the bootloader can be configured to load a Linux kernel that chain-loads a compromised Windows kernel
That strikes me as an odd proposition.... The Windows kernel has a lot of requirements out of its bootloader. It's not compatible with any of the plethora of [awesome] boot specifications that many Linux kernels support, like multiboot for example. BOOTMGR (or NTLDR for older OSes, but that of course will never support UEFI or secure boot) does a very significant amount of Windows-specific voodoo to get the system into a condition where the kernel can run, like loading boot start drivers and so on. Unless you patch the entire chain (which may include the MBR program... not as familiar with UEFI boot processes as I am with BIOS booting) to remove the signature requirement, from BOOTMGR, OSLoader, Winload, the kernel, and probably WinResume as well, you couldn't even start to get unsigned drivers working. Without invoking test mode, of course:)
It's absolutely possible, of course, but the sheer amount of hackery that is required to make it work is just mind boggling... at least to me. Can you link anything that explains your concept?
That's so easy, it's unfair: Stuxnet and Flame, of course.
I answer the same to that question.
I think it's a lot more reasonable to assume that Iran or any other country at war with the US would likely not be dropping nukes all over the place, even if they had them. Weaponized malware, on the other hand, has already proven to be VERY effective, and the most chilling aspect of those weapons is that they completed their missions without even being detected.
The thought of some clandestine scheme to wreak havoc with the precision that computer viruses can have but that nuclear weapons most certainly cannot is not only more plausible in my mind, but it's already been done. And no one is sitting back, looking at the horrible collateral damage they caused.
So as this type of warfare continues---and it most definitely will---and some day a SCADA system fails and it kills people, there won't be the "benefit" of a giant, impossible-to-miss mushroom cloud sitting on the horizon to tell us why it happened.
Scary because you can't see it. Much like ionizing radiation... but at least that is something relatively straightforward to detect, and doesn't reprogram your geiger counter to tell you everything is just fine while you suck up lethal doses of gamma rays.
Sabotage: yes. Cyber terrorism? No. Warfare, yes, but not terrorism.
To be fair, terrorism is rather broadly any act that incites fear, specifically for political purposes. I don't know about you, but Stuxnet and Flame scare the hell out of me.
And I don't even begin to represent their targets.
It does around here - If you're a young person it's hard to come up with $300+ per month for smokes - So you stop.
[TL;DR: below]
I can't see that being accurate on average. People who start smoking don't have a problem affording cigarettes. I can't think of anyone who went from zero to twenty (or more) cigarettes smoked per day in anything resembling a short amount of time, myself included. It's only when you're a regular smoker that the cost of cigarettes starts to go up into the hundreds of dollars per month, especially if the price of them is at or below, as you put it, $10 a pack. Progressing from that point, someone who is a regular smoker has had more than enough time to work the cost into his budget, and it's still affordable.
I don't really have any objection to the concept of taxes in general, nor as a smoker do I have an objection to taxing cigarettes. What really pisses me off (and that I naturally object to) is the fact that cigarette taxes (and just cigarettes, not other forms of tobacco, which is a different rant) are not appropriated exclusively to programs designed to aid people who want to quit, to cover the "social health"-related costs of having a society with lifelong smokers in it, and to more adequately prepare people so that they don't "fall into the trap" of being a "hopelessly addicted" smoker. Instead, and while a portion of money from said taxes does go to those efforts, taxes have been raised over the years against cigarettes through the one process that expressly enables oppression of the minority: Voting.
It's fairly well understood that poor people are both more likely to be smokers and less likely to vote. That way, when an issue is presented on the ballot that basically says: "A class of citizens that you're most likely not a member of [smokers] will effectively pay ${X Million} to fund something that doesn't benefit them and that they also won't appreciate [fine arts/a stadium] and/or a public institution [local schools/police force/whatever] in which they will receive, at most, a significantly underrepresented portion of that benefit due to their minority status." The odds of someone voting YES to a measure that they perceive will benefit them yet will allow them to incur none of the oppression it brings (financial or otherwise) by simply being outside of the class that is oppressed is, by my estimation, Pretty Fucking High. For examples of this that you might understand better (and hopefully find as upsetting as I do), see the recent bans on gay marriage in North Carolina and other states.
If cigarette taxes were truly fair and just, then they would be used to help mitigate ancillary problems that arise from smoking in the arena of human health, but first and foremost against the most fundamental problem that underlies smoking: addiction is not a choice. While I readily admit that there is no known method to circumvent that problem, there is a whole hell of a lot of stuff out there in the form of drugs, therapy, education, and likely significantly more things that I'm not even aware of that could be funded by cigarette taxes in such a way as to make that problem much less of a hurdle to overcome, allowing a smoker to make the choice to quit smoking and significantly aiding them in the process. Above all, and here's the kicker: those taxes could make "quitting today" less expensive than "smoking tomorrow." Sadly, you'll find that nicotine patches and gum, behavioral therapy, and something like Chantix are all more expensive over the period in which they're used or that they're designed to be effective than the cost of cigarettes would be to cover the same for the average smoker. At least in Ohio... the last time I checked, anyway.
For what it's worth, I firmly believe that people don't start smoking because they're morons. You start smoking because you want to smoke---thoug
"Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible."
Are you talking about the same Microsoft I know?
Oh, right, they're "trying".
Lest ye not be too quick to judge, that mayest thou consider: a physician engages in the art of "practice!"
You people are sooooo biased. It's obvious that Apple can't do anything right here.
Apple could do all kinds of things right, but they probably never will. They'd just have to do something---hell, anything---that was in the spirit of a free, open system, and we'd probably be happy. But that kind of bullshit isn't as profitable as vendor lock-in, so they won't.
Step back a minute. Just because Microsoft owns Skype does NOT mean that they think it's a great business idea to come in and tell them HOW they should accomplish something. Did it ever occur to you that they might have said, "We want Skype to be more reliable, so here's some money, dear Skype division. Now get it done."?
How one 'cheats' on questions like that, though, I have no idea...
You get one of your non-crazy, more dishonest (more than you, because he'll pass the test, obviously) friends to help you using SMS/MMS while taking it.
Actually why do you need to block the data and ultimately kill the app? Why not feed it bogus information when a user denies access to an actual contact list?
It's funny that you bring that up. In Windows, UAC does these things for a non-elevated app. The problem is that, even though MANY applications would work just fine with this type of filesystem and registry virtualization, they force a UAC elevation prompt through their manifest anyway.
Or they register and install a system service that runs ALL THE TIME to do their dirty work for them. *Casts a dirty glance at Steam*
Developers won't work within the confines of such a system because it's infinitely easier to get a user to click "Yes" on the prompt that allows their app to just bypass it entirely. And the developers that WILL work within such confines are the kind of people that wouldn't have an ulterior motive for you to install their app anyway.
This is slashdot! We don't RTFA, we don't RTFS and we don't RTFH! And in the rare cases where we do read the article, the summary or the headline, we make damn sure we misunderstand it.
Win7 seems to have implemented it in the right way, ask when it's important, once, so it's unusual to see a prompt and so people actually read it...
With Windows 7, I concur that Microsoft did do it right, but it's not that it asks any less frequently per se, it's just that certain things are automatically elevated without a UAC prompt. There were some nifty little tricks that abused that at first, because rundll32.exe was one of the auto-elevated applications.
What was really obnoxious about UAC in Vista (that lead me to turn it off) was that even running MMC, by itself, would cause a prompt. This was annoying as all hell when you were launching it to manage a remote server---an activity which UAC cannot really be employed to prevent malicious behavior, as UAC only protects local resources.
he router's web interface allows one to open specific ports for specific IPv6 addresses. No NAT required, which is nice: I can have several servers running on the same port with no issues.
The question I put back to that statement though: Since NAT is a pseudo-firewall for IPv4, applications running on computers leverage some IP trickery (NAT traversal techniques) or dynamically map ports via UPnP to achieve connectivity. Those techniques aren't the classical "allow X past firewall" setting though, they merely give the traffic somewhere to go instead of bouncing off of the router's TCP stack.
How does one achieve the connectivity that full IPv6 *should* have (but won't because the clients won't talk to the border firewall), which is identical to the effective connectivity and security that we have via IPv4 with UPnP today?
I would really like to know, because the one and only time I got IPv6 working right on my network, I shut it right the hell down when I ran a web-based port scan:-(
Slashdot Mirror
the bootloader can be configured to load a Linux kernel that chain-loads a compromised Windows kernel
That strikes me as an odd proposition.... The Windows kernel has a lot of requirements out of its bootloader. It's not compatible with any of the plethora of [awesome] boot specifications that many Linux kernels support, like multiboot for example. BOOTMGR (or NTLDR for older OSes, but that of course will never support UEFI or secure boot) does a very significant amount of Windows-specific voodoo to get the system into a condition where the kernel can run, like loading boot start drivers and so on. Unless you patch the entire chain (which may include the MBR program... not as familiar with UEFI boot processes as I am with BIOS booting) to remove the signature requirement, from BOOTMGR, OSLoader, Winload, the kernel, and probably WinResume as well, you couldn't even start to get unsigned drivers working. Without invoking test mode, of course :)
It's absolutely possible, of course, but the sheer amount of hackery that is required to make it work is just mind boggling... at least to me. Can you link anything that explains your concept?
"no to pizza"
Why would you make up an acronym for a concept that doesn't exist for words that cannot be spoken?
That's so easy, it's unfair: Stuxnet and Flame, of course.
I answer the same to that question.
I think it's a lot more reasonable to assume that Iran or any other country at war with the US would likely not be dropping nukes all over the place, even if they had them. Weaponized malware, on the other hand, has already proven to be VERY effective, and the most chilling aspect of those weapons is that they completed their missions without even being detected.
The thought of some clandestine scheme to wreak havoc with the precision that computer viruses can have but that nuclear weapons most certainly cannot is not only more plausible in my mind, but it's already been done. And no one is sitting back, looking at the horrible collateral damage they caused.
So as this type of warfare continues---and it most definitely will---and some day a SCADA system fails and it kills people, there won't be the "benefit" of a giant, impossible-to-miss mushroom cloud sitting on the horizon to tell us why it happened.
Scary because you can't see it. Much like ionizing radiation... but at least that is something relatively straightforward to detect, and doesn't reprogram your geiger counter to tell you everything is just fine while you suck up lethal doses of gamma rays.
Sabotage: yes. Cyber terrorism? No. Warfare, yes, but not terrorism.
To be fair, terrorism is rather broadly any act that incites fear, specifically for political purposes. I don't know about you, but Stuxnet and Flame scare the hell out of me.
And I don't even begin to represent their targets.
It wasn't the tax that reduced smoking.
It does around here - If you're a young person it's hard to come up with $300+ per month for smokes - So you stop.
[TL;DR: below]
I can't see that being accurate on average. People who start smoking don't have a problem affording cigarettes. I can't think of anyone who went from zero to twenty (or more) cigarettes smoked per day in anything resembling a short amount of time, myself included. It's only when you're a regular smoker that the cost of cigarettes starts to go up into the hundreds of dollars per month, especially if the price of them is at or below, as you put it, $10 a pack. Progressing from that point, someone who is a regular smoker has had more than enough time to work the cost into his budget, and it's still affordable.
I don't really have any objection to the concept of taxes in general, nor as a smoker do I have an objection to taxing cigarettes. What really pisses me off (and that I naturally object to) is the fact that cigarette taxes (and just cigarettes, not other forms of tobacco, which is a different rant) are not appropriated exclusively to programs designed to aid people who want to quit, to cover the "social health"-related costs of having a society with lifelong smokers in it, and to more adequately prepare people so that they don't "fall into the trap" of being a "hopelessly addicted" smoker. Instead, and while a portion of money from said taxes does go to those efforts, taxes have been raised over the years against cigarettes through the one process that expressly enables oppression of the minority: Voting.
It's fairly well understood that poor people are both more likely to be smokers and less likely to vote. That way, when an issue is presented on the ballot that basically says: "A class of citizens that you're most likely not a member of [smokers] will effectively pay ${X Million} to fund something that doesn't benefit them and that they also won't appreciate [fine arts/a stadium] and/or a public institution [local schools/police force/whatever] in which they will receive, at most, a significantly underrepresented portion of that benefit due to their minority status." The odds of someone voting YES to a measure that they perceive will benefit them yet will allow them to incur none of the oppression it brings (financial or otherwise) by simply being outside of the class that is oppressed is, by my estimation, Pretty Fucking High. For examples of this that you might understand better (and hopefully find as upsetting as I do), see the recent bans on gay marriage in North Carolina and other states.
If cigarette taxes were truly fair and just, then they would be used to help mitigate ancillary problems that arise from smoking in the arena of human health, but first and foremost against the most fundamental problem that underlies smoking: addiction is not a choice. While I readily admit that there is no known method to circumvent that problem, there is a whole hell of a lot of stuff out there in the form of drugs, therapy, education, and likely significantly more things that I'm not even aware of that could be funded by cigarette taxes in such a way as to make that problem much less of a hurdle to overcome, allowing a smoker to make the choice to quit smoking and significantly aiding them in the process. Above all, and here's the kicker: those taxes could make "quitting today" less expensive than "smoking tomorrow." Sadly, you'll find that nicotine patches and gum, behavioral therapy, and something like Chantix are all more expensive over the period in which they're used or that they're designed to be effective than the cost of cigarettes would be to cover the same for the average smoker. At least in Ohio... the last time I checked, anyway.
For what it's worth, I firmly believe that people don't start smoking because they're morons. You start smoking because you want to smoke---thoug
I didn't know until checking just after that post that HTTPS Everywhere is out for Chrome! Woot.
That other extension looks pretty cool, though. I'll see if it works well!
"Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible."
Are you talking about the same Microsoft I know?
Oh, right, they're "trying".
Lest ye not be too quick to judge, that mayest thou consider: a physician engages in the art of "practice!"
After the first line of your post, I'm rather dismayed that the link you provided didn't start, "https://" ... :(
run up to a random cop on the street and ask him how long it'd take to get reinforcements to the area.
I hope to God that I remember this idea the next time I win a bet with a friend.
Btrfs builds largely on ext2
[citation needed]
Nope, he's quite right. I built btrfs just fine previously, but now after I upgraded to ext4, look what happens:
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mason/btrfs-progs.git
$ cd btrfs-progs
$ make
System going down for HALT now!
You people are sooooo biased. It's obvious that Apple can't do anything right here.
Apple could do all kinds of things right, but they probably never will. They'd just have to do something---hell, anything---that was in the spirit of a free, open system, and we'd probably be happy. But that kind of bullshit isn't as profitable as vendor lock-in, so they won't.
Fortunately my mother's maiden name is v6g1sH6Ynr.
I think our mothers must have the same ethnic background. A similarly-named company also produced my first car.
Wait a minute.... That's also where I met my spouse!
Eat your own dog food.
Step back a minute. Just because Microsoft owns Skype does NOT mean that they think it's a great business idea to come in and tell them HOW they should accomplish something. Did it ever occur to you that they might have said, "We want Skype to be more reliable, so here's some money, dear Skype division. Now get it done."?
the sight of a ridiculous twenty-six-cable tangle winding it's way through your case like like a nest of intertwined worms.
The mental image on that one is priceless :D
Thank you, sir!
How one 'cheats' on questions like that, though, I have no idea...
You get one of your non-crazy, more dishonest (more than you, because he'll pass the test, obviously) friends to help you using SMS/MMS while taking it.
Bah hell. "Redundant" was not what I was looking to mod you as.
Carry on!
Then you die like the doctor who came-up with this "eat lots of fat" diet.
If you think that his diet was the cause of the fall and resulting head trauma that killed him, I've got some news for you: you're a fucking moron.
Only one, usually the one with the beard.
But Golbez didn't have a beard!
Actually why do you need to block the data and ultimately kill the app? Why not feed it bogus information when a user denies access to an actual contact list?
It's funny that you bring that up. In Windows, UAC does these things for a non-elevated app. The problem is that, even though MANY applications would work just fine with this type of filesystem and registry virtualization, they force a UAC elevation prompt through their manifest anyway.
Or they register and install a system service that runs ALL THE TIME to do their dirty work for them. *Casts a dirty glance at Steam*
Developers won't work within the confines of such a system because it's infinitely easier to get a user to click "Yes" on the prompt that allows their app to just bypass it entirely. And the developers that WILL work within such confines are the kind of people that wouldn't have an ulterior motive for you to install their app anyway.
Capitalization is even more important.
It's the difference between helping your uncle jack off the horse, and helping your Uncle Jack off the horse.
This is slashdot! We don't RTFA, we don't RTFS and we don't RTFH! And in the rare cases where we do read the article, the summary or the headline, we make damn sure we misunderstand it.
Hear, hear!
...what are we talking about again?
So then is a phishing scam involving trousers called a Tackle Box?
Win7 seems to have implemented it in the right way, ask when it's important, once, so it's unusual to see a prompt and so people actually read it ...
With Windows 7, I concur that Microsoft did do it right, but it's not that it asks any less frequently per se, it's just that certain things are automatically elevated without a UAC prompt. There were some nifty little tricks that abused that at first, because rundll32.exe was one of the auto-elevated applications.
What was really obnoxious about UAC in Vista (that lead me to turn it off) was that even running MMC, by itself, would cause a prompt. This was annoying as all hell when you were launching it to manage a remote server---an activity which UAC cannot really be employed to prevent malicious behavior, as UAC only protects local resources.
Oh noes, he said something true that I don't like. Quick, mod it down! If you just mod hard enough eventually 2+2 will equal 5.
You were modded down because you're an asshole, posting off-topic. I humbly request anyone with a spare mod point to make this troll's day:
2+2 = 5
he router's web interface allows one to open specific ports for specific IPv6 addresses. No NAT required, which is nice: I can have several servers running on the same port with no issues.
The question I put back to that statement though: Since NAT is a pseudo-firewall for IPv4, applications running on computers leverage some IP trickery (NAT traversal techniques) or dynamically map ports via UPnP to achieve connectivity. Those techniques aren't the classical "allow X past firewall" setting though, they merely give the traffic somewhere to go instead of bouncing off of the router's TCP stack.
:-(
How does one achieve the connectivity that full IPv6 *should* have (but won't because the clients won't talk to the border firewall), which is identical to the effective connectivity and security that we have via IPv4 with UPnP today?
I would really like to know, because the one and only time I got IPv6 working right on my network, I shut it right the hell down when I ran a web-based port scan