Posts by Unus Radix 13 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Feb 2010
... how much progress has the chief culprit, Microsoft, really made in these 10+ yrs (?) of proclamations of taking security seriously. I sort of expected that things would have gradually gotten better, given time, but from a pragmatic point of view it seems that the trend is just the opposite. Shame on me for being naive, I suppose.
The Finnish law actually provides stronger protection than that of being entitled to privacy under an expectation thereof: as long as one is inside one's home or even in the immediately surrounding area it is a criminal offense to make a record of one with a "technical apparatus" (in practice, a camera). Fines and imprisonment up to 1 yr are in store for offenders. Prison, obviously, can only be applied to the person(s) responsible, but I see no reason for this not percolating up in the chain of command as having someone commit a criminal act for you is equivalent of committing it yourself.
ring 0 :
The term for Intel (tm) processors for a CPU mode with full access to the machine. "Supervisor mode" might be a more general term. Most importantly this means the control of the protection mechanisms (e.g. page tables) themselves.
root access :
Unix concept for when your (E)UID == 0 in which case, basically, access is granted directly, omitting regular checks.
Note that Unix can run on hardware with no proper supervisor mode / HW protection, e.g. Minix & embedded Linux versions. It is argueable whether these are real Unixes, but at least this should demonstrate that the concepts, in themselves, are distinct.
How exactly the perps choose what information (if any) is worth siphoning off to the [former Soviet] Republic of Bulvania for closer inspection. Sending, say, the entire contents of the HD and then examining that is probably not feasible. I suppose doing the same for "C:\Documents and Settings" would be a start, but still ...
... as it has been made (or is in the process of being made) into open source and all that, but then, ultimately, it is thoroughly screwed as a development platform, especially so with Nokia's deeply mystifying additions. Slim hope with Qt+Symbian, though, if they ever get it to work as to completely hide the underlying platform and/or modify it so that e.g. multithreading and normal use of standard C++ is not sabotaged by platform design. It will probably take too much time before this is 1) realized, and assuming that 1 eventually happens 2) implemented; meanwhile, the crucial independent developers have gone elsewhere.
It might make sense to simply discard the upper layers of Symbian as it is now (assuming that the lower levels are in fact decent or can be made so) and replace the upper ones with, say, Java (as, I seem to recall was done, with Android). Then again this is probably an IP (sw patent) minefield.
This would seem to be to be one of those things that should be thoroughly considered in the early stages of (HW&SW) design, and even so a right bitch to get - more or less - sorted. Nokia should have had a fair change with this given their past experience. I understand that this has been less than stellar with Windows Mobile in the past - another case of medicore results at an enormous expense ? [Or maybe we just need new kind of batteries, where the the most important parameter is not mAh but perhaps Bq ?]
A laudable goal, no doubt, but then one should bear in mind that new trees grow spontaneously, never mind through deliberate planting and relatively minimal care (given, most importantly, that the Sun keeps emitting photons). This is in sharp contrast to most other raw materials we are likely to have access to in the foreseeable future.
The point of another browser on a mobile phone: Nokia's pre-installed one, as opposed to OperaMini, something genuinely useful within the limitations of screen size and so forth, even with the evident lack of UI polish (but then the versions I have used seem to have been written in Java, and this - I'd presume - severely limits the design ...)
[Choice of icon due to a recent change in general world view due to Bayonetta: her enemies tend to sport a halo.]
Could we have a default first comment extolling the virtues of Linux automatically inserted to the discussion whenever there is a story mentioning Windows ? A fervent pledge to Windows-servitude could be automatically added after that, saving even more time and effort in the long run. These should have a special icon not available to us common riff-raff - like the vulture for the mighty Moderatrix - so that these could be conveniently skipped and ignored. Please ?
[Either that or come clean as to what happened to Sarah Bee ...]
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