Even Microsoft's FUD doesn't assert that Adobe would sue them saying they can't use PDF, only that Adobe might sue them saying that Microsoft can't bundle the PDF creation ability into an existing market-dominant product but instead must sell it separately.
This "excessive prompting" is never complained about with OS X, or within Linux.
Plenty of the people who have complained, that I've seen, have been people who have used either OS X or Linux and complained that the Vista beta implementation of the feature was clumsier and more intrusive than the implementation of similar security functionality on those non-Windows platforms.
Being similar in outline is not the same thing as being identical in implementation.
Or at least, as a taxpayer I should be getting a kickback. They are, of course, using both bandwidth and power that should be going to the PBS broadcasts.
PBS isn't owned by the taxpayers, it is a private non-profit (and the stations are, generally, themselves separate private non-profits).
Why should you be getting a kickback?
. Understand this: spam and viruses will propigate through any message transfer protocol that will ever be invented.
That's true, but so what? You act as though pointing out that no system will every be completely perfect in this regard was equivalent to saying that no system could ever be substantially better than the existing system in this area so as to warrant a change.
The fixes for e-mail likely will also occur in-flight... there's too much momentum, and too many transactions dependent on e-mail for it to stop, then go.
I'm not so sure that's true; I suspect e-mail will be around with incremental, "in-flight" attempts at fixes for some time, but I also think that sooner or later its going to be suprisingly suddenly displaced, but not by something whose main focus is as an "e-mail replacement".
Instead, by something that takes a radically different approach to information sharing, that would subsume the function of lots of different computing and communication technologies. But I don't know what that thing will look like.
If there is any reality to Microsoft's expectation of a suit, the inclusion of ps2pdf in those OS's has no parallel to it, since the speculated suit is an antitrust suit, which is based not only on the action of the defendant but their market-dominant position.
A point people consistently seem to miss when discussing actual or potential antitrust actions against Microsoft, resulting in spurious analogies like this.
The dpkg --configure -a did, as it seemed, fix the PCMCIA hang, and all I had to do to fix the video problem was apt-get install nvidia-glx.
Relatively painless upgrade with minimal downtime. I'm happy.
And even then it would make sense to use plain text to collaborate on the *content* of the document, and then have one person do the 'typesetting' in an appropriate application once the content is complete. Content update/edits would go back to the plain text, and then re-typeset the new version.
Good luck convincing people to give up Word for TeX, sensible as your idea is.
Since the protection is not protecting the virus-writer's copyright-protected material (as the virus-writer doesn't own the user's documents), I don't think its a violation of the DMCA.
Went home at lunch to check on my Kubuntu upgrade (done with Adept) and had the same problem -- went online (on the same system with the hung-up upgrade -- which, itself, was a surprising and welcome capability) and found a suggestion solution, reboot to recovery mode and use dpkg --configure -a. Seems to have solved the problem, but now I've got some kind of, I assume, X problem (Kubuntu starts up fine up to -- I think -- the point of loading the GUI logon screen, which flashes -- again, I think, not quick enough to see for sure what it is -- and then returns to the splash screen. When I go home again tonight I'll have to try to figure that one out.
Ctrl-Alt-Del does a proper, orderly shutdown, though, so the OS appears to be working. If the remaining problem is straightforward, it'll still probably be my easiest OS upgrade since the days of pre-hard-disk DOS when "upgrading" meant you stick in the DOS 3.0 diskette rather than the DOS 2.11 one.
But it wasn't as painless as I was hoping it would be.
Public key cryptography does not work against a man in the middle attack.
Insofar as this is true, its irrelevant. There is no key exchange here; you simply keep the private key, and put the public key in the code, and use it to encrypt the software.
When the files are being encrypted by software running on your computer, such a virus is inevitably vulnerable.
How, precisely, is a virus that does what is described above vulnerable?
To overcome this flaw, the virus writer would have to send the files to a pre-known IP address for off-site encryption (which among other problems would probably be a pretty noticeable activity). Doing so would presumably also expose the author to risk that the computer in question (and presumably he himself) could be siezed.
Well, even if there was a need to do off-site encryption (as noted above, they aren't), it would make more sense to use some other exploit to take control of remote systems, and have those remote systems act as the encryption servers, rather than use a PC easily traceable to the virus creator as the encryption server.
That doesn't really seem to change the meaning to me. He very explicitly says the PS3 will satisfy consumer need for a computer.
I don't think that's accurate. He was saying the PS3 will be the primary entertainment platform, including for online entertainment, for most of its users (he specific refers to entertainment functions) and that, therefore, Sony doesn't need to have a presence in the PC universe to compete with Microsoft's "Live Anywhere" to make the PS3 competitive with the Xbox 360 in overall experience. He says "We don't need the PC" where "We = Sony", and in the context of questions about the need to compete with MS's Live Anywhere that goes beyond the console platform.
He was not saying, there, that people who use PS3's won't have any need or use for a PC. He's saying that their use of a PC won't be significant in regard to the PS3's competitive position with regard to the Xbox 360, and that Live Anywhere isn't something Sony feels it needs to worry about.
Now, there may be reason to argue with that position, as well, but he's not claiming the PS3 will displace all use of the PC, or that PS3 users will no longer need PCs at all.
It's ironic that everyone is critizing MS for improving security features, yet everyone is also criticizing them for their lack of security.
I think what everyone is criticizing MS for with regard to UAC is starting with the advantage in usability at the price of security, and then copying what various Linux distros and OS X, etc., do to enhance security, doing it badly, and less usably than even those OS's that were previously behind in usability.
And still, from some comments, falling short of those other systems in several areas of security.
I fault the OS for not giving sufficient granularity of permissions for applications.
Appropriate "sandbox" security model depends on what an application is supposed to be doing; any application that provides a scripting facility ought to provide an appropriate internal security model as well. Arbitrary scripts should not have access to the full range of permissions available to the application running them unless the user has specifically elected to allow that, or unless the application itself provides no dangerous capacities in the first place.
The fact that it can run script on a client machine once a user opens the document is the entire point of the "virus".
Any document format with a scripting facility provides the capacity to a script on the client machine when a user opens a document. If that's all it takes to have a "virus", then every macro is a "virus".
Just because all it does is download porn, doesnt mean that it couldnt download a shell script that wipes out the MBR on your hard disk.
OTOH, it also doesn't demonstrate that it could download such a shell script and cause it to be executed without user intervention.
So its not really a "proof of concept" as regards that particularly capacity at all. The fact that it doesn't show that you can't do it is meaningless, that tells you nothing you didn't know without the so-called "proof of concept".
Does this bypass the "do you want to run macros?" because if so, it's a virus, if not, it's a stupid user virus.
Running macros in a word-processor document shouldn't (by default) be "all-or-nothing"; they ought to run in a secure sandbox that requires user intervention to perform dangerous tasks like, say, modifying the global template (or, arguably, any external file), even if the user account has permission to run them.
That it infects the global template when opened from a document file is the actual "proof of concept" here, and if it really doesn't require user intervention, in the default configuration of StarOffice or OOo, to (1) allow macros to run, and (2) allow a macro running in one document to affect the global template, then there is a real, though I would suspect fairly simple to fix, problem; document macros need to run, by default, in a more tightly-restricted sandbox than that.
If I wanted to be really sadistic, I could instead present site readers with a sentence, in which they have to fill in either "their," "there," or "they're."
If that was the only thing you did, with rotating sentences, a computer would probably beat most internet users, defeating the purpose.
Well, for Kubuntu, the process is easy. Go to webpage, read instructions, change "breezy" to "dapper" in the GUI package manger (Adept), click "Apply", then "Full Upgrade" then "Commit changes". When download/install is complete, reboot.
Compared to the process for Windows major version upgrades, its actually a lot simpler. Unless the Vista->XP upgrade process is better than any previous Windows upgrade I've seen, quicker and probably far more reliable, too.
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Even Microsoft's FUD doesn't assert that Adobe would sue them saying they can't use PDF, only that Adobe might sue them saying that Microsoft can't bundle the PDF creation ability into an existing market-dominant product but instead must sell it separately.
Plenty of the people who have complained, that I've seen, have been people who have used either OS X or Linux and complained that the Vista beta implementation of the feature was clumsier and more intrusive than the implementation of similar security functionality on those non-Windows platforms.
Being similar in outline is not the same thing as being identical in implementation.
If its a prank, its probably not an OTP. If it is real information that the sender wants to transmit securely, it may be a one time pad.
If there is any reality to Microsoft's expectation of a suit, the inclusion of ps2pdf in those OS's has no parallel to it, since the speculated suit is an antitrust suit, which is based not only on the action of the defendant but their market-dominant position.
A point people consistently seem to miss when discussing actual or potential antitrust actions against Microsoft, resulting in spurious analogies like this.
The dpkg --configure -a did, as it seemed, fix the PCMCIA hang, and all I had to do to fix the video problem was apt-get install nvidia-glx. Relatively painless upgrade with minimal downtime. I'm happy.
Good luck convincing people to give up Word for TeX, sensible as your idea is.
Because The Sims 2 and Rome: Total War (for example) aren't available on Linux.
For the average user, an OS isn't an end to itself, but something to run other software on.
Since the protection is not protecting the virus-writer's copyright-protected material (as the virus-writer doesn't own the user's documents), I don't think its a violation of the DMCA.
Went home at lunch to check on my Kubuntu upgrade (done with Adept) and had the same problem -- went online (on the same system with the hung-up upgrade -- which, itself, was a surprising and welcome capability) and found a suggestion solution, reboot to recovery mode and use dpkg --configure -a. Seems to have solved the problem, but now I've got some kind of, I assume, X problem (Kubuntu starts up fine up to -- I think -- the point of loading the GUI logon screen, which flashes -- again, I think, not quick enough to see for sure what it is -- and then returns to the splash screen. When I go home again tonight I'll have to try to figure that one out.
Ctrl-Alt-Del does a proper, orderly shutdown, though, so the OS appears to be working. If the remaining problem is straightforward, it'll still probably be my easiest OS upgrade since the days of pre-hard-disk DOS when "upgrading" meant you stick in the DOS 3.0 diskette rather than the DOS 2.11 one.
But it wasn't as painless as I was hoping it would be.
Insofar as this is true, its irrelevant. There is no key exchange here; you simply keep the private key, and put the public key in the code, and use it to encrypt the software.
How, precisely, is a virus that does what is described above vulnerable?
Well, even if there was a need to do off-site encryption (as noted above, they aren't), it would make more sense to use some other exploit to take control of remote systems, and have those remote systems act as the encryption servers, rather than use a PC easily traceable to the virus creator as the encryption server.
I don't think that's accurate. He was saying the PS3 will be the primary entertainment platform, including for online entertainment, for most of its users (he specific refers to entertainment functions) and that, therefore, Sony doesn't need to have a presence in the PC universe to compete with Microsoft's "Live Anywhere" to make the PS3 competitive with the Xbox 360 in overall experience. He says "We don't need the PC" where "We = Sony", and in the context of questions about the need to compete with MS's Live Anywhere that goes beyond the console platform.
He was not saying, there, that people who use PS3's won't have any need or use for a PC. He's saying that their use of a PC won't be significant in regard to the PS3's competitive position with regard to the Xbox 360, and that Live Anywhere isn't something Sony feels it needs to worry about.
Now, there may be reason to argue with that position, as well, but he's not claiming the PS3 will displace all use of the PC, or that PS3 users will no longer need PCs at all.
Why would a law that expanded the definition of "treason" to include voting for an unconstitutional statute be, itself, unconstitutional?
I think you need to read Art. III, Sec. 3 of the Constitution. Particularly the part that reads:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort
Treason is the one crime whose definition is given (and made exclusive) in the Constitution.
I think what everyone is criticizing MS for with regard to UAC is starting with the advantage in usability at the price of security, and then copying what various Linux distros and OS X, etc., do to enhance security, doing it badly, and less usably than even those OS's that were previously behind in usability.
And still, from some comments, falling short of those other systems in several areas of security.
As there were PS2 games that used, at least as an option, keyboard and/or mouse, I would expect this capacity won't be removed from the PS3.
Appropriate "sandbox" security model depends on what an application is supposed to be doing; any application that provides a scripting facility ought to provide an appropriate internal security model as well. Arbitrary scripts should not have access to the full range of permissions available to the application running them unless the user has specifically elected to allow that, or unless the application itself provides no dangerous capacities in the first place.
Any document format with a scripting facility provides the capacity to a script on the client machine when a user opens a document. If that's all it takes to have a "virus", then every macro is a "virus".
OTOH, it also doesn't demonstrate that it could download such a shell script and cause it to be executed without user intervention.
So its not really a "proof of concept" as regards that particularly capacity at all. The fact that it doesn't show that you can't do it is meaningless, that tells you nothing you didn't know without the so-called "proof of concept".
Running macros in a word-processor document shouldn't (by default) be "all-or-nothing"; they ought to run in a secure sandbox that requires user intervention to perform dangerous tasks like, say, modifying the global template (or, arguably, any external file), even if the user account has permission to run them.
That it infects the global template when opened from a document file is the actual "proof of concept" here, and if it really doesn't require user intervention, in the default configuration of StarOffice or OOo, to (1) allow macros to run, and (2) allow a macro running in one document to affect the global template, then there is a real, though I would suspect fairly simple to fix, problem; document macros need to run, by default, in a more tightly-restricted sandbox than that.
If that was the only thing you did, with rotating sentences, a computer would probably beat most internet users, defeating the purpose.
Well, for Kubuntu, the process is easy. Go to webpage, read instructions, change "breezy" to "dapper" in the GUI package manger (Adept), click "Apply", then "Full Upgrade" then "Commit changes". When download/install is complete, reboot.
Compared to the process for Windows major version upgrades, its actually a lot simpler. Unless the Vista->XP upgrade process is better than any previous Windows upgrade I've seen, quicker and probably far more reliable, too.