Recent Posts

8851

Living Room / Re: Samsung unveils 32GB Flash-based HDD killer

« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 11:26 AM »

Solid-state disks have been around for a long time, but at an insane cost - basically only the military and other Big Guys use them. I would really appreciate a smallish solid-state disk at a reasonable price; not only will you get better throughput, but search time should be reduced from miliseconds to micro/nanoseconds.

If the 32gig drive is at a resonable price, it would be perfect for OS + applications and things like source code and documents. Heck, even a few games for faster loading and less drive thrashing. But I bet you it's not reasonably priced

Another alternative are the ram-based drives that are starting to pop up. Sure, they lose your data contents if you unplug your PC for "some amount of time" (24+ hours iirc), but with a normal poweroff the data is kept thanks to the PCI bus power. And this a lot cheaper than solid-state disks, even if 4x1GB ram modules are expensive.

The only sad thing with the "ram drives" (which paradoxically is also what really makes them useful) is that they're limited to SATA or SATA-2 speeds, limiting you to hundreds of megabytes per second bandwidth, while the RAM modules are able to transfer gigabytes per second.

8852

Living Room / Re: Unprotected Wireless Lans?

« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 11:20 AM »

I dunno how many unprotected WLANs are around, since my laptop-enabled friend didn't have any "toolz" when he visited me. But we found about 15 active WLANs, 3-4 of them that were permanently online and with good signal strength...

8853

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - How to use machine code to get your CPU name

« Last post by f0dder on March 22, 2006, 11:14 AM »

I was under the impression (probably wrong) that applications in Windows 2k/XP work within allocated virtual memory and can't directly address the hardware memory. I thought if you tried to access memory outside the address range of the apps allocation you got Access Violation errors etc.? Don't all apps have to address Windows and other apps memory via the various Windows libraries/API etc.?? Or am I totally barking up the wrong tree and C++ will let you do what you like?

Unless you write device driver code (which can be done in C/C++), you're always going to be dealing with virtual memory. Hell, you're dealing with "virtual" memory even in device drivers, unless you *specifially* need a physical memory address (mapping device memory, DMA transfers, etc).

In order to run priveleged device driver code, you need the proper administrative access privileges. So again, this isn't a security problem.

Application level peek and poke will only let you write inside your own program's address space, not even in the address spaces of other programs. Well, it *is* possible to write into another process' memory, but again that requires the necessary privileges.

It's an unfortunate fact that Microsoft decided to make the default users of WinXP have administrative privileges, and this is why windows systems are "insecure". It seems like this is a thing they might be fixing with vista, but hooray and everything, there'll still be millions of XP boxes around for years, and many of those probably will remain unpatched for quite a wihle.

8854

Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

« Last post by f0dder on March 21, 2006, 09:09 AM »

Try getting a new PCB, sounds like the way to go. If you make it work, make sure to copy over your data as quickly as you can, because the drive probably won't live for long. Keep a fan blowing at the drive while doing the data copy, low temperatures help prolonging life...

8855

fSekrit / Re: Is the application part of the file encrypted also?

« Last post by f0dder on March 21, 2006, 08:34 AM »

The application part of your notes are NOT encrypted, just compressed as mouser points out. Thus there's nothing there helping a potential attacker. The compression is done for size issues, not security - even having the source code to fSekrit would not give an attacker any benefits (and in fact I'm considering opening up the source in the future).

Also, I don't know of any current known-plaintext attacks for AES/Rijndael, even theoretic ones (but I haven't checked in a while, I must admit).

In a coming version (don't know if it'll make it into the one scheduled for early April) I'll add some more security, something called "salt". Basically it means that two identical pieces of text encrypted with the same passphrase will NOT produce the same output file.

8856

Living Room / Re: How long will it take you to adopt Windows Vista as your OS?

« Last post by f0dder on March 21, 2006, 08:31 AM »

does drm really have anything to do with windows vista? i mean whatever drm technologies they add to drm will surely be added to the media player software, etc.  its not like the operating system is going to make the drm situation better or worse one way or the other as far as i know.

It sure IS going to make a difference once palladium-enabled systems pop up... you feel like installing and booting another operating system? no-go, if it's not "approved". You'll have hardware + OS enforced DRM. Want to play DRM music? Sure thing, unless you're trying to play to an analog output or a digital output connected to an "insecure" device.

They might not get it right with the first edition of Vista and Palladium, just like the pretty strong original XBOX encryption was defeated too. But there's some VERY scary perspectives here, which (as usual) is going to hit the legit end-users a lot harder than the pirates. This time it's for real, *hard* OS and and hardware enforced restrictions on what you can do with YOUR hardware.

But I really don't understand what folks mean when they say 'Linux sucks' and I fire up my box and have no problems. Really, none. Sure it's been a long and many times hard road. Giving the details would make for a really long post.

It would be an equivalently long post if I was going to ratify "why linux sucks". I'm pretty familiar with linux and BSD and don't have trouble managing either. But no way in hell I could be bothered running any of these for my desktop. There's simply too many annoyances, quirks, and really boring trivial things you have to do manually.

I would encourage giving Mac a try. BSD under the hood can't be a bad thing and I predict great things happening in Mac-land, especially since being ported to Intel chipsets and Mac Minis making it affordable.

Yup, BSD + MACH + NeXT under the hood == not a bad thing indeed. I'm not all too happy with the move to intel hardware since there's so much crappy legacy with the x86 system. But oh well, it should make things more affordable. Just hope that Apple won't go as DRM-crazy as MS are... and that applications will support three-button mice in a comfortable way, I've always hated the one-button-and-keyboard-modifiers approach that Macs used to have.

As for OEM XP versions, there are a few different ways that this works. If you buy eg a DELL PC, you have one form of OEM. This is hardware tied to some strings in your BIOS, so you can only use that OEM with DELL computers. If you buy a piece-of-hardware + OEM XP, that copy will not be hardware tied, and you'll have the usual "you can change 3 pieces of hardware before you need to call the toll-free MS number and explain why so much hardware has changed and get your 25-digit unlock code". Christ I'm glad I have a corporate/VLK version.

8857

Living Room / Re: Kensington lock toilet paper hack

« Last post by f0dder on March 21, 2006, 08:20 AM »

At "my" museum, we have a laptop in the main hall used for checking the shared calendar and some other misc. tasks. Sometimes the... uh... "person that sells ticket etc. to guests" has to leave it for a short while, so we have a kensington lock on it...

8858

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - How to use machine code to get your CPU name

« Last post by f0dder on March 21, 2006, 08:19 AM »

Carol, you need to make a distinction between "Visual C++" and ".net" - VC++, even the 2005 version, can still do unmanaged (native) as well as managed (.net) code.

Dunno how managed code and pointers mix, but they're sure are available for native code. Not that memory allocation with malloc/free and new/delete is a good thing anyway, everybody should use resource management objects for greater security against leaks etc.

Can't help feeling security would be an issue though if you can generate code on the fly and then execute it!

Not a problem, that code will still be limited by NT's security model...

8859

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« Last post by f0dder on March 19, 2006, 06:25 AM »

You could use my fSekrit to store registration keys :p - I personally use it for passwords for various things now.

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Living Room / Re: How long will it take you to adopt Windows Vista as your OS?

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 11:31 PM »

It's the difference between a real woman and a slattern, I'd much rather look at an attractive woman than be repelled by a skank.

I prefer women that are beatiful WITHOUT makeup, but are drop-dead gorgeous with. Vista is a case of "I can live with this skank when she has a couple of pounds of makeup on".

You might not think much of DRM right now and shrug it off as a "It's only the pirates worrying about this". I happen to think differently... I rip all my CDs to lossless audio format (APE or FLAC which sure as hell do NOT do DRM). If Microsoft has their way, I will not be able to do this in the future. Heck, some of my legally purchased CDs I've only been able to rip because I have a plextor drive and plextools. MS and friends are currently developing technologies that will only allow you to have audio output if you output is connected to a "verified device" - much worse than what's currently done with digital out on SPDIF devices.

It's all technology that fooks over regular users, but won't be much of a hindrance for pirates.

Just say NO NO NO and NO NO NO to VISTA. Unless, of course, you love eyecandy and 1984.

8861

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Multithreaded GUI Application

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 06:56 PM »

Well, it's bound to one version of VB (or well, the v6 safe code should work on both v5 and v6), and it is STABLE for those versions. The "hacky" part means it has to do some pretty interesting stuff to make things works, largely because VB objects are COM objects. Pretty interesting if you like lowlevel code, but waste of time to do yourself when working with a language like VB

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Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Multithreaded GUI Application

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 04:49 PM »

Again: it's possible in pre-dotnet VB code, although it's hacky

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Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - How to use machine code to get your CPU name

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 04:48 PM »

Oh, system call API?

btw, how does your 'asm' code do API calls?

8864

Living Room / Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 04:46 PM »

I hope to play with RAID-5 in the future... sounds like a good balance between wasted space and redundancy. I'll probably wait until I can afford some dedicated controller for it though, instead of a software solution.

As for backups, I don't currently have anything really good. I use subversion for my source code though, so at least that is relatively safe. Using TrueImage at work for backups, but it's not really ideal for that. Kicks ass for drive imaging, though

8865

General Software Discussion / Re: Map a Drive via SFTP

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 01:45 PM »

Sounds pretty interesting...

8866

Developer's Corner / Re: math for programmers - nice big blog entry

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 01:37 PM »

Sounds interesting, I've ScapBook'ed the page and will read it later when I'm home

8867

Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - Multithreaded GUI Application

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 01:35 PM »

You *can* do multi-threading in VB, although it is a bit hacky. You can't access global variables without going through a lot of tricky hoops, and there's a bunch of language features you can't use from secondary threads. But it *is* possible

That's for v5 and v6 btw, dunno about vb.net - but I assume they've fixed threading issues there.

8868

Backup Guide / Re: Hello from Genie-soft (and info about discount)

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:59 PM »

I think I'll give GBM a try... I need some decent backup software, and you guys seem pretty happy with it

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Living Room / Re: How long will it take you to adopt Windows Vista as your OS?

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:59 PM »

I won't use Vista until I absolutely have to. I don't like eyecandy in my OS, and it's one of the first things I turn off in XP (or rather, it used to be, before I set up a decent customized unattended install CD). All the eyecandy crap added to Vista + the DRM shit = no go, bro.

Too bad linux SUCKS, with a kernel designed by people who mentally live in the 70'es. The "user-friendly" distros are even more bloated than XP.

I guess I'll give Mac OS X a try, it's the only decent realistic alternative to windows for desktop use.

8870

Living Room / Re: Chinese Gold Farmers...

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:55 PM »

Those bastards (or rather, their bosses) should be put out of their misery, they ruin the online games.

8871

Living Room / Re: Scientology safe found in Desert... Google Satellite image included

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:53 PM »

Heh, and I thought scientology was whack BEFORE I saw this...

8872

Living Room / Re: Partitioning hard drive - any point?

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:32 PM »

Repeat after me:


RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!
RAID/mirroring IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS!


mirroring is great, and I wouldn't be without it. But it's only useful to guard against data loss in case of harddrive crash - it doesn't save you from errant deletes, viruses, filesystem crashes et cetera.

Multiple partitions is a good thing, since you only lose one partition in case of filesystem corruption. Granted, filesystem corruption doesn't happen often if you run NTFS, but it CAN happen, and when it does it usually hits you hard. VERY hard.

A separate partition for your paging file is nonsense. It only helps if you put it on a separate physical drive. Besides, you should have enough RAM that you don't need a paging file (which is, of course, impossible if you use anything from Adobe ;-) )

I have a partition for OS + apps, one for documents and source code, one for games and then a "dump" partition. When I get the time to back up stuff etc., I'll merge games and "dump" since there's not much point in having them separate. "dump" is where I have temp files, downloads, misc. large data files et cetera.

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Developer's Corner / Re: FBSL - How to use machine code to get your CPU name

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:25 PM »

Eek, that looks like how pascal did machine code before the inline assembler was added

8874

Living Room / Re: Kensington lock toilet paper hack

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:20 PM »

gaffa/gaffer tape, probably, as that's what that kind of tape is called (at least in .dk).

But christ, that's shocking considering kensingtons reputation.

8875

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: fSekrit in Clif Notes

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2006, 12:11 PM »

Thanks for your kind words, clif

I'm working on unicode and find/replace at the moment. Spare time has been a bit tight because of work (until I find something better, I load/unload parcels at www.dpd.net - early morning, 7km of bicycling each way, and hard physical work, so I'm a bit trashed when I get home ).

There's already undo, btw, at the standard CTRL+Z keyboard shortcut. I usually don't use editing menus myself, so I've been a bit forgetful of stuff to add there.

I expect to have the next version ready for April 1st. I'm currently pondering whether to have two exes, one for unicode and one for ANSI text, since unicode will add a little bloat and might reduce win9x compatibility (that's another thing that sets fSekrit apart from locknote. Locknote uses an API that's not available on win9x, so it won't run there at all).