Unix grew up in a multiuser university setting with hundreds of accounts and every freshman dreaming of hacking into the registrar's computer and hacking his (not "or her" here sadly) grades. Any application that needed to be root had to jump through so many hoops and permissions to get installed most developers assumed that the application will run without root privilege. That is the root of security in Unix
Windows grew up as a personal machine used by one user, in a corporate setting. Early PC administration was not centralized and most admins allowed root access to most applications. So almost all the app developers assumed root access. People familiar with work PCs bought the same OS for their homes too. There was this huge conflict of interest between the app-developers and the OS. Big turf battles between app-developers. Root access was common, so each app booted out the other and installed itself as the default handler. Fundamental reason for user losing control over their PC is the assumption "it is normal for applications to run as root".
Android is growing up in a different environment. People are aware of security issues, privacy issues, bad sites, malware dishing sites etc. There is no assumption that the user must give unlimited access/privilege to the applications. So security is likely to be better than windows, but not as strong as unix. The user is the system-administrator here. Most sys-admins are lazy. In the university unix world, lazy admins refuse to install apps that needed root access. In the user-is-the-admin world, the lazy users give in to the demands of the apps more easily. But they are not likely to be as lassie-faire as they were with windows.
In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords.
They are still blaming bugs in code. Pretending to be mistakes made by low level programming flunkies. The problem was using an unsalted hash that allowed them to do a simple dictionary attack. Further even the top guys were using very simple passwords. Used the same password for multiple accounts. Continued to leave other accounts and usernames unlocked even after knowing one account using that password has been compromised.
No. The real problem was that the managers and the top dogs drawing top salaries were clueless idiots. Pretending that it was some kind of stupid bug left in code by some low level programmer shows how disconnected these bozos are from reality.
As far as individual users are concerned Microsoft does not care if they pirate it or not, as long as they use Ms Office. But they care about the corporate accounts. So many corporations have bought perpetual license for Office 97. Office 2000, Office 2005 etc. They are all running them in virtual WinXP created by VNC or some such virtualization product. They don't see any reason to upgrade Win, or even get security updates because, all the security policy is imposed and handled by the virtualization server. So pretty soon huge corporate accounts are going to get off the upgrade treadmill.
I expect a huge fight between Microsoft and the corporations over whether or not the original license allows them to use the product on a virtual machine. The compromise is going to be one last payment to Microsoft to regularize the licenses and that would be the last golden egg laid by the MsOffice goose. After that it will be cooked I suppose.
Use the thingomatic 3-D printer to print out a thingomatic 3-D printer! I think this will be one of the first thing to be solved if we are going to colonize mars. Then we need to pack it inside a robot that will make the raw material for 3-D printer plastic too. One kind of robot will make may be one kind of raw material but with self replicating capacity and another robot another raw material. These robots would be programmed to have an innate urge to reproduce and replicate themselves. They would eventually be programmed to fight with one another and steal raw material from one another. Since the whole 3D-printer-self-replicating-robot is made of the same material, one robot would just consume another robot for raw materials. And whichever kind of robot is best in acquiring raw material in any given circumstances, will win and endure. Seed mars or a distant planet with a few of them, and a few million years later we can just go there and harvest all the raw material we need for our 3D printers!
OMG! Now I see it. Quick, they are going to come and harvest us. The self replicating raw material producing robot is what we call bacteria. We are what they want to harvest. Run! Hide! Do something!
Can the sandboxing be done in such a way that all the data written by FlashPlayer in local storage can be erased when it goes out of scope? Every invocation of flash player will be on a freshly cleared local storage and one flash run will not be able to retrieve cookies and other persistent data?
An old prof told me that everything is a straight line in the log-log paper. You can literally draw any conclusion you want once you choose the axes to be logarithmic.
When Galileo invented the telescope, pointed it to the sky and mapped more stars than anyone before him (or since, he still holds the record for the number of stars cataloged) most people objected saying, "well this tube seems to be showing many interesting things. But what is the guarantee it is showing the real thing? What if it is producing illusions?". Even when pointed to terrestrial objects and showed that it is always showing the real thing, there were doubts. His lenses had terrible spherical aberration and chromatic aberration and had very heavy rainbow fringes on bright objects and things were shown upside down. One could almost forgive the bishops and the cardinals distrusting the instrument, and saying they will believe only things that they can see with their eye.
Fast forward 400 years, images captured on a charge coupled device producing pixels from light gathered by giant telescopes is considered "direct imaging" and is somehow more reliable and more worthy of our trust than the Doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation!
What do most people do after searching? They do something. Send an email, sell stock buy bonds, book a vacation... The next research project by Google is, it will do it for you. It already has all the log in credentials and your buy/sell/consume pattern in. So just sit back and Google will live your life for you.
Instead of having bugs in our programs, we are going to have programs in bugs. What would happen if it supports recursion? Is it possible we humans have been looking down the call stack instead of up? OMG indeed. OMG is just one step up the call stack! OMG'sG!!!!
The Hindu concept of even mountains, planets and even the universe having a finite life, a birth and a death but endlessly in cycles do not sound so goofy, right?
Use mod points on stories that interest you, but you are not likely to be a poster. Listen more than you talk. Read more than you write. You will have ample opportunities to use your mod points to improve the threads where you are not contributing. And other mods will raise your invaluable comments on the threads you do post. Or lower it if it is not as great as you think it is. Fair is fair.
Looks like the lawyers of Microsoft were anticipating this move and were itching for a fight. They have sued the entire internet for infringing on their trademark.Net
That liquor control board's antiquated database can be accessed only using an old IE6 client. So that little terminal shown on the right is actually Linux machine running IE6 under WINE:-)
Yes, at that time, intel chips were not as powerful as sparc chips. May be I should have said, intel chips with linux caught up to the speed of power of sparc chips. Again intel chips R&D was spread over much larger number of customers compared to sparc. Thus though Moore's Law was helping both the chips, Intel has much more cash to take advantage of it.
When Microsoft was chewing into the market share of Sun's unix workstation, it fought a short sighted battle. OS vs OS. Server vs Server. But Microsoft had an unending money supply through its monopoly in the MS-Office franchise. Microsoft could simply wait it out in a slugfest. Then Linux got ported into intel. The server market was being chewed on both ends and it simply did not have any viable options left. He is just looking for scape goats in the form of open source and the community. It realized it very late and tried to use StarOffice but never had the strategic vision to use it effectively.
Google is doing it right. Its google-docs does not do much, in terms of bells and whistles it pales when compared to Ms-Office. But it is well positioned based on a simple truth. 90% of the people need only 10% of the features of full fledged Ms-Office. Give that 10% free and effectively deny Ms-Office the mind-share of 90% of the people. Force Microsoft to interoperate with a significant part of this 90%. Give customers of Microsoft some ammunition in price negotiation. Anything that will make Microsoft play defense in the Office arena, is the resource it can not spend in fighting Google. It is ably helped by Microsoft that has promoted to leading positions people who won the corporate desktop market. Like Civil War generals fighting the war using Napoleonic tactics against machine guns, or the WW-I generals fighting that war using Civil War lessons, the management of Microsoft is fighting the consumer market war using corporate desktop war tactics.
Coming back to Sun, it was effectively done in by amortization. The cost of development and research of intel chips was spread over so many more customers compared to the sparc chips. The same way cost of development of Windows was spread over a much larger number of customers. When there is an order of magnitude difference between you and your competitor in terms of potential for amortization of cost of R&D, you should have the vision to react early and react decisively. For all the high salaries paid to these MBA types, they did not see it coming.
I'll grant you I am Monday-morning-quarter-backing. But I not getting Sunday-after-noon-quarterbacking salaries either. Scott McNealy got paid to see this coming. He failed. Miserably.
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Windows grew up as a personal machine used by one user, in a corporate setting. Early PC administration was not centralized and most admins allowed root access to most applications. So almost all the app developers assumed root access. People familiar with work PCs bought the same OS for their homes too. There was this huge conflict of interest between the app-developers and the OS. Big turf battles between app-developers. Root access was common, so each app booted out the other and installed itself as the default handler. Fundamental reason for user losing control over their PC is the assumption "it is normal for applications to run as root".
Android is growing up in a different environment. People are aware of security issues, privacy issues, bad sites, malware dishing sites etc. There is no assumption that the user must give unlimited access/privilege to the applications. So security is likely to be better than windows, but not as strong as unix. The user is the system-administrator here. Most sys-admins are lazy. In the university unix world, lazy admins refuse to install apps that needed root access. In the user-is-the-admin world, the lazy users give in to the demands of the apps more easily. But they are not likely to be as lassie-faire as they were with windows.
In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords.
They are still blaming bugs in code. Pretending to be mistakes made by low level programming flunkies. The problem was using an unsalted hash that allowed them to do a simple dictionary attack. Further even the top guys were using very simple passwords. Used the same password for multiple accounts. Continued to leave other accounts and usernames unlocked even after knowing one account using that password has been compromised.
No. The real problem was that the managers and the top dogs drawing top salaries were clueless idiots. Pretending that it was some kind of stupid bug left in code by some low level programmer shows how disconnected these bozos are from reality.
I expect a huge fight between Microsoft and the corporations over whether or not the original license allows them to use the product on a virtual machine. The compromise is going to be one last payment to Microsoft to regularize the licenses and that would be the last golden egg laid by the MsOffice goose. After that it will be cooked I suppose.
It is French? Go figure. I could not find a page titled "Do" neither.
OMG! Now I see it. Quick, they are going to come and harvest us. The self replicating raw material producing robot is what we call bacteria. We are what they want to harvest. Run! Hide! Do something!
Any excess salt left over after building the plant will be given to Gawker to help them improve their salted password hashes.
Can the sandboxing be done in such a way that all the data written by FlashPlayer in local storage can be erased when it goes out of scope? Every invocation of flash player will be on a freshly cleared local storage and one flash run will not be able to retrieve cookies and other persistent data?
The movie is going to have 17 species of finches? And ground dwelling sea going lizards?
Just go to the Hometowne Buffet, why bother to dig all the way to China?
Cleverly fooled ya! The real combination is 12345 not 123456
An old prof told me that everything is a straight line in the log-log paper. You can literally draw any conclusion you want once you choose the axes to be logarithmic.
Typo buddy. occultation http://onelook.com/?w=occultation&last=oscultation&loc=spell1
Fast forward 400 years, images captured on a charge coupled device producing pixels from light gathered by giant telescopes is considered "direct imaging" and is somehow more reliable and more worthy of our trust than the Doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation!
What do most people do after searching? They do something. Send an email, sell stock buy bonds, book a vacation ... The next research project by Google is, it will do it for you. It already has all the log in credentials and your buy/sell/consume pattern in. So just sit back and Google will live your life for you.
Let me be the first to welcome our programmed bug overlords in Soviet America where bugs have programs in Beowulf cluster.
Instead of having bugs in our programs, we are going to have programs in bugs. What would happen if it supports recursion? Is it possible we humans have been looking down the call stack instead of up? OMG indeed. OMG is just one step up the call stack! OMG'sG!!!!
The Hindu concept of even mountains, planets and even the universe having a finite life, a birth and a death but endlessly in cycles do not sound so goofy, right?
Use mod points on stories that interest you, but you are not likely to be a poster. Listen more than you talk. Read more than you write. You will have ample opportunities to use your mod points to improve the threads where you are not contributing. And other mods will raise your invaluable comments on the threads you do post. Or lower it if it is not as great as you think it is. Fair is fair.
it'll be 9/11 times a hundred.
What? 900/11 ? That is 81.81818181818181818181818...
Looks like the lawyers of Microsoft were anticipating this move and were itching for a fight. They have sued the entire internet for infringing on their trademark .Net
That liquor control board's antiquated database can be accessed only using an old IE6 client. So that little terminal shown on the right is actually Linux machine running IE6 under WINE :-)
What makes you think political right disapproves of her for this? In fact they eulogize her even more for being able to spin her way out of it.
Yes, at that time, intel chips were not as powerful as sparc chips. May be I should have said, intel chips with linux caught up to the speed of power of sparc chips. Again intel chips R&D was spread over much larger number of customers compared to sparc. Thus though Moore's Law was helping both the chips, Intel has much more cash to take advantage of it.
Google is doing it right. Its google-docs does not do much, in terms of bells and whistles it pales when compared to Ms-Office. But it is well positioned based on a simple truth. 90% of the people need only 10% of the features of full fledged Ms-Office. Give that 10% free and effectively deny Ms-Office the mind-share of 90% of the people. Force Microsoft to interoperate with a significant part of this 90%. Give customers of Microsoft some ammunition in price negotiation. Anything that will make Microsoft play defense in the Office arena, is the resource it can not spend in fighting Google. It is ably helped by Microsoft that has promoted to leading positions people who won the corporate desktop market. Like Civil War generals fighting the war using Napoleonic tactics against machine guns, or the WW-I generals fighting that war using Civil War lessons, the management of Microsoft is fighting the consumer market war using corporate desktop war tactics.
Coming back to Sun, it was effectively done in by amortization. The cost of development and research of intel chips was spread over so many more customers compared to the sparc chips. The same way cost of development of Windows was spread over a much larger number of customers. When there is an order of magnitude difference between you and your competitor in terms of potential for amortization of cost of R&D, you should have the vision to react early and react decisively. For all the high salaries paid to these MBA types, they did not see it coming.
I'll grant you I am Monday-morning-quarter-backing. But I not getting Sunday-after-noon-quarterbacking salaries either. Scott McNealy got paid to see this coming. He failed. Miserably.
Steve Ballmer was seen pleading plaintively at the merciless slashdot crowd.