Turbo Pascal and Microsoft BASIC were the only choices back then, other than assembler. At least with Pascal you could add in some mixed assembler to work with interrupts and low level BIOS logic. Try that with MS BASIC from that era. C compilers for the PC came out over the following year but they were a little unstable. I bought 'both' books on the C Language in preparation for some real programming, and later when it came out I bought my first C compiler (Borland Turbo C) for the PC and rewrote the library. Pascal and C are fairly equal on what you could do back then, but C++ certainly spelled the demise of Pascal as it seriously lost favour.
Obviously nobody at the Smithsonian ever had to write a program in COBOL!
I have a story. I once worked in a factory where the computer systems were written in COBOL, and it, to put it politely, sucked. We needed data to manage our jobs in the shop and buying requests to fill our orders but there was no way to get the data the way we needed it. After surviving a layoff I inherited a PC with a 3270 terminal emulator card and proceeded to reprogram the board to extract information off of the on-line CICS system so I could reprocess it the way we needed it. I created a callable library of routines to manage these extractions. Once I had the basics for extracting information by mapping the terminal output to data fields I could then instruct it to page forward through each application and extract the information to a floppy, memory (didn't have much), or print it. I had no direct link to the corporate database system, only the ability to scrape information off of the virtual console and reorganize it as I chose to do.
With that library I then spent half of an afternoon using that 'tool' to build an application which extracted a recursive bill of materials from the system for any product I wanted to build. It took less than 4 hours to get the proof of concept done and start using it. My manager saw how effective I had become in doing my job and asked my secret, and I showed him, the report the the Data Processing Department had been telling us for seven years that they could not do. They had told me it was impossible.
Once my boss saw the report I handed him he marched back into the DP managers office and demanded that they build the same program for everyone to use, throwing that report on his desk. That same report, with direct access to the database, written in COBOL, took over 6 Man-Months to write. With my little PC and virtual-console library I did it in under 4 hours using Turbo Pascal. Which language do you want to program in?
Voyager is travelling 38,000 mph, directly away from the Sun. If its sensors no longer feel the push of the Solar Wind its because the wind is now going slower, say 37,999 mph, but not yet zero mph as the article title might imply. The wind is most likely still there, we just can not sense it anymore with the technology aboard the spacecraft.
This would make for one very effective immune system for the colony as a whole. Who would dare eat arsenic laden DNA?
Most all organisms strive to find at least one property that gives them an edge over their adversaries, and I suspect this would do it quite nicely, at least until one such member randomly morphs into a carnivorous version of the same bacterium. Once that happens then the whole population comes under the stress to mutate themselves to develop yet another advantage. It would be VERY informative of how life on earth developed to watch those mutations progress through the colony. A new post-Abiogenesis study anyone?
Changing the IP would not work well and it may be different from session to session anyway due to dynamic IP allocation at your ISP. What you need is a browser plugin that injects a seed of randomization into the browser information returned to the collection server, which changes that seed on an unpredictable way. If each http connection back to the server exchanges different "user" information then their whole scheme for collecting 'some sense of uniqueness' is blown completely out of the water.
Well... I can say they are just awesome at catching vermin. I was at Yellowstone doing some nature photography just recently and came across one coyote who in the period of just two minutes caught and ate three while I sat there clicking away non-stop. He would stand there silently with ears up and tilted forward listening to the rodents under the grass, and then pounce on the grass right where the rodent is. Bullseye every time.
Of course the problem with Chicago is there isn't much grass, so the methodology would have to change. Rats on pavement would be somewhat similar to roadrunners if you are just going to chase them down, only rodents are slower than roadrunners any day of the week. Even in the city environment my money is on the coyote.
That is what the Intel VT-d extension is for, and qubes-os.org is building a secure Hypervisor to operate it from a higher privilege than the normal root privilege, so the DMA can not break out via the normal driver level hacks.
... and you can only train a cat to 'not get caught' doing it.
Their (cats and dogs) brains are wired very differently, and therefore they react differently to training.
I once sat in on a session with a "cat trainer" for a well known show in Las Vagas, and their words of wisdom were to "train the cat to do what it wants". No, really. It means you look at the personality of the cat and notice what it likes to do, and then you train it to do that action on command. If you try to train a cat to do what *you want* then you will always fail to have a predictable show.
Dogs on the other hand have lived in packs for hundreds of thousands of years, and realize there is a social order. They, by nature, want to please the dominant animal/master/friend.
The Carbon Dioxide rate increased less in 2009 than in 2008, due to circumstance other than human intent or modification of behaviour.
You can thank La Niña, the souring oceans (and dying corals), and a slight downturn in deforestation due to the bad Economy. Can we reflect on this story again next year after this "improvement" has its chance to work its magic?
Every two years or so Microsoft comes out with a brand new OS, and sets to marketing it and degrading the previous OS's worth throught lack of bug fixes, unsupported applications, and attempts to coerce you to upgrade so they can get a new cash infusion. Never mind that their "new" OS is the same one just reconfigured, renamed, and with enough modifications to "look" different to the average user. Incremental changes, but nothing requiring it be called by another name. Its designed to keep users upgrading (new cash flow) instead of updating (zero profit).
Linux is what? 10-15 years old? By their definition Linux should have been replaced at least 5 years ago. By saying this they get to compare their brand new shiny OS against a dull and broken old OS. The thin is, Linux still is more efficient dispute its age, because it keeps improving daily through its daily update channels, not just monthly bug fixes like some other OS's.
Here is another idea for you. How about hardware assisted "dynamic" (aka dynamically hooked) tracepoints via a custom Xen-like bare metal hypervisor? The OS and therefore its contained malware would know nothing of the inspection process, and best of all it could be OS independent if done at the hardware level. The control/diagnostics software could be running in a VM right next to the OS under test. Boot the hypervisor from CD and then load the original machines OS. Stealth rootkits would be a thing of the past. Simply boot the monitor before loading the OS under test and have a blast uncovering all kinds of malware in any OS of your choice.
Don't you think that the problem is "targeting" of the right cells rather than the amount of perforin? I don't know about you, but an over abundance of perforin running around randomly in my blood stream does NOT sound like a GOOD thing. It would only take a little to kill you, so the true matter is knowing when and where to apply what we already have. The triggering mechanism is what we should be studying.
If the NSA broke in and stuck a small device into an empty PCI slot in your computer, would you notice?
They don't need to. Its very likely your machine has a re-flashable bus controller, CPU microcode, GPU, or a network controller card installed, so the PCI slot device is really a moot point from the sited article. Each device has its own processor and flash memory used to (re)program it. If it has direct access to the hardware bus or any devices DMA controller it can modify your kernel on the fly. No "special" PCI device is required for this kind of hack. If 'they' (whom ever 'they' might be in your specific case) want to hack your machine then they have all the hardware need to do the job already.
The design is different, the security model is different, the class binary byte code structure is different, and therefore the logic flow is *completely* different. The most that would be in common would be the names of the entry points for some of the classes used in both implementations.
Oracle is counting on the laymen juror thinking that because they both technologies use the letters "VM" to describe how the application is run, that it must be a clone. If that were the case then perhaps Oracle should be suing VMware instead?
I'm not sure if you are using Linux or not (you say you have an X server), but if you are and have the right hardware you might want to look at Qubes-os.org. Each network application is made to run in its own Xen VM, with fast startup and a read only file system. Any persistence can be undone easily and reverted back to a good known state. You simply use one browser instance for banking and another for cruising the web, and neither instance can affect the other.
btw - I used to do what you are suggesting, but I added a few extra capabilities to it. First I created a SElinux locked down user account and configured an admin script using Inotify to scan the users "Download" directory, and if it found a new file it first virus scanned it, and if clean, it placed it in that users "Shared" directory. That Shared directory was read only for that restricted account, but that same directory was also mounted via sshfs into the normal users account (mine). Any files downloaded instantly (after the initial scanning) appeared into my Shared directory. All user/group permissions were automatically managed by the file mapping, and because the locked down web user was a restricted account it could not write to anything I didn't give it explicit permissions to. You can't store a cookie if you can't write to anything. What made it great was that the Inotify script kept a complete log of every read and write that the browser was attempting and I could then tweak those permissions to make it quite usable. I just place files to upload in "my" shared directory, and retrieve downloaded files from that same directory. The restricted user had only read permissions to that single shared directory, and write permissions to only what I wanted it to have. It worked great. All it needed was an icon on the desktop to do an ssh into that account to run the ff browser and nothing could escape to anywhere else on the system due to the SElinux OS permissions. Any attempt to circumvent the browser would raise all kinds of monitoring flags and ring bells (figuratively) so it was interesting to see what websites were actually doing nasty deeds.
The mention both impact and gravity tractors, and both have their problems.
The "impact" method stands the chance of splitting the asteroid into man little pieces, and since that process of splitting absorbs energy less of it is available to deflect the body from its current course. To have enough mass going at a high enough velocity to contain enough energy to nudge it into a different trajectory you need heavy lift rockets with very fast final stage projectiles. The more velocity the more energy, but the more of that energy that will create debris that potentially causes even more problems. The best solution would be a very heavy object moving slowly, but the would be impossible to lift and deploy. Using nukes would allow a smaller projectile, but would very likely cause radioactive debris to renter earth's atmosphere. Not good. Its better to land on it and push it into the sun's gravity well.
The 'Gravity tractor' method requires just as much energy as pushing the asteroid, but you need LOTS of mass to make it work. Again you need heavy lift equipment to make this work, and I seriously doubt you can lift enough mass into space, and move it to where it needs to be, in time to effect the trajectory by much. You are still better off using that same fuel to get there quickly and push it lightly for a while into a new trajectory.
Not only that, but the law of entropy demands that new errors will happen just when you need to use it online to pay your mortgage. Now try replacing it? If the premise is that you can't intentionally create an error to match a known pattern then how does one replace a "failed" identity? You simply do it like this http://www.flylogic.net/blog/?p=10 Actually, forcing an error is easy, its getting rid of an unwanted error that is hard, and you can't prevent new errors. In other words, John Doe is toast when a bit changes, but Nation States with deep pockets can become John Doe any time they please.
I has noting to do with "rollovers", they just want YOU to rollover and hand them all your money. Seriously, using Google patent search there is no term/word "rollover" anywhere in that patent! The patent to me seems to be a orangutan-in-the-closet style cut and paste of many unrelated topics. I have read a lot of patents in my day, but someone must have spent some serious time trying to figure out how to make the claims totally incomprehensible and meaningless.
I think the parent post was referring to this image: http://www.freeweb.hu/neuwanstein/primer_timeline.jpg. The original URL gives a 404, but I managed to locate the actual link by searching for the proper Blog article on that site for the date specified in the original URL.
Possibly. But lets not forget that erasing all files and logs is also a good way to cover ones tracks. If the intent was to do a DoS then it was quite effective, for a while.
Its not as difficult as many might think to breach the security of a large ISP. Ask any Red Team. The IT personnel working there is probably mired by the tribulations of just trying to keep up with the little stuff, and haven't the time to build security in. Having a security 'plan' has little effect if your forward facing defence boundaries look like a piece of IP protocol Swiss cheese. It only takes one foothold inside that defence perimeter to make all the efforts of the entire IT organization look totally ineffective.
The slash and burn technique serves to cover up all sources of incriminating evidence, and better yet, hides the true motivation of the attacker unless they actually take the time to leave a message behind. You are not likely to find a trail of breadcrumbs laying around if their intent was business rather than pleasure.
Just add this stuff to the Red Ink Supply in Washington DC, and nobody will ever need another battery, ever again. Power from paper. With each session of Congress our economy will become *stronger*, and we will no longer have to rely on foreign oil for even our transportation purposes. All new Congressional Energy Bills passed can now pay for themselves! Problem averted. But, lets just hope that spontaneous combustion of recycled paper doesn't start causing any new problems. </sarcasm>
According to Wikipedia Ballmer makes around 665,833 per year, not exactly a lot of cash in the pocket for a big man, but a lot more in perks no doubt. At 54 years of age he would be due to retire at 65, in 11 years. 9% of his yearly income is around $59,924 times 11 years is roughly 659,174, and he is only willing to pony up for 100,000? For a guy who is worth well over 14 B, (yes that's a B, not an M,) 100,000 is pocket change.
Ok, I'm getting to the point. Now the issue is the 659,174 that he claims as income is not his real income. You simply can't save 14 Billion by collecting 659,174-9% per year. Building wealth at that level is all about *hiding* what you really make, and getting taxed on what you can't shelter from the Government tax auditors (i.e. a puny 659k). In order to be worth 14B he would have had to earn 259M per year for every year of his life, and pay no taxes on that gross income as well. I don't think he was making that much at the age 2, so you will have to scale that income per year according to your own theory. Why would he sweat it over a measly 59k per year? In theory he would owe 23 Million per year in taxes if he really paid %9 on his *actual* total earnings each year. So there you go, 100,000 is dirt cheap. That's around 1/230th of his actual income per year.
I shouldn't complain. Lots of people would love to have his pocket change. Personally I'd just like to know where he puts his other 22 Million each year to be sheltered, so I can put some there too.;)
They (China and several other Asian countries) also buy all our electronic garbage and recycle the gold and other expensive metals. Unfortunately the lead, cadmium, and other toxic metals are left behind to pollute their own environment.
Its strange how short term economic gains influences such bad decisions. Its almost as bad as if we were exporting politics. </humor>
I only buy recycled junk off of eBay, and from now on, only items designated as multiple 'lots' greater than 25 items. The more junk you buy the less goes into some remote far away landfill. Who would have thought that importing somebodies sinking/water polluting fleet of Junk from China could save the US environment?
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Turbo Pascal and Microsoft BASIC were the only choices back then, other than assembler. At least with Pascal you could add in some mixed assembler to work with interrupts and low level BIOS logic. Try that with MS BASIC from that era. C compilers for the PC came out over the following year but they were a little unstable. I bought 'both' books on the C Language in preparation for some real programming, and later when it came out I bought my first C compiler (Borland Turbo C) for the PC and rewrote the library. Pascal and C are fairly equal on what you could do back then, but C++ certainly spelled the demise of Pascal as it seriously lost favour.
I have a story. I once worked in a factory where the computer systems were written in COBOL, and it, to put it politely, sucked. We needed data to manage our jobs in the shop and buying requests to fill our orders but there was no way to get the data the way we needed it. After surviving a layoff I inherited a PC with a 3270 terminal emulator card and proceeded to reprogram the board to extract information off of the on-line CICS system so I could reprocess it the way we needed it. I created a callable library of routines to manage these extractions. Once I had the basics for extracting information by mapping the terminal output to data fields I could then instruct it to page forward through each application and extract the information to a floppy, memory (didn't have much), or print it. I had no direct link to the corporate database system, only the ability to scrape information off of the virtual console and reorganize it as I chose to do.
With that library I then spent half of an afternoon using that 'tool' to build an application which extracted a recursive bill of materials from the system for any product I wanted to build. It took less than 4 hours to get the proof of concept done and start using it. My manager saw how effective I had become in doing my job and asked my secret, and I showed him, the report the the Data Processing Department had been telling us for seven years that they could not do. They had told me it was impossible.
Once my boss saw the report I handed him he marched back into the DP managers office and demanded that they build the same program for everyone to use, throwing that report on his desk. That same report, with direct access to the database, written in COBOL, took over 6 Man-Months to write. With my little PC and virtual-console library I did it in under 4 hours using Turbo Pascal. Which language do you want to program in?
Voyager is travelling 38,000 mph, directly away from the Sun. If its sensors no longer feel the push of the Solar Wind its because the wind is now going slower, say 37,999 mph, but not yet zero mph as the article title might imply. The wind is most likely still there, we just can not sense it anymore with the technology aboard the spacecraft.
Most all organisms strive to find at least one property that gives them an edge over their adversaries, and I suspect this would do it quite nicely, at least until one such member randomly morphs into a carnivorous version of the same bacterium. Once that happens then the whole population comes under the stress to mutate themselves to develop yet another advantage. It would be VERY informative of how life on earth developed to watch those mutations progress through the colony. A new post-Abiogenesis study anyone?
Changing the IP would not work well and it may be different from session to session anyway due to dynamic IP allocation at your ISP. What you need is a browser plugin that injects a seed of randomization into the browser information returned to the collection server, which changes that seed on an unpredictable way. If each http connection back to the server exchanges different "user" information then their whole scheme for collecting 'some sense of uniqueness' is blown completely out of the water.
Of course the problem with Chicago is there isn't much grass, so the methodology would have to change. Rats on pavement would be somewhat similar to roadrunners if you are just going to chase them down, only rodents are slower than roadrunners any day of the week. Even in the city environment my money is on the coyote.
That is what the Intel VT-d extension is for, and qubes-os.org is building a secure Hypervisor to operate it from a higher privilege than the normal root privilege, so the DMA can not break out via the normal driver level hacks.
Their (cats and dogs) brains are wired very differently, and therefore they react differently to training.
I once sat in on a session with a "cat trainer" for a well known show in Las Vagas, and their words of wisdom were to "train the cat to do what it wants". No, really. It means you look at the personality of the cat and notice what it likes to do, and then you train it to do that action on command. If you try to train a cat to do what *you want* then you will always fail to have a predictable show.
Dogs on the other hand have lived in packs for hundreds of thousands of years, and realize there is a social order. They, by nature, want to please the dominant animal/master/friend.
You can thank La Niña, the souring oceans (and dying corals), and a slight downturn in deforestation due to the bad Economy. Can we reflect on this story again next year after this "improvement" has its chance to work its magic?
Linux is what? 10-15 years old? By their definition Linux should have been replaced at least 5 years ago. By saying this they get to compare their brand new shiny OS against a dull and broken old OS. The thin is, Linux still is more efficient dispute its age, because it keeps improving daily through its daily update channels, not just monthly bug fixes like some other OS's.
Here is another idea for you. How about hardware assisted "dynamic" (aka dynamically hooked) tracepoints via a custom Xen-like bare metal hypervisor? The OS and therefore its contained malware would know nothing of the inspection process, and best of all it could be OS independent if done at the hardware level. The control/diagnostics software could be running in a VM right next to the OS under test. Boot the hypervisor from CD and then load the original machines OS. Stealth rootkits would be a thing of the past. Simply boot the monitor before loading the OS under test and have a blast uncovering all kinds of malware in any OS of your choice.
.
They don't need to. Its very likely your machine has a re-flashable bus controller, CPU microcode, GPU, or a network controller card installed, so the PCI slot device is really a moot point from the sited article. Each device has its own processor and flash memory used to (re)program it. If it has direct access to the hardware bus or any devices DMA controller it can modify your kernel on the fly. No "special" PCI device is required for this kind of hack. If 'they' (whom ever 'they' might be in your specific case) want to hack your machine then they have all the hardware need to do the job already.
Oracle is counting on the laymen juror thinking that because they both technologies use the letters "VM" to describe how the application is run, that it must be a clone. If that were the case then perhaps Oracle should be suing VMware instead?
btw - I used to do what you are suggesting, but I added a few extra capabilities to it. First I created a SElinux locked down user account and configured an admin script using Inotify to scan the users "Download" directory, and if it found a new file it first virus scanned it, and if clean, it placed it in that users "Shared" directory. That Shared directory was read only for that restricted account, but that same directory was also mounted via sshfs into the normal users account (mine). Any files downloaded instantly (after the initial scanning) appeared into my Shared directory. All user/group permissions were automatically managed by the file mapping, and because the locked down web user was a restricted account it could not write to anything I didn't give it explicit permissions to. You can't store a cookie if you can't write to anything. What made it great was that the Inotify script kept a complete log of every read and write that the browser was attempting and I could then tweak those permissions to make it quite usable. I just place files to upload in "my" shared directory, and retrieve downloaded files from that same directory. The restricted user had only read permissions to that single shared directory, and write permissions to only what I wanted it to have. It worked great. All it needed was an icon on the desktop to do an ssh into that account to run the ff browser and nothing could escape to anywhere else on the system due to the SElinux OS permissions. Any attempt to circumvent the browser would raise all kinds of monitoring flags and ring bells (figuratively) so it was interesting to see what websites were actually doing nasty deeds.
The "impact" method stands the chance of splitting the asteroid into man little pieces, and since that process of splitting absorbs energy less of it is available to deflect the body from its current course. To have enough mass going at a high enough velocity to contain enough energy to nudge it into a different trajectory you need heavy lift rockets with very fast final stage projectiles. The more velocity the more energy, but the more of that energy that will create debris that potentially causes even more problems. The best solution would be a very heavy object moving slowly, but the would be impossible to lift and deploy. Using nukes would allow a smaller projectile, but would very likely cause radioactive debris to renter earth's atmosphere. Not good. Its better to land on it and push it into the sun's gravity well.
The 'Gravity tractor' method requires just as much energy as pushing the asteroid, but you need LOTS of mass to make it work. Again you need heavy lift equipment to make this work, and I seriously doubt you can lift enough mass into space, and move it to where it needs to be, in time to effect the trajectory by much. You are still better off using that same fuel to get there quickly and push it lightly for a while into a new trajectory.
Not only that, but the law of entropy demands that new errors will happen just when you need to use it online to pay your mortgage. Now try replacing it? If the premise is that you can't intentionally create an error to match a known pattern then how does one replace a "failed" identity? You simply do it like this http://www.flylogic.net/blog/?p=10 Actually, forcing an error is easy, its getting rid of an unwanted error that is hard, and you can't prevent new errors. In other words, John Doe is toast when a bit changes, but Nation States with deep pockets can become John Doe any time they please.
I has noting to do with "rollovers", they just want YOU to rollover and hand them all your money. Seriously, using Google patent search there is no term/word "rollover" anywhere in that patent! The patent to me seems to be a orangutan-in-the-closet style cut and paste of many unrelated topics. I have read a lot of patents in my day, but someone must have spent some serious time trying to figure out how to make the claims totally incomprehensible and meaningless.
As long as they are not texting while driving I'm happy. Having a person/machine/cyborg like that step on your foot could really hurt.
I think the parent post was referring to this image: http://www.freeweb.hu/neuwanstein/primer_timeline.jpg. The original URL gives a 404, but I managed to locate the actual link by searching for the proper Blog article on that site for the date specified in the original URL.
Its not as difficult as many might think to breach the security of a large ISP. Ask any Red Team. The IT personnel working there is probably mired by the tribulations of just trying to keep up with the little stuff, and haven't the time to build security in. Having a security 'plan' has little effect if your forward facing defence boundaries look like a piece of IP protocol Swiss cheese. It only takes one foothold inside that defence perimeter to make all the efforts of the entire IT organization look totally ineffective.
The slash and burn technique serves to cover up all sources of incriminating evidence, and better yet, hides the true motivation of the attacker unless they actually take the time to leave a message behind. You are not likely to find a trail of breadcrumbs laying around if their intent was business rather than pleasure.
Just add this stuff to the Red Ink Supply in Washington DC, and nobody will ever need another battery, ever again. Power from paper. With each session of Congress our economy will become *stronger*, and we will no longer have to rely on foreign oil for even our transportation purposes. All new Congressional Energy Bills passed can now pay for themselves! Problem averted. But, lets just hope that spontaneous combustion of recycled paper doesn't start causing any new problems. </sarcasm>
Ok, I'm getting to the point. Now the issue is the 659,174 that he claims as income is not his real income. You simply can't save 14 Billion by collecting 659,174-9% per year. Building wealth at that level is all about *hiding* what you really make, and getting taxed on what you can't shelter from the Government tax auditors (i.e. a puny 659k). In order to be worth 14B he would have had to earn 259M per year for every year of his life, and pay no taxes on that gross income as well. I don't think he was making that much at the age 2, so you will have to scale that income per year according to your own theory. Why would he sweat it over a measly 59k per year? In theory he would owe 23 Million per year in taxes if he really paid %9 on his *actual* total earnings each year. So there you go, 100,000 is dirt cheap. That's around 1/230th of his actual income per year.
I shouldn't complain. Lots of people would love to have his pocket change. Personally I'd just like to know where he puts his other 22 Million each year to be sheltered, so I can put some there too. ;)
Its strange how short term economic gains influences such bad decisions. Its almost as bad as if we were exporting politics. </humor>
I only buy recycled junk off of eBay, and from now on, only items designated as multiple 'lots' greater than 25 items. The more junk you buy the less goes into some remote far away landfill. Who would have thought that importing somebodies sinking/water polluting fleet of Junk from China could save the US environment?