you know, I've been working through the idea of a "hacking 101" course for pre-university students. Think about the concepts to you need to understand how to write a "simple" stack overflow ; all about how programs execute, how system calls work, machine language, probably network programming. Let alone the actual C and ASM hackery skills. More advanced hacks like infecting dynamic libraries etc require even more knowledge. By the end of it, you'd come out at least knowing if you liked computer science. I wish someone had done this for me when I was 16 or 17. Take the class over a few weeks, introducing one concept a week and then have a go at writing that part of your exploit.
It has been suggested to me that I might as well just teach a basic operating systems class, but it doesn't have to same ring to it...
EFI isn't processor neutral. It's x86 only at this point.
This is plainly wrong. I'm not sure there are actually any x86 processors using it -- the only systems currently in production with it are Itanium based ones.
It is an open standard as much as openfirmware is.
Though I realise you are being sarcastic, there is obviously some misunderstanding of how this works as evidenced by other posts in this thread.
EFI is firmware; from the moment you switch on your machine EFI is in control of it. You can quite optionally have EFI Applications that are stored on a non-volatile storage area (probably a hard disk) in a modified FAT partition. Seeing as you wanted to know, these are in Microsoft Portable Executable format, which is a form of COFF. But you can easily develop them under (ELF based) linux with gnu-efi. It's just like a normal C program, you can allocate memory etc etc. Elilo is the EFI boot loader and it works pretty much like lilo.
You can even have EFI drivers that extended EFI to do other cool things.
yeah but even if you have a shared account the numbers on the cards are different, so you can see who is spending what. at least that's the way it is with my amex card that is shared with my g/f.
I got "sucked in" to this because I wanted the 'au' part to symbolise australian, but didn't have a registered business name/number at the time, which you require to get a.com.au address. This also means you have to file tax returns, etc etc. Although their model is basically pure profit, I would have been willing to keep the domain if I thought that the 'au' was attracting a few extra people without all the overhead of having.com.au.
So I bought it, and then about a week later my Dad rang me up and said "someone gave me a business card with www.address.au.com on it, is that a typo?". he didn't even try typing it into the browser.
after that I knew that it was never going to work...
yeah, and here is a good site about it. You can even download it from here, i guess it is classed as abandonware.
I remember you could play "realistic" mode where the shuttle platform moves out in real time, which is about 3 days I think. now that's realism!
if you bought it, it came with a *huge* wall chart with all the switches. The two real life shuttle disasters look positivley pedestrian compared to some of my botched landings in that game.
oh, sorry to reply to myself but i might add there were plenty of apple laptops there running linux, mine included. The other notable Apple laptop user was Rusty Russell, writer of IP tables and more recently the new kernel module architecture.
I attended Jeff Bates's talk at linux.conf.au where he gave his presentation using OS X. The only presenter all week who dared to use a non-Linux platform.
or changing your password to something different every month or two
well, you can make the computer force you to do this, like happens here. It's monthly here though, and you can't recycle passwords for something like 18 months.
The upshot of this is that pretty much everyone in this building currently has the password "sep2002" or some slight variation of. too much of a good thing and all that.
mplayer already does this. You can even get debian packages, which when the realplayer program is installed will just automagically work to play rm files.
Obviously some privacy protections would be needed, but it is surely possible.
There is no privacy where the electoral roll is concerned
Australian Electoral Roll FAQ
How can I purchase or view the electoral roll?
Whilst the Commonwealth Electoral Roll is not currently available on the Internet, it is a public document and is available free of charge for viewing at every AEC State Head Office and Divisional Office.
Hard copy (printed) rolls
Individual copies of the Electoral Roll can be purchased from the Divisional Returning Officer for the relevant Division. The State Head Offices can also supply State-wide sets or various rolls within a State. Rolls are currently priced at $27.10 each (including GST).
Terribly dangerous -- I once witnessed a horrific "accident" where a book-reading nerd found his fantasy/D&D book so fascinating he couldn't put it down to visit the urinal.
Oblivious to the impending danger of two far cooler students, he was unprepared for the inevitable shoulder barge.
The nerd learns a valuable lesson : book + urinal = wet in the worst possible way.
I always thought these stories were made up until it happened to me...
We had an external party complain that they were receiving filthy emails from the place I was working for about "male sex changes". A terrible business that.
Turns out the problem was the header had been stamped by our mail server, msexchange.corp.com.au, and was somehow showing up in her client.
I've been subscribed to the plex86 mailing list for around 6 months and there really isn't anything of interest going on. What happened was the lead developer, Kevin Lawton, was sacked from Mandrake and disappeared. As far as I can tell he didn't leave anyone with check-in access to the CVS tree, and the whole thing just stopped.
Not that it was ever that great, it really is a pain to install and try and use compared to Vmware. It's now moved to here (for one of those very Stallman-esqe reasons sourceforge wasn't "free" enough or something) and apparently Drew is working on getting the latest CVS with patches up and running, but don't hold your breath.
it could be a good project, just needs some more effort from people. i personally thought there would have been more developer interest.
Slashdot Mirror
ltrace will allow you to peek into what libraries are being called on Linux.
you know, I've been working through the idea of a "hacking 101" course for pre-university students. Think about the concepts to you need to understand how to write a "simple" stack overflow ; all about how programs execute, how system calls work, machine language, probably network programming. Let alone the actual C and ASM hackery skills. More advanced hacks like infecting dynamic libraries etc require even more knowledge. By the end of it, you'd come out at least knowing if you liked computer science. I wish someone had done this for me when I was 16 or 17. Take the class over a few weeks, introducing one concept a week and then have a go at writing that part of your exploit.
...
It has been suggested to me that I might as well just teach a basic operating systems class, but it doesn't have to same ring to it
or, get apt-rpm from, say http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org, and then from the command line
sudo apt-get install openmotif21
and it will be magically installed.
add
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4
Section "DRI"
mode 0666
EndSection
to
EFI isn't processor neutral. It's x86 only at this point.
This is plainly wrong. I'm not sure there are actually any x86 processors using it -- the only systems currently in production with it are Itanium based ones.
It is an open standard as much as openfirmware is.
Though I realise you are being sarcastic, there is obviously some misunderstanding of how this works as evidenced by other posts in this thread.
EFI is firmware; from the moment you switch on your machine EFI is in control of it. You can quite optionally have EFI Applications that are stored on a non-volatile storage area (probably a hard disk) in a modified FAT partition. Seeing as you wanted to know, these are in Microsoft Portable Executable format, which is a form of COFF. But you can easily develop them under (ELF based) linux with gnu-efi. It's just like a normal C program, you can allocate memory etc etc. Elilo is the EFI boot loader and it works pretty much like lilo.
You can even have EFI drivers that extended EFI to do other cool things.
In essence, it's like having DOS built right in.
yeah but even if you have a shared account the numbers on the cards are different, so you can see who is spending what. at least that's the way it is with my amex card that is shared with my g/f.
I got "sucked in" to this because I wanted the 'au' part to symbolise australian, but didn't have a registered business name/number at the time, which you require to get a .com.au address. This also means you have to file tax returns, etc etc. Although their model is basically pure profit, I would have been willing to keep the domain if I thought that the 'au' was attracting a few extra people without all the overhead of having .com.au.
So I bought it, and then about a week later my Dad rang me up and said "someone gave me a business card with www.address.au.com on it, is that a typo?". he didn't even try typing it into the browser.
after that I knew that it was never going to work...
It may just be the only OSS tool in the motion picture industry.
I know sweep, an opensource sound editor is used widely, and in fact was partly funded by Pixar.
yeah, and here is a good site about it. You can even download it from here, i guess it is classed as abandonware.
I remember you could play "realistic" mode where the shuttle platform moves out in real time, which is about 3 days I think. now that's realism!
if you bought it, it came with a *huge* wall chart with all the switches. The two real life shuttle disasters look positivley pedestrian compared to some of my botched landings in that game.
oh, sorry to reply to myself but i might add there were plenty of apple laptops there running linux, mine included. The other notable Apple laptop user was Rusty Russell, writer of IP tables and more recently the new kernel module architecture.
I attended Jeff Bates's talk at linux.conf.au where he gave his presentation using OS X. The only presenter all week who dared to use a non-Linux platform.
or changing your password to something different every month or two
well, you can make the computer force you to do this, like happens here. It's monthly here though, and you can't recycle passwords for something like 18 months.
The upshot of this is that pretty much everyone in this building currently has the password "sep2002" or some slight variation of. too much of a good thing and all that.
mplayer already does this. You can even get debian packages, which when the realplayer program is installed will just automagically work to play rm files.
yeah great except it gets twice as loud for your neighbour thanks to the positive interference.
Obviously some privacy protections would be needed, but it is surely possible.
There is no privacy where the electoral roll is concerned Australian Electoral Roll FAQ
How can I purchase or view the electoral roll?
Whilst the Commonwealth Electoral Roll is not currently available on the Internet, it is a public document and is available free of charge for viewing at every AEC State Head Office and Divisional Office.
Hard copy (printed) rolls
Individual copies of the Electoral Roll can be purchased from the Divisional Returning Officer for the relevant Division. The State Head Offices can also supply State-wide sets or various rolls within a State. Rolls are currently priced at $27.10 each (including GST).
Terribly dangerous -- I once witnessed a horrific "accident" where a book-reading nerd found his fantasy/D&D book so fascinating he couldn't put it down to visit the urinal.
Oblivious to the impending danger of two far cooler students, he was unprepared for the inevitable shoulder barge.
The nerd learns a valuable lesson : book + urinal = wet in the worst possible way.
yeah but it really needs a good text editor before it will become mainstream
The latest firmware (5.07a) has a hold feature -- hold down the ON key when it is on, and you get a display
> SELECT
[] HOLD
While still pressing ON press STOP and it will toggle to "Hold On".
It's a bit unintuitive but it works
I won't bore you will how to actually find it but we did this sort of thing too. It wasn't pulled until the year after we left. crazy days
PC stands for "Paper Cartridge", which on some HP printers were just that, like a big atari game full of paper you could slide in and out.
It means load more paper of size letter into the paper cartridge.
It's quite easy to get around the "argument list too long" error
this linux journal article covers it quite nicely.
I always thought these stories were made up until it happened to me ...
We had an external party complain that they were receiving filthy emails from the place I was working for about "male sex changes". A terrible business that.
Turns out the problem was the header had been stamped by our mail server, msexchange.corp.com.au, and was somehow showing up in her client.
I've been subscribed to the plex86 mailing list for around 6 months and there really isn't anything of interest going on. What happened was the lead developer, Kevin Lawton, was sacked from Mandrake and disappeared. As far as I can tell he didn't leave anyone with check-in access to the CVS tree, and the whole thing just stopped.
Not that it was ever that great, it really is a pain to install and try and use compared to Vmware. It's now moved to here (for one of those very Stallman-esqe reasons sourceforge wasn't "free" enough or something) and apparently Drew is working on getting the latest CVS with patches up and running, but don't hold your breath.
it could be a good project, just needs some more effort from people. i personally thought there would have been more developer interest.
here's a good start
http://www.ai.mit.edu/~vona/bass/bass.html