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Comment Gateway Pundit, seriously? (Score 0, Troll) 214

Good lord! Why would you use such an unreliable source like The Gateway Pundit? Even when they are accurate, they're stealing their articles from sites that actually employ journalists. The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right[2] fake news website.[1] The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.[34]

Comment Not sure what they expected... (Score 4, Insightful) 65

The techbros can obviously buy their way in to the party readily enough(realistically, unless you are talking grungy underground scene events in disused warehouses, it's probably not art-for-art's-sake money that is even throwing the party; though it may be the entertainment industry side sponsoring the artistic side because that's prestigious for the sector as a whole, the way a certain number of Oscar-bait movies that are expected to be critical successes and commercially middling is accepted practice); but that's significantly different from being able to buy the regard of people who they've been more or less directly threatening.

Are they just high on their own supply and didn't realize how it would go over? Is forcing the soon-to-be-replaced labor units to watch videos with you rambling about how brilliant their obsolescence is part of the fun?

Comment And who is saying this? (Score 1, Troll) 200

The Toronto Sun is part of Postmedia, an American-owned chain that exercises strong editorial control and is basically Fox North.

Canadian Civil Liberties Association seems legit, but the Canadian Constitution Foundation is part of the Koch Atlas network, slipping far-right American money into Canadian politics.

That doesn't mean that they're wrong, but what they say should be examined carefully for fish hooks.

Comment Re:Well, now I'm eating crow (Score 1) 31

It wouldn't be surprising if there will be some demand for bite-sized physical machines from people who think that they can't assume hypervisors will be security boundaries; but I suspect that getting actual improvement will be harder than it looks; especially if you aren't willing to sacrifice convenience:

VMs are, certainly, in no small part about utilization and economies of scale: until you get to the point of systems 'big' enough that they seriously restrict your choice of vendors(eg. basically everybody sells 1-2 socket systems; 4-8 means Xeon, and only certain more expensive Xeons, more than 8 sockets means some fancy custom interconnect) it's basically always cheaper to slice a bigger system in half than it is to buy two smaller ones: much less redundant hardware that way.

However, they are also about management convenience that you can't really get out of a physical server without adding a (potentially dangerously) capable BMC or similar computer-inside-the-computer(like the "nitro" controllers that AWS uses): and the history of BMC vulnerabilities(both against their network interfaces and against the components they expose to the OS running on the system) is not entirely cheery; with the situation probably looking worse if you want a BMC that can do all the various management things vsphere can do to an ESX VM.

There's also the question of OS driver vulnerabilities and hardware/firmware vulnerabilities: this VM escape relies on ESX's virtual USB device being buggy; it's not as though you would necessarily have greater confidence in the virtual USB device the BMC uses to interact with the OS; or even the firmware of some of the physical devices on the motherboard.

If anything, while they clearly aren't perfect and can't be trusted enough to avoid much greater attention to how to keep guests from interfering with one another; my suspicion would be that the complexity, and thus bug potential, of real peripherals is considerably higher than that of VM peripherals; especially the newer ones that are explicitly abstractions designed to be convenient for virtualization; rather than close imitations of common physical hardware intended for compatibility with OSes that don't expect to be running in a VM.

Comment Re:Well, now I'm eating crow (Score 2) 31

There are some 'usb devices over IP' software offerings that add a virtual USB root and can be used to connect USB devices that are physically connected to other hosts(obviously this works better with relatively low-bandwidth and latency-insensitive things; it's more about license dongles and USB to serial converters than video capture devices); so you do have options(and those offerings also tend to have explicit support for relatively easy switching of the USB devices being redirected between multiple hosts, if that's required); but it seems pretty unlikely that their virtual USB devices have gotten the same amount of probing that the vmware ones have, since they are relatively niche offerings vs. being the de-facto on-prem virtualization option(at least until Broadcom showed up).

Potentially still worth it, if you've got some absolutely unpatchable ESX host running at least one guest that must have USB, since the vulnerability on the vmware side is now a known one; but quite likely to not be a net gain in security vs. a patchable host; just given the relative amount of attention given.

Comment Re:Well, now I'm eating crow (Score 1) 31

There was a somewhat similar(also a bug in the virtual USB device allowing manipulation of the VM host from inside a guest with virtual USB a few years ago. There have also been a couple(CVE-2015-3456 and CVE-2021-3507) targeting the virtual floppy drive device.

They seem to be relatively rare; though tend to be pretty alarming when they do come up because their relative rarity means that people often treat a hypervisor as a reliable security boundary so there isn't necessarily a lot of backup built in to handle cases where that assumption is invalidated.

Comment Seems pretty plausible. (Score 1, Troll) 169

I don't know whether they'll be able to get past the requirement that Apple have sufficient market power in at least one of the tied products; but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument that iCloud is tied to iDevices in a number of ways that typically aren't wholly without justification(eg. having iCloud be the only thing you can restore from reduces the complexity of the first-run restore option because it can just assume iCloud; rather than Apple having to define an interface that 3rd party restore providers would offer or add a pre-restore app install section so that the relevant 3rd party app could be installed to provide the restore interface(the way 3rd party apps can snap into the "Files" app); but which are...awfully convenient...given Apple's margins on both cloud storage and higher storage phone models.

It probably doesn't help(if Apple seeks to make some sort of "we do it for the security of the people!" argument) that iOS historically(and still does, though it is much de-emphasized) supported either unencrypted or encrypted backups and restores over USB when directly connected to a computer; so clearly it was possible to design a backup mechanism for an untrusted storage medium back when cabled syncs were still general practice; and they specifically didn't bother to do that for networked backup and restore.

Comment Seems dubious... (Score 2) 215

This seems like a pretty tenuous theory. There's a reasonably solid suspicion when businesses with clear connections to the cube farms, like restaurants and coffee places whose main draw is proximity to offices(and, typically, because of the way the zoning shakes down, significantly less proximity to things that aren't offices) are involved that people no longer seeing them as convenient, because they aren't in the office, or requiring their convenience, because it's a lot easier to make your own coffee when you don't have a commute.

This is a department store though: furniture, clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, housewares of various sorts. Am I claiming that literally nobody has ever popped over in an emergency after spilling coffee on their pants; or that it has never benefitted from being more convenient because it's on the way home from work? No, that sort of thing must happen at least occasionally. Do I buy that people drawn to the area by the fact that they work there are the primary audience for those sorts of (more typically) planned purchases? That seems like a hard sell.

Comment Re:We'll stop using C++ (Score 1) 228

I'd say an average Rust user is much more "qualified" than an average C++ user.
C++ is mainstream. While great software has been written in it, and there are many great programmers in C++, an average C++ programmer is quite mediocre, quite behind times and feels too secure to learn anything new.
Rust users are more motivated and actual nerds.

Comment Re:So... vegans beware! (Score 1) 221

The problem with the term "ultraprocessed foods" is that it's too broad.
They will refine it.

Also, making something taste like something else is not the problem.
It's the amount of processing that goes into it and what that means. Eating homemade mock-duck is not the same as eating Froot Loops.

Comment Re:Articles like this assume... (Score 1) 266

True, but does one need to get into that much debt for that?
Education, much like healthcare, can be delivered much more cheaply than it is being delivered now, given all these technology advances.
But both have only gotten more expensive.

Not preparing kids for a job skill by universities is just negligent. By all means, teach history, political science, philosophy, logic and argumentation. But there must be some concrete job oriented training as well because there simply are not enough vacancies for scholars.

Education is a life long endeavor, not a 4 year affair. But for that to happen, there needs to be enough skill transfer for financial security to enable leisure.

Comment Umm, peripheral vision? (Score 1) 92

I'm having a really, really, hard time seeing the case for transparency in a screen this small. Sure, if a screen is going to dominate your field of view there are cases where you might need to consider how the stuff onscreen is going to coexist with the rest of the world(though many more where the point is that your screen is dominating your field of view because you are working/gaming/watching a movie and not looking to be interrupted); but this isn't that screen.

Even your 17in 'desktop replacement'/'mobile workstation' monster just doesn't occupy that much of your field of view; especially when you can just tilt it down a trifle if you want it out of the way. I'm having a hard time seeing the virtues of totally ruining the quality of the screen space you do have in order to retain visibility of such a relatively small space that you can easily inspect at will just by moving your head.

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