I don't really understand the intent of "We've built the chip that you should have had next."
Same here. Kinda strange. Instead maybe go with a progression on the theme:
Remember when programming was fun?
And then you got tied down using hardware with too many rules.
Rediscover the joy of code with the 8-core Parallax Propeller!
I'd keep the layout in Ken's original graphic. It has a better eye-line. Maybe play up 'joy of code' as well. Yeah, you know why.
I don't really understand the intent of "We've built the chip that you should have had next." It seems like it would make more sense to say "We've built the chip that you should try next." or something like that.
Computing has taken increasingly ugly turns from how I thought it would have progressed when I was young.
We no longer have control of our machines and we cannot tell how badly they're betraying us. They certainly don't work for us, anymore. It's almost silly that we pay money for them, since they serve the interests of all kinds of nefarious external forces, while reluctantly doing the few things we can coax them to do for us.
Today I've been switching to a faster PC that I've had for over two years. I hadn't made the switch earlier, since I hate the interruption that comes with doing so, but with Quartus II Subscription Edition having expired and a lot of SPICE simulations waiting to be done in the Tanner EDA tools, I thought I'd take the plunge, switching to Quartus II Web Edition in the process, which supports the Terasic boards. We originally had Windows 7 on this machine, which would have been agreeable, but because we couldn't remember the password (a long time had passed), we had to reinstall Windows. We couldn't get Windows 7 anymore, though, so we had to put Windows 8 on it. That thing is so slow now, I can't believe it. The internet works like molasses. I'm actually using a laptop on the same network to download big apps onto a memory stick which I'll poke into that pig later. We were surprised to find that the new machine was actually moving Ethernet packets pretty quickly, just none for us. I think I've heard that starting a Windows 8 machine can begin with two days of it downloading 'updates', while it effectively ignores you. Anyway, the state of things is a complete mess, as far as I can tell. If all this wasn't bad enough, there are all kinds of pop-ups occurring, which take some discernment to dismiss. It's just disgusting. My dream is to use the Prop2 as a Noah's Ark to get away from the mess that modern computing has become. I just want something that works reliably, can be self-hosting, and is fluent in real-time operations (which NO 'computer' is, anymore).
That was the notion behind "the chip you should have had next" (instead of what we got). Now, I now there is Linux, and I would probably be a lot less sour if I was using it, instead, but to me, the state of computing is not even interesting, anymore. All of us that use these big-company-OS machines are like mentally-abused co-dependents who can hardly recognize what a bad circumstance they are living in. I just want off this derelict ship ASAP.
Computing has taken increasingly ugly turns from how I thought it would have progressed when I was young.
We no longer have control of our machines and we cannot tell how badly they're betraying us. They certainly don't work for us, anymore. It's almost silly that we pay money for them, since they serve the interests of all kinds of nefarious external forces, while reluctantly doing the few things we can coax them to do for us.
Today I've been switching to a faster PC that I've had for over two years. I hadn't made the switch earlier, since I hate the interruption that comes with doing so, but with Quartus II Subscription Edition having expired and a lot of SPICE simulations waiting to be done in the Tanner EDA tools, I thought I'd take the plunge, switching to Quartus II Web Edition in the process, which supports the Terasic boards. We originally had Windows 7 on this machine, which would have been agreeable, but because we couldn't remember the password (a long time had passed), we had to reinstall Windows. We couldn't get Windows 7 anymore, though, so we had to put Windows 8 on it. That thing is so slow now, I can't believe it. The internet works like molasses. I'm actually using a laptop on the same network to download big apps onto a memory stick which I'll poke into that pig later. We were surprised to find that the new machine was actually moving Ethernet packets pretty quickly, just none for us. I think I've heard that starting a Windows 8 machine can begin with two days of it downloading 'updates', while it effectively ignores you. Anyway, the state of things is a complete mess, as far as I can tell. If all this wasn't bad enough, there are all kinds of pop-ups occurring, which take some discernment to dismiss. It's just disgusting. My dream is to use the Prop2 as a Noah's Ark to get away from the mess that modern computing has become. I just want something that works reliably, can be self-hosting, and is fluent in real-time operations (which NO 'computer' is, anymore).
That was the notion behind "the chip you should have had next" (instead of what we got). Now, I now there is Linux, and I would probably be a lot less sour if I was using it, instead, but to me, the state of computing is not even interesting, anymore. All of us that use these big-company-OS machines are like mentally-abused co-dependents who can hardly recognize what a bad circumstance they are living in. I just want off this derelict ship ASAP.
Isn't this more a criticism of the operating system than the chips themselves? Couldn't you achieve what you want by taking a PC clone without any OS and loading one you wrote yourself which is what you'll have to do to make a self-hosting P2 system anyway. I realize that even this might be problematic soon when the boot ROM won't even load anything other than Windows or Mac OS X but I don't think we've reached that point yet.
Isn't this more a criticism of the operating system than the chips themselves? Couldn't you achieve what you want by taking a PC clone without any OS and loading one you wrote yourself which is what you'll have to do to make a self-hosting P2 system anyway. I realize that even this might be problematic soon when the boot ROM won't even load anything other than Windows or Mac OS X but I don't think we've reached that point yet.
Yes, it is a criticism of the OS. It shapes the whole experience, much more than the hardware. I think the hardware is practically unknowable, anymore, anyway.
Yes but Win 7 will probably also waste a day of your time downloading updates before you can really use it.
True enough, but I'd be willing to endure that to get a mature system, then turn off automatic updates. One day is minimal compared to the recovery time required when an automatic update bricks a fully-loaded system while you sleep.
Yes, it is a criticism of the OS. It shapes the whole experience, much more than the hardware. I think the hardware is practically unknowable, anymore, anyway.
Even the hardware is untrustworthy.
At a defcon talk this year on how to decap chips two of the researchers shared one of their case studies where someone had snuck-in an RF module into their customer's product without their knowledge somewhere in the supply chain.
The didn't solder in the device, no.
They didn't add it to the PCB, no.
Their customer's product was an MCU with built-in eeprom. The package was meant to contain two dies... one being the MCU, the other being the eeprom. When they x-ray'd their production chips someone had inserted a 433Mhz radio tranceiver into the package.
At a defcon talk this year on how to decap chips two of the researchers shared one of their case studies where someone had snuck-in an RF module into their customer's product without their knowledge somewhere in the supply chain.
The didn't solder in the device, no.
They didn't add it to the PCB, no.
Their customer's product was an MCU with built-in eeprom. The package was meant to contain two dies... one being the MCU, the other being the eeprom. When they x-ray'd their production chips someone had inserted a 433Mhz radio tranceiver into the package.
At a defcon talk this year on how to decap chips two of the researchers shared one of their case studies where someone had snuck-in an RF module into their customer's product without their knowledge somewhere in the supply chain.
The didn't solder in the device, no.
They didn't add it to the PCB, no.
Their customer's product was an MCU with built-in eeprom. The package was meant to contain two dies... one being the MCU, the other being the eeprom. When they x-ray'd their production chips someone had inserted a 433Mhz radio tranceiver into the package.
Can you find a link to that? I'm curious how this could have happened - of course I can understand that a module maker could do this but why? They would be adding cost into the system so what would be the motivation? I'm guessing that this was supposedly there to act as a backdoor, or to broadcast information to someone? Maybe someone paid a module maker to just make a few of these that they could slip into the right slots?
Also note that at most chip companies the engineers are probably ~80% software engineers. Plenty of opportunity to slip things into these chips. I don't know how much code review is done at these companies, but my experience says not as much as you might think.
Most of my machines run Linux because it is not as bloated as Windows, and the source is available, so if I wanted to spend the time, I could re-build everything from scratch.
Unfortunately a lot of software tools I use are only available under Windows, and it is possible to make a blazingly fast Windows box, but it takes some doing.
Recently I upgraded my main Windows box for Proteus/Ares as follows:
- AMD "8 core" FX-8530 running at 3.5GHz, overclocks stably to 4.0GHz (really it is 4 core with fancy dual thread per core, more efficient than Intel's hyper threading)
- Kingston 128GB SSD for boot/os
- 16GB of DDR3-1600 so I can disable swapping
- spent plenty of time tuning the box, and tweaking settings
Mind you, it took almost three days to get everything working right due to obsolete SATA drivers in Win7Pro causing disk corruption, and the SATA drivers no longer being part of the chipset driver package...
I am adding a second SSD with Ubuntu, so I can dual boot between Linux and Windows 7 Pro (64 bit)
Even with the incredible bloat in Windows, this box is insanely fast. Cold start to desktop in about 11 seconds; IE/FireFox/Chrome cold start to google home page <1s, LibreOffice writer or calc start in <2s the first time, <1 sec after... but I had to throw ridiculous amount of computing power at it (~60BIPS); an old PDP-11/70 could run a ton of users in 4MB with a tiny fraction of CPU power!
One does wonder where all those "spare" cpu cycles go...
Computing has taken increasingly ugly turns from how I thought it would have progressed when I was young.
We no longer have control of our machines and we cannot tell how badly they're betraying us. They certainly don't work for us, anymore. It's almost silly that we pay money for them, since they serve the interests of all kinds of nefarious external forces, while reluctantly doing the few things we can coax them to do for us.
Today I've been switching to a faster PC that I've had for over two years. I hadn't made the switch earlier, since I hate the interruption that comes with doing so, but with Quartus II Subscription Edition having expired and a lot of SPICE simulations waiting to be done in the Tanner EDA tools, I thought I'd take the plunge, switching to Quartus II Web Edition in the process, which supports the Terasic boards. We originally had Windows 7 on this machine, which would have been agreeable, but because we couldn't remember the password (a long time had passed), we had to reinstall Windows. We couldn't get Windows 7 anymore, though, so we had to put Windows 8 on it. That thing is so slow now, I can't believe it. The internet works like molasses. I'm actually using a laptop on the same network to download big apps onto a memory stick which I'll poke into that pig later. We were surprised to find that the new machine was actually moving Ethernet packets pretty quickly, just none for us. I think I've heard that starting a Windows 8 machine can begin with two days of it downloading 'updates', while it effectively ignores you. Anyway, the state of things is a complete mess, as far as I can tell. If all this wasn't bad enough, there are all kinds of pop-ups occurring, which take some discernment to dismiss. It's just disgusting. My dream is to use the Prop2 as a Noah's Ark to get away from the mess that modern computing has become. I just want something that works reliably, can be self-hosting, and is fluent in real-time operations (which NO 'computer' is, anymore).
That was the notion behind "the chip you should have had next" (instead of what we got). Now, I now there is Linux, and I would probably be a lot less sour if I was using it, instead, but to me, the state of computing is not even interesting, anymore. All of us that use these big-company-OS machines are like mentally-abused co-dependents who can hardly recognize what a bad circumstance they are living in. I just want off this derelict ship ASAP.
I have an ISO stored on a USB flash drive and a bootable disc or two stashed in my "IT Silver Bullet" folder. You boot this thing, it enters the registry, you can clear a password and elevate a user to administrator user. Works on Workstation OSes, some additional hacks required for newer versions of server.
Clear the password, let it write the registry key back, eject media, reboot, enter admin account, continue from there. Can't tell you how many times I've had to use this Linux recovery tool.
Even with the incredible bloat in Windows, this box is insanely fast. Cold start to desktop in about 11 seconds;
So, if I had just upgraded from a Commodore C64 to your machine I would spend 11 seconds after turning it on thinking it was broken:)
Of course having got it booted I would realize it is not a computer at all, where is the programing language I can use?
Chip,
Many years ago a young chap felt much the same as you and decided to write his own OS.
That chaps name was Linus Torvalds hand his OS is Linux.
Sadly it's increasingly looking like the desktop PC as we know it will be obsolete before Linux gets wide spread adoption on it. I suspect that you are in a bind with all those chip design and other electronics design tools that only work in Windows.
Edit: Actually I think Windows comes with JavaScript built in. That's the only programming option for your newly installed Windows "computer".
So, if I had just upgraded from a Commodore C64 to your machine I would spend 11 seconds after turning it on thinking it was broken:)
Of course having got it booted I would realize it is not a computer at all, where is the programing language I can use?
Chip,
Many years ago a young chap felt much the same as you and decided to write his own OS.
That chaps name was Linus Torvalds hand his OS is Linux.
Sadly it's increasingly looking like the desktop PC as we know it will be obsolete before Linux gets wide spread adoption on it. I suspect that you are in a bind with all those chip design and other electronics design tools that only work in Windows.
Edit: Actually I think Windows comes with JavaScript built in. That's the only programming option for your newly installed Windows "computer".
The Mac OS comes with Perl and Python and the Bash shell which has a fairly powerful programming language. It may come with others as well.
Can you find a link to that? I'm curious how this could have happened - of course I can understand that a module maker could do this but why? They would be adding cost into the system so what would be the motivation? I'm guessing that this was supposedly there to act as a backdoor, or to broadcast information to someone? Maybe someone paid a module maker to just make a few of these that they could slip into the right slots?
My guess would be Nation State, but that would be a guess. There are other commercial activities that could justify funding those kinds of threats such as trading platforms.
The video isn't posted yet. Watch the defcon21 website.
The Transcend 32MB WIFI SD card is a wonderful thing. Storage and WIFI all in one weenie little SD card.
Turns out it runs Linux in there to manage all that. Of course it could be any OS but basically it has access to all the files you store there so it can back door any executables that that pass by. Not mention that it has a tap on your WIFI communications.
Not only that but the OS installation on the SD card is full of potential exploits which can be used by baddies to get at your systems.
On the plus side though, because of those exploits a clever hacker has gotten in there and showed us all how to modify the thing to our herts content:
The Transcend 32MB WIFI SD card is a wonderful thing. Storage and WIFI all in one weenie little SD card.
Turns out it runs Linux in there to manage all that. Of course it could be any OS but basically it has access to all the files you store there so it can back door any executables that that pass by. Not mention that it has a tap on your WIFI communications.
Not only that but the OS installation on the SD card is full of potential exploits which can be used by baddies to get at your systems.
On the plus side though, because of those exploits a clever hacker has gotten in there and showed us all how to modify the thing to our herts content:
So, if I had just upgraded from a Commodore C64 to your machine I would spend 11 seconds after turning it on thinking it was broken:)
Of course having got it booted I would realize it is not a computer at all, where is the programing language I can use?
Chip,
Many years ago a young chap felt much the same as you and decided to write his own OS.
That chaps name was Linus Torvalds hand his OS is Linux.
Sadly it's increasingly looking like the desktop PC as we know it will be obsolete before Linux gets wide spread adoption on it. I suspect that you are in a bind with all those chip design and other electronics design tools that only work in Windows.
Edit: Actually I think Windows comes with JavaScript built in. That's the only programming option for your newly installed Windows "computer".
You know I certainly won't go to the mat for MS but..... huh? To program my Linux system I had to obtain the packages to program it. It does not boot to command prompt before the monitor warms up and there are tools for things in Linux that only are available for it, some only for the a distro unless you you just love the challenge of a few nights work just to get it to operate. I don't see where it's the antithesis of the large bloated OS. It's got to be massaged to do anything sort of real-time, it comes on a DVD now and to be useful to anyone but a *nix geek like me or you it takes gigs of ram. I agree on the fact that at least people can look inside the box but that only is relevant to a few of us.
The Transcend 32MB WIFI SD card is a wonderful thing. Storage and WIFI all in one weenie little SD card.
Turns out it runs Linux in there to manage all that. Of course it could be any OS but basically it has access to all the files you store there so it can back door any executables that that pass by. Not mention that it has a tap on your WIFI communications.
Not only that but the OS installation on the SD card is full of potential exploits which can be used by baddies to get at your systems.
On the plus side though, because of those exploits a clever hacker has gotten in there and showed us all how to modify the thing to our herts content:
This is where things get interesting I think. Device peripherals are not just dumb devices anymore. They are little computer systems all to themselves. Little, poorly updated, quickly developed, feature-creeping, rushed to market computer systems. All riddled with flaws. If some highly funded entity wants to send all the file names you store to an IP somewhere they don't need a vendor-coded back door. They just need to poke the right pressure points and install their own. You don't packet capture all your internet traffic and analyze it in detail and encrypted comms are blasting out of your system all the time anyway, whats one more stream?
You don't packet capture all your internet traffic and analyze it in detail and encrypted comms are blasting out of your system all the time anyway, whats one more stream?
Speak for yourself :-) I do. But then again I do malware analysis for a living so I'm constantly looking for unwelcome visitors.
There is so much stuff that emanates as "normal" from your average OSes, and... just like you said above most of it is either encrypted or not interesting enough to decompile. Eventually you succumb and have to baseline the noise and look for changes.
I never understood this business about my computer talking everywhere all the time. How did that ever get allowed to happen? My computer should only do what I tell it.
For example. The WEB browser. In the URL bar I type the location I want to visit. Or I'm following a link to some host. How come all of a sudden by browser is fetching stuff from a 100 other hosts and domains that I never asked for?
I'm not sure why that idea wasn't laughed out of the room as soon as it was uttered.
Windows Task Manager is part of this cabal. Your machine can be completely dogged-out doing *something* and yet Task Manager lies to you that your machine is spending 95% of its time in idle state. BS!
If we could get a bit of honesty from our tools, perhaps we could make more informed decisions. But when they are part of the lie, there's not much hope.
Search was added to the address bar for a few reasons:
1. Usability. Put something in, get something potentially useful out. Opera browser started this with the address bar being a commamind line of sorts. G fish would search for fish, etc... The others simplified this into just doing a search on input that made no other sense.
2. Revenue. Offering that capability drives traffic which can equal dollars.
3. Discourage full URL input. It is easier to communicate and own a single word. Pour enough dollars in so that people can just input the minimum and find you.
Opera did not start anything. I have never seen an Opera browser nor do I know anyone who uses one.
What happens is:
1) I go to some website.
2) My browser downloads a pile of HTML and CSS and JavaScript from the website. So far so good.
3) That JavaScript or HTML starts loading a pile of stuff from God knows where else.
Just watch your browser status bar some times. It's amazing what flashes by.
So how come I can't tell my browser "Don't down load anything from anywhere unless it's from the site I am visiting"
So how come I can't tell by browser "Don't down load anything from anywhere unless it's from the site I am visiting"
Your buddy javascript will stop doing a lot of those cool things you like. Smaller sites will download libraries from content delivery networks instead of their site to cut down on their bandwidth. Google has a BIG CDN, so lots of web sites point their javascript loads to them. But anything from Google can surely be trusted
If you just get stuff from the sites yo originally go to, things will be pretty boring.
... because functionality trumps security. If Browser A doesn't support it for security reasons then the sheeple will move to browsers B, C and D so they can continue to water their virtual crops and watch the dancing pigs.
You should look at noscript and disconnect 2.
Disconnect 2 blackholes tracking sites.
noscript disables all scripting on all sites until you explicitly whitelist it.
"my buddy javascript" is quite OK. He's only a language after all.
When you visit any page I make you will get JS that I serve that will do cool things like connecting back to my server and making realtime animations of live data changes.
If he needs any libraries to do that he will get them from my web site also. I take full reponsibiliy and accountability as to what happens.
In terms of bandwidth, most JS libraries are not so big that it would make any difference if I serve them or arrange that you get the from Gooogle or whoever. Given the amount of data I will stream to my webapp it's not worth thinking about. And all that connecting to doublclick or google analytics or whatever a hundred times for each page load is a thousand times worse.
Think of it like this: There is a company out there that you trust that provides a nice executable program for your Windows machine. So you download and run it. Problem is that in order to run it the installer fetches a bunch of
dlls from places and people you have never heard of. Which in turn post all kind of data about you and your machine back to some unknown entity.
Now a days we have all kind of anti-virus tools, even built into Windows, to stop that happening. How come browsers are so lax about it? They could easily say "no".
Comments
Same here. Kinda strange. Instead maybe go with a progression on the theme:
Remember when programming was fun?
And then you got tied down using hardware with too many rules.
Rediscover the joy of code with the 8-core Parallax Propeller!
I'd keep the layout in Ken's original graphic. It has a better eye-line. Maybe play up 'joy of code' as well. Yeah, you know why.
-- Gordon
Computing has taken increasingly ugly turns from how I thought it would have progressed when I was young.
We no longer have control of our machines and we cannot tell how badly they're betraying us. They certainly don't work for us, anymore. It's almost silly that we pay money for them, since they serve the interests of all kinds of nefarious external forces, while reluctantly doing the few things we can coax them to do for us.
Today I've been switching to a faster PC that I've had for over two years. I hadn't made the switch earlier, since I hate the interruption that comes with doing so, but with Quartus II Subscription Edition having expired and a lot of SPICE simulations waiting to be done in the Tanner EDA tools, I thought I'd take the plunge, switching to Quartus II Web Edition in the process, which supports the Terasic boards. We originally had Windows 7 on this machine, which would have been agreeable, but because we couldn't remember the password (a long time had passed), we had to reinstall Windows. We couldn't get Windows 7 anymore, though, so we had to put Windows 8 on it. That thing is so slow now, I can't believe it. The internet works like molasses. I'm actually using a laptop on the same network to download big apps onto a memory stick which I'll poke into that pig later. We were surprised to find that the new machine was actually moving Ethernet packets pretty quickly, just none for us. I think I've heard that starting a Windows 8 machine can begin with two days of it downloading 'updates', while it effectively ignores you. Anyway, the state of things is a complete mess, as far as I can tell. If all this wasn't bad enough, there are all kinds of pop-ups occurring, which take some discernment to dismiss. It's just disgusting. My dream is to use the Prop2 as a Noah's Ark to get away from the mess that modern computing has become. I just want something that works reliably, can be self-hosting, and is fluent in real-time operations (which NO 'computer' is, anymore).
That was the notion behind "the chip you should have had next" (instead of what we got). Now, I now there is Linux, and I would probably be a lot less sour if I was using it, instead, but to me, the state of computing is not even interesting, anymore. All of us that use these big-company-OS machines are like mentally-abused co-dependents who can hardly recognize what a bad circumstance they are living in. I just want off this derelict ship ASAP.
-Phil
If this thing doesn't give me some computer time soon, I'll go that route. I think it was our IT guy that only had Win8, anymore.
Yes, it is a criticism of the OS. It shapes the whole experience, much more than the hardware. I think the hardware is practically unknowable, anymore, anyway.
-Phil
Even the hardware is untrustworthy.
At a defcon talk this year on how to decap chips two of the researchers shared one of their case studies where someone had snuck-in an RF module into their customer's product without their knowledge somewhere in the supply chain.
The didn't solder in the device, no.
They didn't add it to the PCB, no.
Their customer's product was an MCU with built-in eeprom. The package was meant to contain two dies... one being the MCU, the other being the eeprom. When they x-ray'd their production chips someone had inserted a 433Mhz radio tranceiver into the package.
Can you find a link to that? I'm curious how this could have happened - of course I can understand that a module maker could do this but why? They would be adding cost into the system so what would be the motivation? I'm guessing that this was supposedly there to act as a backdoor, or to broadcast information to someone? Maybe someone paid a module maker to just make a few of these that they could slip into the right slots?
On the untrustworthy note this paper has been in the news "Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans": http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf
Chip will "like" it
Also note that at most chip companies the engineers are probably ~80% software engineers. Plenty of opportunity to slip things into these chips. I don't know how much code review is done at these companies, but my experience says not as much as you might think.
Edited to add: see this old picture from Vernor Vinge (scifi author) ;-) - http://vrinimi.org/front9uns.jpg and http://vrinimi.org/back9rev.jpg (you need to read Rainbow's End to "get" the latter)
Unfortunately a lot of software tools I use are only available under Windows, and it is possible to make a blazingly fast Windows box, but it takes some doing.
Recently I upgraded my main Windows box for Proteus/Ares as follows:
- AMD "8 core" FX-8530 running at 3.5GHz, overclocks stably to 4.0GHz (really it is 4 core with fancy dual thread per core, more efficient than Intel's hyper threading)
- Kingston 128GB SSD for boot/os
- 16GB of DDR3-1600 so I can disable swapping
- spent plenty of time tuning the box, and tweaking settings
Mind you, it took almost three days to get everything working right due to obsolete SATA drivers in Win7Pro causing disk corruption, and the SATA drivers no longer being part of the chipset driver package...
I am adding a second SSD with Ubuntu, so I can dual boot between Linux and Windows 7 Pro (64 bit)
Even with the incredible bloat in Windows, this box is insanely fast. Cold start to desktop in about 11 seconds; IE/FireFox/Chrome cold start to google home page <1s, LibreOffice writer or calc start in <2s the first time, <1 sec after... but I had to throw ridiculous amount of computing power at it (~60BIPS); an old PDP-11/70 could run a ton of users in 4MB with a tiny fraction of CPU power!
One does wonder where all those "spare" cpu cycles go...
http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/
I have an ISO stored on a USB flash drive and a bootable disc or two stashed in my "IT Silver Bullet" folder. You boot this thing, it enters the registry, you can clear a password and elevate a user to administrator user. Works on Workstation OSes, some additional hacks required for newer versions of server.
Clear the password, let it write the registry key back, eject media, reboot, enter admin account, continue from there. Can't tell you how many times I've had to use this Linux recovery tool.
Of course having got it booted I would realize it is not a computer at all, where is the programing language I can use?
Chip,
Many years ago a young chap felt much the same as you and decided to write his own OS.
That chaps name was Linus Torvalds hand his OS is Linux.
Sadly it's increasingly looking like the desktop PC as we know it will be obsolete before Linux gets wide spread adoption on it. I suspect that you are in a bind with all those chip design and other electronics design tools that only work in Windows.
Edit: Actually I think Windows comes with JavaScript built in. That's the only programming option for your newly installed Windows "computer".
My guess would be Nation State, but that would be a guess. There are other commercial activities that could justify funding those kinds of threats such as trading platforms.
The video isn't posted yet. Watch the defcon21 website.
The Transcend 32MB WIFI SD card is a wonderful thing. Storage and WIFI all in one weenie little SD card.
Turns out it runs Linux in there to manage all that. Of course it could be any OS but basically it has access to all the files you store there so it can back door any executables that that pass by. Not mention that it has a tap on your WIFI communications.
Not only that but the OS installation on the SD card is full of potential exploits which can be used by baddies to get at your systems.
On the plus side though, because of those exploits a clever hacker has gotten in there and showed us all how to modify the thing to our herts content:
http://haxit.blogspot.ch/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards.html
You know I certainly won't go to the mat for MS but..... huh? To program my Linux system I had to obtain the packages to program it. It does not boot to command prompt before the monitor warms up and there are tools for things in Linux that only are available for it, some only for the a distro unless you you just love the challenge of a few nights work just to get it to operate. I don't see where it's the antithesis of the large bloated OS. It's got to be massaged to do anything sort of real-time, it comes on a DVD now and to be useful to anyone but a *nix geek like me or you it takes gigs of ram. I agree on the fact that at least people can look inside the box but that only is relevant to a few of us.
This is where things get interesting I think. Device peripherals are not just dumb devices anymore. They are little computer systems all to themselves. Little, poorly updated, quickly developed, feature-creeping, rushed to market computer systems. All riddled with flaws. If some highly funded entity wants to send all the file names you store to an IP somewhere they don't need a vendor-coded back door. They just need to poke the right pressure points and install their own. You don't packet capture all your internet traffic and analyze it in detail and encrypted comms are blasting out of your system all the time anyway, whats one more stream?
Speak for yourself :-) I do. But then again I do malware analysis for a living so I'm constantly looking for unwelcome visitors.
There is so much stuff that emanates as "normal" from your average OSes, and... just like you said above most of it is either encrypted or not interesting enough to decompile. Eventually you succumb and have to baseline the noise and look for changes.
For example. The WEB browser. In the URL bar I type the location I want to visit. Or I'm following a link to some host. How come all of a sudden by browser is fetching stuff from a 100 other hosts and domains that I never asked for?
I'm not sure why that idea wasn't laughed out of the room as soon as it was uttered.
If we could get a bit of honesty from our tools, perhaps we could make more informed decisions. But when they are part of the lie, there's not much hope.
1. Usability. Put something in, get something potentially useful out. Opera browser started this with the address bar being a commamind line of sorts. G fish would search for fish, etc... The others simplified this into just doing a search on input that made no other sense.
2. Revenue. Offering that capability drives traffic which can equal dollars.
3. Discourage full URL input. It is easier to communicate and own a single word. Pour enough dollars in so that people can just input the minimum and find you.
That all said, I don't like it either.
Opera did not start anything. I have never seen an Opera browser nor do I know anyone who uses one.
What happens is:
1) I go to some website.
2) My browser downloads a pile of HTML and CSS and JavaScript from the website. So far so good.
3) That JavaScript or HTML starts loading a pile of stuff from God knows where else.
Just watch your browser status bar some times. It's amazing what flashes by.
So how come I can't tell my browser "Don't down load anything from anywhere unless it's from the site I am visiting"
How come this is evening happening by default?
Your buddy javascript will stop doing a lot of those cool things you like. Smaller sites will download libraries from content delivery networks instead of their site to cut down on their bandwidth. Google has a BIG CDN, so lots of web sites point their javascript loads to them. But anything from Google can surely be trusted
If you just get stuff from the sites yo originally go to, things will be pretty boring.
... because functionality trumps security. If Browser A doesn't support it for security reasons then the sheeple will move to browsers B, C and D so they can continue to water their virtual crops and watch the dancing pigs.
You should look at noscript and disconnect 2.
Disconnect 2 blackholes tracking sites.
noscript disables all scripting on all sites until you explicitly whitelist it.
What? Real Javascript programmers write minified code out the gate!!
"my buddy javascript" is quite OK. He's only a language after all.
When you visit any page I make you will get JS that I serve that will do cool things like connecting back to my server and making realtime animations of live data changes.
If he needs any libraries to do that he will get them from my web site also. I take full reponsibiliy and accountability as to what happens.
In terms of bandwidth, most JS libraries are not so big that it would make any difference if I serve them or arrange that you get the from Gooogle or whoever. Given the amount of data I will stream to my webapp it's not worth thinking about. And all that connecting to doublclick or google analytics or whatever a hundred times for each page load is a thousand times worse.
Think of it like this: There is a company out there that you trust that provides a nice executable program for your Windows machine. So you download and run it. Problem is that in order to run it the installer fetches a bunch of
dlls from places and people you have never heard of. Which in turn post all kind of data about you and your machine back to some unknown entity.
Now a days we have all kind of anti-virus tools, even built into Windows, to stop that happening. How come browsers are so lax about it? They could easily say "no".