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Comment Re:You have to be kidding (Score 1) 210

Let's try a hypothetical example:

KnoxOS is so locked down that the only way to install software on your machine is to mail your passport and a hand-written request to the company that wrote it.
BasementOS is written in javascript, tries to execute anything it receives on a socket and has a mandatory root shell with no password accessible on port 23.

KnoxOS runs on the security system at fort knox while BasementOS runs on a super nintendo in someone's basement. Several trojans are written for KnoxOS because everyone wants that gold, but they are never installed because the admin isn't stupid. Zero malware is written for BasementOS because nobody cares about some basement dwellers super nintendo.

If we apply your metrics, BasementOS is more secure than KnoxOS.

Any sufficiently advanced operating system can have malware written for it. Counting how many trojans are written for an OS might give you an idea of how valuable of a target it is, but it doesn't tell you how secure it is.

Comment Re:SlowNewsDay (Score 2) 71

What we have here is a pen-and-paper exercise

GM: "Your party is enriching uranium when suddenly one of your centrifuges begins accelerating outside its operational parameters. How do you react?"
China: "We cast clairvoyance on the US to see what technology they use to respond to this issue."
US: "We summon a tarasque in the middle east and shout for everyone to look over there."

Comment Re:Mark Advertisements as Such (Score 1) 263

I don't think video is the proper medium for that kind of content. Candid information from an engineer on an interesting project can be interesting, but slashdot already has a mechanism for relating that kind of information. I understand that there are monetary reasons for pushing video on slashdot, but you would be better served with videos of the interior of data centers or production facilities than you would be with someone talking at a camera.

Comment Re:Parking Garages? (Score 2) 164

I suspect that the parking garage is where the card numbers were compromised. Someone likely dismantled the credit card reader when noone was around and added a simple device that tapped into the current MSRs signal line and logged everything to an sd card. They could even give it a bluetooth or wifi interface if they wanted to be fancy about it.

Comment Re:Added value of Go? (Score 2, Interesting) 186

I tried grabbing go and compiled a hello world to compare it to C:

[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ uname -a
Linux talisman-pc 3.2.13-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 24 09:10:39 CET 2012 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 640 Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ cat test.go
package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello, world")
}
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ time go build test.go

real 0m2.215s
user 0m2.547s
sys 0m0.210s
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ ls -lh test
-rwxr-xr-x 1 talisman talisman 1.3M Mar 28 15:43 test
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ time ./test
Hello, world

real 0m0.003s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ cat test.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("Hello, World!");
return 0;
}
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ time gcc test.c

real 0m0.047s
user 0m0.027s
sys 0m0.013s
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ ls -lh a.out
-rwxr-xr-x 1 talisman talisman 6.6K Mar 28 15:45 a.out
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$ time ./a.out
Hello, World!
real 0m0.001s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
[talisman@talisman-pc:~/tmp]$

This is obviously not a very scientific comparison, but the takeaways are that the go executable was 1.3M compared to the C executables 6.6K and the go compile took over 2 seconds whereas the C compile took less than 0.05 seconds.

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