between Weatherbug and VirusProtectPro.
Couldn't the registrars run that algorithm ahead of time and ban (or track down) new registrations for those domains?
Not without the seed/magic number. Without it, they're reduced to manipulating the system clock on a compromised box to predict the domains.
There's also the problem of the sheer number of 8-character domains srizbi can generate. 4 new domains every 3 days for an infinite number of years. You could just ban /all/ 8 character domains, but no one wants to do that.
Fireeye sunk over $1500 into registering a couple hundred of those domains before they figured out that the domains were dynamically generated based on the date.
I don't think the burger comparison is even worth pursuing; that was a $5 burger at a fast food outlet, and theoretically an employee who took the time to make a good one could have given you a burger that looked like the advertised one.
As a member of the exclusive club of former fast-food employees, I can tell you that it's not only theoretically possible, but occasionally required! Fast food places are regularly audited by their parent company - if you're working the kitchen when corporate comes to audit, you'll be expected to assemble a burger that looks exactly like the advertisement, down to the placement of the pickles and those neat overlapping onions, in under 15 seconds. If you screw it up, the auditor will ream you, and show you how to do it right.
In Apple's case, no corporate auditor could have recreated that advertisement.
The Estonia based Command and Control servers have been kicked offline.
Only one server is still online, based in Frankfurt, Germany; name registered through the Cayman Islands.
This is not the server that's hard-coded in to the new Srizbi patch, just one of the backup servers supplying it.
source
Because Srizbi has an algorithm that generates new pseudo-random domain names based on the current date. If the hard-coded C&C server ever goes down, the bot herder can calculate what domain names Srizbi will be looking to in the near future, and register them to reclaim the botnet (and push an update that changes the hard-coded server)
Technical Details of Srizbis domain generation algorithm
problem with blue frog was that, while it did work, it leeched other people's bandwidth to perform dDoS with.
You're wrong.
the bluefrog client submitted one complaint report for each relevant spam that client's machine received. If you didn't receive that spam and forward it to Blue Frog, your box wouldn't send out anything. Likewise, no one else's box would send out complaints for spam that you received.
Some could describe it as a ddos, but blue frog actually throttled itself to keep from knocking people off the internet. Complaints were sent out gradually over a couple of days, rather than having all the clients respond at once.
Srizbi will, in fact, accept an uninstall command from a bogus C&C server.
Lots of stuff about Srizbi
In the course of invesigating Srizbi, researchers had 250,000 bots under their control for a span of a few days. Sending the uninstall command was one of several ways they could have crippled this small portion of Srizbi. But honestly, no citizen has the legal authority to make changes to hundreds of thousands of other people's PCs. Maybe if some law enforcement agencies would get involved, that would be nice. Or at least give blanket immunity to researchers who would do so.
You misunderstand.
Srizbi has an algorithm to generate a pseudo-random domain name from the current date, and looks to that domain for command & control instructions.
The author of the bot has the same algorithm, and can calculate the domain names days and weeks out. Thus, if their c&c server is knocked off the internet, the bot herder just has to register a few domain names that Srizbi will be looking to in the near future.
This has nothing to do with the domain names of the bots themselves, or of the target machines.
So, 10% actually ARE addicted to video games?
Sounds like video games are DANGEROUS and should be HEAVILY REGULATED as a schedule 1 drug like Marijuana.
You mean when you call your ISP's support line, they actually make someone try and fix the problem?
My ISP's answer is always "we'll open a ticket and get back to you by e-mail". Then, a few hours later, an E-mail comes saying they're closing my support ticket and denying a problem exists. And the problem will continue for days.
That, or they'll give some answer acknowledging a problem exists, but refusing to do anything about it. Only pulling 300kbps over your 5Mbps connection? Sorry, we sold you bandwidth, not throughput.
The lack of Adblock Plus is all that's keeping me from completely uninstalling Firefox on my windows box.
After browsing under the protection of Adblock for so long, it's nearly impossible to go back. I load up Chrome, and am utterly astounded at the sheer amount of crap on my screen (and noise from my speakers, what the hell is up with that crap) Although in Firefox, I really should have noticed the growing swaths of white-space, and realized that it was only empty because I was blocking the ads.
Or rather, they just didn't install a second browser at all, since the only browser kinda HAS to be the default.
I believe he was making a historical reference. IE was not bundled in desktop Windows until 98, and and in the workstation version until Windows 2000. 95 and NT 4 shipped without any browser; if one was provided at all, it was by an OEM or an ISP. Otherwise, you would have to buy a boxed copy in a store, for Real Money, or find a way to download a copy of the increasingly obsolete Mosaic.
Back then, most ISP's that did not have their own monolithic AOL style interface would give you Netscape 2 or 3. MS countered by trying to get OEMs to ship IE 2/3 on new Windows 95 machines. After a service pack or two they bundled it with OEM copies of Windows 95, with no uninstaller (but you could manually delete it).
They also bundled early versions of IE with Plus, Office, Encarta, and all the other stuff that people usually order on a new PC, to get OEMs to put it on.
The PS3 has rechargeable battery powered controllers
But as I recall, they charge off of USB ports on the PS3, the same ones wired controllers plug into.
And for those USB ports to be powered, the PS3 has to be on, with the associated ~170w power draw.
Of course, you can just plug them in to any old USB port; I doubt many people actually leave their PS3 on to charge their controllers from it.
I was curious about this a while back. Turns out my battery charger (the cheapest one available at Fry's) does not draw enough power to even register on my Kill-A-Watt. Wattage reads as 0, and KwH after a full 8 hour charge of 2 dead NiMh AA batteries reads 0.00.
I think it's safe to say it's a negligible amount.
I'll plug my old GCN into a kill-a-watt sometime tonight and post the results.
Done.
Gamecube: 0w powered off, 22w idle, 22w while in use.
Or, lets put it another way: an Apple II also plays games and consumes a lot less power than a Wii. Is it more efficient?
I highly doubt that an Apple II drew less than 16.4w.
You do know that the Wii is a die-shrunk GameCube
We should see a lower power draw than the GameCube since the components have undergone a die shrink
But it's not JUST die-shrunk. It's also clocked significantly faster, which should bring power consumption back up.
CPU
Gamecube: 485 MHZ, 180nm
Wii: 730 MHZ, 90nm
GPU:
Gamecube: 160MHZ, 180nm
Wii: 240 MHZ, 90nm
Die shrink or no, that's ~50% faster. As you mention, the bluetooth and 802.11 radios are also non-trival power draws that have been added.
It's worth mentioning that 16.4w for a 700 Mhz G3 with a reasonably fully featured graphics chip is not too shabby, even if the graphics are limited to 480p.
I'll plug my old GCN into a kill-a-watt sometime tonight and post the results.
You have a system in London that supports 4.5 million riders a day, in a city of 7.3 million. That's nearly 2/3 of the population.
Here in America, most of our major metropolitan areas have abortive mass transit systems that support closer to 1/10th of their population. Diesel buses are the workhorses of our transit systems and carry the vast majority of our transit commuters. Most are standing-room-only, thanks to the gas prices of the past few years and infrequent service. Most of our metro areas are just now starting to build small light-rail transit lines to supplement the bus service.
Be thankful you don't live in the Atlanta or Phoenix areas. At least you can get to "some back of beyond town" on your system. On ours, you're lucky if it's even theoretically possible to do a weekday commute.
I think you are exactly right.
The delay in bringing up the backup server was probably because they were waiting for the old IP to get flushed out of DNS server caches. They probably knew it wasn't going to last long before they got shut off, so they wanted to make sure every bot could find them while they were up.
It appears that the new C&C server listed in the article, 62.176.17.200, has been blackholed by my ISP's routers. I'm on a Qwest "business/office" ADSL line. Any similar reports from other ISP's?
Or is it actually down?
If most American ISPs are blocking it, Rustock is dead, or at least in a coma. TFA implied that the IP address was being distributed to the bot, not the domain name.
This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.
For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.
It's a good thing ASRock only makes desktop motherboards, then.
I mean, theoretically you could install their utility on any machine that supports S3 or S4, but they've most likely tied it to their hardware somehow.
whats the profit margin on a resistor?
Actually, Radio Shack's electronic components are almost pure profit. Local/regional management tries to discourage sales of them, however, because Radio Shack uses "Dollars per ticket" internally as their primary performance metric. Component sales, despite being marked up 1,000% or more, drag the dollars per ticket number way down and hurt the bonuses of management.
Methanol is freely available, and is used as a fuel in many racing cars, from the professional levels to the hobbyists. This is because it doesn't ignite as easily, thus allowing engine modifications that increase compression to levels that would ordinarily require 110+ octane gasoline, cheaply increasing performance. All that is required to use it in a gasoline engine is a (large) adjustment to the air/fuel ratio.
You can buy it by the barrel or by the gallon at any number of places. The biggest danger with it is that a methanol flame is colorless; it burns invisibly. At racing events, this is actually seen as a safety feature, as a methanol fire produces no black clouds of smoke to obscure the view of drivers and safety crews.
It does make you wonder what the 30% "other" is though.
Everything with less than 1% gets lumped in there. that "Vinyl AC'97 Audio", which is the VIA chipset integrated audio, barely made 1%, says a lot. Everyone who bought an off-brand generic 5.1 card to replace their 2 channel onboard audio is probably in the "other" category, with the wide variety of sound cards availiable. Also, see how many times the Realtek 5.1 chip shows up, which is probably the most popular onboard audio, under different names? Manufacturers lack of consistency with sound card naming are bumping their own cards into "other".
Take a look at 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio monitors, which they claim make up 26% of all monitors. And within widescreen 34% claim 24" or larger (24" @ 15%+ over 24" @ 19%).
That equates to 9% of all users using a 24"+ screen. Yet if you compare that to the primary display resolution table, a mere 2.29% are running 1920x1200 or larger. 1920x1200 is the native resolution on 24"-26" screens, with 30" being 2560x1600 (and not represented at all in the chart).
9% of people using modestly sized flat-panel TV's as monitors while they game would easily explain that.