Recent Posts

4276

General Software Discussion / Re: Another 'Lifetime' license bites the dust

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2008, 05:30 AM »

This is one of the times I agree with Josh.

As long as a license gives you a reasonable period of minor new-feature updates (and, preferably, that the company backports bugfixes for a while after update-period ends), I believe it's perfectly fair to charge for upgrades. I'm against software subscriptions though, and I believe charging for upgrades should be based on new major features, not an annual version-number bumping.

4277

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2008, 04:09 AM »

Carol: you're right in all of your points

Given the poll options, I still interpret the meaning as "destroy humanity" rather than "destroy the earth", though.

4278

Site/Forum Features / Re: Forum feature suggestion: Necromancer alert (very old threads resurrected)

« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2008, 02:08 AM »

Sounds like a good idea - sometimes people forget to check the date of a thread before posting in it.

Not saying it can't be relevant to revive old threads instead of posting a new one, though, just that a little warning about "Hey, did you remember to check the date?" might be a good idea. Should be easy enough to do, there's already code to warn if somebody has made a reply to thread between you hit "reply" and "post".

4279

Living Room / Re: Look what Santa brought us!

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 05:55 PM »

Haha, you finally got your sweet, sweet revenge, scannie?

It's sooooo out of tune, I love it. Will certainly have to play it loud during the family xmas dinner

4280

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 05:53 PM »

Dead Can Dance - Rakim

Pretty great stuff

4281

Living Room / Re: Wreckedcarzz vs. scannie

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 05:52 PM »

scancode: nah, the FAILblood comes from his father - and while we have the same mother, fortunately p3lb0x and the_other_brother's father is not mine

4282

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 TEASER: SQLite Scrub

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 11:07 AM »

It isn't, because you don't have to store the complete string. If your CC number is 12345678, you can configure it as "delete any string that ends with 78" or "delete any string that contains 456". This is much safer.

-tranglos (December 10, 2008, 08:14 AM)

This could end up deleting a lot of other data, though. What about "delete strings that have this SHA-512 hash" for really sensitive information?

4283

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 10:53 AM »

Some say the end is near. Some say we'll see Armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this... bullshit three ring circus sideshow of freaks. Some say a comet will fall from the sky, followed by meteor showers and tidal waves. Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still, followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits. One great big festering neon distraction...

Tool - Ænima - Ænima

4284

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 04:00 AM »

If the question is to be interpreted as Earth, not humanity, I vote for being wiped out by aliens in order to build an intergalactic highway.

4285

Living Room / Re: Email etiquette How to Decline Fowards/Junk?

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 03:10 AM »

You shouldn't make it a "couldn't be delivered" kind of message, since the message is in fact delivered (some people might try re-sending if they get a "couldn't be delivered").

Decent email applications should offer message template support. Make a template that briefly and politely explains that you're not interested in junk/spam/silly jokes/powerpoint presentations/whatever, and send that when you get one of those junk mails. The idea is to make the template not seem too much like a cold and angry auto-generated reply.

4286

Living Room / Re: Google Native Client Puts x86 On the Web

« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2008, 03:06 AM »

CWuestefeld: I disagree - they say sandbox, not VM... a VM would be massively overkill for a browser, and it's already been demonstrated that even VMs can be broken out of every now and then. And it's a lot different that Java or JavaScript, since those technologies don't have any facilities for directly accessing memory, performing syscalls, et cetera.

It's a bad idea, and we already have ActiveX anyway.

4287

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 08:01 PM »

Assuming that the question means "how will humanity end" rather than "how does planet earth get destroyed", I'll say global warming (and resulting floods, farmlands turning to deserts, and the remaining humans battling over the few remaining areas that are suitable for living) is a likely candidate.

Global thermonuclear war (want to play a game?) could be another option - I doubt any of the big forces like USA, Russia or China will start anything stupid, but if terrorists from one of the less stable countries fire a nuke and the offended country retaliates, things can escalate pretty quickly.

Asteroid collision would also be bad - the risk of it happening might not be big, but it's happened before, and what can we do to defend ourselves against it? (flying a shuttle and nuking the asteroid works in the movies, but in real life? )

4288

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 07:55 PM »

app: I assume that's the application responsible for the error message, then - the app looks like something that connects to the intarweb for information, so a bit of googling indicates that the error is probably related to some MSXML XMLHTTP request

4289

Living Room / Re: Google Native Client Puts x86 On the Web

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 07:52 PM »

You simply can't verify native x86 code - there's way too many tricky things that can be done. Somebody might come up with a partial solution that works "pretty OK for standard code", but malware authors aren't going to stick to "standard code". Trying to verify x86 code is a waste of time.

The only thing you can really do about native code is requiring the modules to be digitally signed, and then hope users have enough sense to not run code that's been signed by SneakySoftware Inc. And hope that signing authorities won't let anybody register "Mircosoft", "Goggle", etc.

Once the native code runs, you can try to sandbox it... but you'll ultimately fail. There's so many sneaky things x86 code can do, and so many holes you have to be aware of. AFAIK IE8 already has some sandboxing mode available... running in a thread with reduced privileges will get you a long way, but native code will be able to exploit browser bugs and the like, since native code can use pointers and (attempt to) write to arbitrary memory locations.

I really don't see wtf google is trying to achieve, they should stick with ActiveX (which fulfills native code needs) and JAVA (which is safer). The only way to get native code to run safely would be running it in a virtual machine... and virtual machines like vmware have had "escape outside the box" exploits. Even if you do a full emulation (without the run-certain-stuff-natively like vmware and friends do), you'd need some communication channels between the emulated code and the host, which might be open to exploitation. And the benefit of native code is speed, which would be killed by emulation.

Just focus on speeding up your javascript engine and memory allocators, dammit! (Oh, and beat SUN engineers with a big clue stick until they reach the JVM performance that Microsoft's JVM had).

4290

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 07:00 PM »

app103: which Visual Basic applications are you currently running?

4291

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 05:06 PM »

GNU/Linux = the larger OS and free software surrounding it, and used to build the kernel.

-zridling (December 09, 2008, 04:53 PM)

I hate this term with a passion - there's a shitload of non-GNU software in any distribution, so calling distributions "GNU/Linux" is simply giving GNU too much credit. It would be easier to take the GNU software out of the picture than finding replacemens for the rest of the pieces that make up a distro. Just because something is licensed under the GPL doesn't make it GNU, btw.

4292

General Software Discussion / Re: How to share file access between two applications?

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 02:09 PM »

Does seem like the author tries to keep from having multiple processes accessing the file and causing havok (ie, the .lock file) - but he still keeps the database open during the entire run of the program, which is quite a normal thing to do. To have smooth and painless multiple-processes (especially across networks) accessing a database, you really do need to access it through a database server process, which would be the only process keeping the file open.

4293

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft updates - annoying folder proliferation

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 01:17 PM »

FileVersion info doesn't really say anything about the file (anybody can add a string like that) unless it's digitally signed. I'd look at the "Digital Signatures" tab instead

4294

Living Room / Google Native Client Puts x86 On the Web

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 11:55 AM »

Via slashdot: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ISJQZa42PCk/article.pl

t3rmin4t0r writes "Google has announced its Google native client, which enables x86 native code to be run securely inside a browser. With Java applets already dead and buried, this could mean the end of the new war between browsers and the various JavaScript engines (V8, Squirrelfish, Tracemonkey).

...am I the only one who thinks this is a very, very, VERY, VERY bad idea? At least java applets have limitations to what they can do, runs cross-platform, and has decent enough performance these days. I really hope this thing doesn't catch on... yeah sure, "it runs sandboxed", and nobody has ever broken out of a sandbox, right?

4295

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft updates - annoying folder proliferation

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 11:49 AM »

Carol: never seen anything like that on any of the XP machines I've dealt with, and not on my Vista laptop either. I don't have a folder structure like that under %TEMP% either :-s

4296

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 11:43 AM »

iphigenie: I ran Arch for a while on my server, but found that the pacman package manager gets ridiculously slow pretty fast (solution is to copy all it's files elsewhere, nuke the source files, and move the copied files back... no FS fragmentation on linux? ), some packages don't get updated often enough (and I can't be bothered maintaining packages or doing unmanaged build-from-source), plus parts of the system get changed around pretty radically every now and then. Doesn't feel "stable" enough for my likings, so I switched to gentoo

I used to run slackware for years, but it feels a bit "dusty" imho - very slow progress. And after the whole drama when Patrick Volkerding was seriously ill, I got the feeling that slackware might die when he does, or at least be left in somewhat of a limbo - that isn't too reassuring either. I also never found a good package manager, and the system as a whole felt a bit arcane. It's not a distro I'd recommend anybody today, but it did sit on the server at my mum's place doing it's job for... what, 5 years?

Personally, I don't have time (nor desire) to muck around just to much around (and get a bit annoyed when I have to much around to get seemingly simple stuff working), and for the stuff I use linux for I don't want to risk ending up with an unsupported distro... so no fringe distros for me.

I'm considering setting up and hosting my own mail, btw, since I'm already running a 24/7 fileserver. I'm tired of having mail outages a few times per year, and I feel it would rock having IMAP running on the LAN - might be fast enough to even use it for archiving all my mails, and having the stuff backed up via rsnapshot.

4297

Living Room / Re: Why Vista's DRM Is Bad For You and other jewels by Bruce Schneier

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 06:37 AM »

Amen.

The DRM systems have tended to take some months to break, though. But before that kind of breakage, there's alternate means for the pirates... cam recordings in movie theaters (often with perfect audio, and often with professional recording gear), DVD screeners, whatever. And I'm sure the big-scale copying plants run by pirates have means to produce copies of protected media before the protection is cracked letting the average Joe make a backup/pirate/whatever copy.

4298

Living Room / Re: Why Vista's DRM Is Bad For You and other jewels by Bruce Schneier

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 05:52 AM »

Carol: they might be legitimate purposes, but still involve circumventing DRM.

4299

Living Room / Re: Why Vista's DRM Is Bad For You and other jewels by Bruce Schneier

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 05:41 AM »

Having said that just having AnyDVD installed in the UK would mean that should your computer ever be examined by the 'authorities' you would be ASSUMED to be using it for breaking DRM. In the UK just having such software installed on your computer is deemed to be proof that you are circumventing copy protection and are there for guilty of an offense. Not sure what the US law says ...

-Carol Haynes (December 09, 2008, 04:46 AM)

Why would you have it installed if you aren't using it to break DRM, anyway? Both region code protection and CSS/ARCCoS count as DRM in my book.

4300

General Software Discussion / Re: How to share file access between two applications?

« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2008, 05:39 AM »

Yep, I think the app would have to be re-engineered such that it only reads the file in memory and then leaves it alone (like e.g. notepad). Additionally, the app would have to read the file again first before actually writing to it (in case the other instance would have written to it in the meantime).

-David.P (December 09, 2008, 04:44 AM)

That would still leave it vulnerable to a race condition, though...

Why oh why is there no software (hardware?) solution to that problem? I think that this problem occurs very often. Well of course it could cause all kinds of trouble if used without caution.

-David.P (December 09, 2008, 04:44 AM)

The solution is the use of databases, going through a database server instead of directly accessing the files. But of course that is pretty overkill for configuration data