There are hundreds of different BIOSes. System init code isn't like program code, it's non-relocatable. You can't just add a hook and bypass the original. In theory, boot block flash which is a mini-BIOS might be hooked, but every single MB model would be different. Unless you're running a REALLY high volume computer (Surface, Macbook), the investment in such hooks would be meaningless.

HD firmware could be more interesting, but the payoff would be hard to justify. HD vendors tend to use the same firmware for an entire series. Still, I can't see it.

Just because "Security researchers" can show a possible exploit for a specific hd or mb model and raise FUD, I would just reflash those components if I were actually concerned.

EFI is a different beast, but that's why we have signed code and OS bootloaders.

My NAS has history and revisions... I can't really see how it could harm that :/

until someone writes a something which specifically circumvents it. Nice concept, seems of little value. A home NAS with automatic historical backups is much more sensible... or you could use cloud storage and just put it all out there for anyone.

If you use Windows, then you are already vulnerable?

Did you mean "If you put a computer of any type online, it will become a target and someone may eventually hit the jackpot."?

Out of curiosity, what exactly would the point of the hardware replacements be?

As far as I have seen, the vast majority of the operational components in Android are not actually GNU but instead Google's own code. GNU components are available... no differently than they are part of SFU from Microsoft. As far as I know, even the bootloader is not GNU. I suppose the init.d may still be, but I'd imagine that since services/daemons are mostly in Java land, that could probably be replaced with a pretty small monolithic script.

So, it is probably more correct to say Linux without the GNU unless we should call Windows "GNU Windows" since one might choose to run a Mingw app.

I would suspect that moving Android to llvm on bsd really wouldn't be so hard since Google's now homegrown most of their stack.

haha!

As I get old,I fear democracy because as I understand the system better,I realize I lack the education or the necessary information resources to make a decision any more intelligent than whether I like a candidate's hair.

I live in Norway. The entire population gets 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick leave (2 more for sick kids) and most Christian holidays off.

I just read the source and agree. Unless they think it's just so much fun to completely reimplement character handling on 20 platforms...or unless they intend to port entirely to Qt, UTF-8 is their only option.

It was created by God and brought to Earth by his son Jesus and he's British!

You heathen bastards!

I was waiting for that comment. I honestly haven't heard radio anywhere lately. Not in stores, not in other peoples cars (built in MP3 players). Not in gyms. Not in business. Not in anywhere I can name.

I actually can't remember the last time I actually heard the radio.

I am usually very interested in knowing things like "How did they reach their conclusions?". Also, I suppose I don't live in outback weird places like Oklahoma or Texas... so I can't speak for those "Heart of America" kind of people. Maybe if you don't mind listening to country, it might be more popular.

This would in fact increase the number of college educated workers in the world who are making college graduate wages and are paying college graduate wage taxes?

Consider if you could increase the number of college graduates an assume that they'll make an average of $10,000 a year more than they would have otherwise. (some will do much better... some much worse). Now tax that at 15%. That's $1500 a year more for each of the 9 million people. It will take probably 6 years to recoup the initial investment the government made in those two years of school. Then, over a period of the next 50 years that person works for a living, They'll contribute an additional $75000 a person which should yield $675 billion tax revenue without accounting for inflation.

If we consider that the same people without subsidies would have a high likelihood of collecting benefits (food stamps etc...), that could be much closer to $3-$4 trillion in additional tax revenue over 50 years.

So... in what way would this be a stupid idea?

Where is the U.S. you're proud of?

To be fair, when was the last time the U.S. displayed the slightest form of constructive or productive greatness? I great up saying the pledge of allegiance everyday. I had to memorize it and recite it constantly. It's hilarious how we day after day talked about :
  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United State of America and to the republic for which it stands.
    One nation (under God)
    Indivisible
  With Liberty
  And justice for all.

One nation? When is that true?
Indivisible? Then how come every time a non-Texan is elected, a formal request is made by Texas to leave the union?

With liberty? In the period of the past 40 years I've been alive, that word has had its definition amended in American dictionaries more times than any other word.

With possibly the exception of the U.K., is there any country in the "civilized world" with less civil liberties than Americans? When I was a 6 year old child standing in the first grade stumbling through the pledge, I had no idea what the word liberty meant and I wish I had so I wouldn't have spent 20 years lying to myself thinking we had them.

Justice for all. Here's justice for you. Every year we teach millions of children in school about about a guy named King George III, we attack him, we burn him on a cross every time. We have a document called the declaration of independence which documents how this evil man was a tyrant and did horrible things to us. Yet, when we read the real history books, we find out that he was a great supporter of the American people and used what little power he had to fight parliament on the behalf of the colonists. He was practically a hero, not an enemy or a tyrant. 200 years later, we still teach our children to hate him. If we didn't than the entire foundation of our country would be a lie. So, our justice for all might not have much to it.

American's stand on shoulders of giants and most of those giants (about 60 percent of them) are immigrants or first generation Americans. We raise our children to hate. We raise our children to have a sick and disgusting need to be special. What does it mean to be special? Well, it means you're great at something. And if you can't be great at something, you can be great by joining a club like a church or a religion or a political party. If you can't do that, then you can be great because there was a characteristic of the vagina your were squeezed from. For example, you can be special because you're white, black, chinese, etc... you can be special just by having been forced through fluid and fat from between the legs of a person who was also great for being a certain color.

American's love to buy their greatness. Consider an iPhone or an Android phone. You can be fashionable and special and great by owning the exact same phone as 40% of the rest of the population. You can even be more special by aiming the speakers and microphone away from you and walking through a mall yelling at the phone so everyone will see you have it. You can also buy a phablet which allows you to have a combination between a one sided horse blinder and a phone.

Let's talk politics. What makes America greatest of all. We televise EVERYTHING!!! We have two teams.. the red and the blue and they enter an arena and day after day people all across American pray for something awesome like a proper conflict where these two teams will go to battle with each other using words. We choose the players for our teams based on their wittiness and ability to make the other team look like a bunch of fools. We love this sport since if you play it right, you can have more players in the arena than the other team for 2 or more years at a time. The goal of this sport is to win no matter what. At the start of any battle, one team will pick a topic. The other team will (based on principle) choose the opposition no matter what. To be a player on either of these teams, the only actual requirement of your position is to insist that the other team is ALWAYS WRONG!!! Your players will then launch an all out attack on the other team and use any and every tool available to it to ensure that the other team doesn't get what it wants. Your team in the mean time as a super slick play will chew away at the other teams idea and cripple it before giving into their demands and sneak as many as your own bits in as you can in the process.

Let's take ObamaCare for example.
  1) Team Red suggests a statewide medical plan which would replace medicare and implement state administered social medicine.
  2) Team Blue proposes a method of implementing this plan on a federal level because smaller states (think Mississippi for example) could never implement this system. The federal system if built properly could be broken into a state level system once it has had a chance to stabilize. Whether this system exists or not is irrelevant on most points since poor people will :
      a) receive medical care paid for by tax payers through a reactively managed system like medicare
      b) receive medical care paid for by tax payers through a proactively managed system like ObamaCare
      c) receive medical care paid for by tax payers through an entirely unmanaged system like defaults on payments by the healthcare recipient.
      d) receive medical care paid for by tax payers via option B in wealthy states where less people per-capita collect welfare or via A or C in poor states incapable of managing a system like this where higher percentages of people will prove to be a burden to the system.
the only actual benefit of option b is that people wouldn't have an excuse anymore for why they can't pay to go to a doctor and therefore would have to simply stay home sick and collect welfare. People would be almost forced to get taken care of when they're sick and therefore be more likely to actually pay something back into the system. What people are missing is that no matter what option you choose, every state says that hospitals can't turn away sick people (at risk of being sued) and therefore people will get medical care no matter what. It's only an issue of how the tax payer will have to pay for it.
  3) Team Red takes the stance that since team Blue said they want to implement this, they cannot and will not support it since it is wrong!!!
  4) Instead of trying to turn Team Blue's plan into Team Red's original plan or something closer to it, they oppose it and attack it as much as they can. They spend years crippling every benefit of the system and eventually give into what's left of it. They have guaranteed at least that there is absolutely no possible way the new medical care system could ever work or ever be fixed. It must be more expensive and it must be as ridiculous as possible.
  5) While passing the new healthcare act, team Red earmarked damn near everything it could onto the plan knowing that eventually Team Blue will give them just about anything they want to try and force the plan through. As a result, Team Red managed to get ear marks in that made it "semi-legal" to teach creationism in public school on Oklahoma.
  6) Team Blue implements the ACA and fails pretty hard at it.
  7) Team Red tears Team Blue apart across the press and takes over most of the government as a result.

It will go back and forth. We have no interest in choosing sane candidates. We want winners. We have to crush the other team. We don't care what the other team says, they're stupid and we hate them. We must crush them. We will ignore whether the candidates for the team actually are able to do anything we agree with. That's no important. We'll hire politicians. People who lack all skills except fighting other politicians. With all the power of TV, the press, the Internet, the radio, billboards, etc... will all our ability to learn about these candidates and will all our ability to research who these people are, the main tool we use to choose the winners is whether they can make a jackass out of their opponents during the in-battles we call debates. Basically we choose the best fighter of the two. If we threw them into a pit, each with a knife and a club it would be equally profitable.

We ship out children dressed in green and brown uniforms holding guns in their hands and tell them that just because they blindly followed orders from a man who won't actually get an education until after he leaves the military that he's a hero for protecting our way of life. What about our way of life was it he was defending when he was in Iraq for much of his childhood swinging guns around. What was it specifically that made him a hero? When we give someone else awards for saving lives and actually doing something heroic, do we introduce them to each other and say "Hey, you guys, you're both heroes!!! This guy is a real hero, this other one is a hero in waiting"? We bitch and moan about how these heros are paid like shit and get no love in return and yet, that hero is given food, housing, clothing, transportation, education and spending/savings money while being in the military and is basically being paid the equivalent of about $60,000 a year at the age of 18 with no education and no real skills... all from the pockets of tax payers. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with soldiers, I just have issues with losers. A person who thinks they're owed something after being paid that much with that little experience is full of shit.

Then there's things like fracking. There is someone, somewhere who thinks it's a good idea to smash the shale beneath the ground and mix ground water with oil sources to make it possible to avoid foreign oil dependence. Oil countries like Norway are laughing their asses off wondering how long before America asks them to retrofit their oil tankers as water tankers instead. With water shortage problems already crippling the idiots of California (there are many smart people in California, but there are idiots everywhere) and other states nearby we decide to kill off more of the drinking water resources of America. With the stock market treating food as if it were gold and gambling on it and driving prices up and letting train loads of grain go to waste, converting massive farm states like North Dakota to baron oil land is stupid.

Then there's the fact that the entire world looks the the U.S. and laughs about the endless stupidity. You couldn't begin to imagine all the different ways which the rest of the world thinks America is just plain insane. Things like pickup trucks as personal urban vehicles. How about food packages like for example a gallon sized Peppridge Farm Gold Fish? How about school shootings (a mostly American luxury)? How about beauty pageants for babies? What about pole dance work outs for overweight housewives? What about mermaid outfit fetishes for bible belt whackos? What about Westborough Baptist Church? What about 10,000 different Christian denominations which all claim to be right suggesting that the rest are wrong? What about the "Church of Atheism"... yeh.. no shit... it's out there.

Here's a GIANT SCARY bitch of one... how about the English Americans, Italian Americans, Russian Americans, Scandinavian Americans, Chinese Americans, Dutch Americans, Polish Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, Turkish Americans..... or North Easterners, New Englanders, New Yorkers, East Coasters, Westerners, Mid-Westerners... How many generations must a person be and be mixed with how many other races before we can start being Americans? I'm apparently Polish, Russian, Jewish, Austrian American. HOLY SHIT!!! The national bits are apparently 4 generations ago. I am probably the first generation since my great great great (whatever) came over to see any of those countries. Other than liking Knishes and Kielbasa, I have not a single thing in common with any of those things which make up my heritage and yet, I can't just call myself an American unless I'm outside of America.

So, I ask again... where is the U.S.A. you're proud of? Where is the greatness of America anymore?

First of all, you say, "North Korea didn't hack Sony," as if it is an indisputable, known fact. It is not -- by any stretch of the imagination.

The fact is, it cannot be proven either way in a public forum, or without having independent access to evidence which proves -- from a social, not technical, standpoint -- how the attack originated. Since neither of those are possible, the MOST that can be accurate stated is that no one, in a public context, can definitively demonstrate for certain who hacked Sony.

Blameless in your scenario is the only entity actually responsible, which is that entity that attacked Sony in the first place.

Whether that is the DPRK, someone directed by the DPRK, someone else entirely, or a combination of the above, your larger point appears to be that somehow the US is to blame for a US subsidiary of a Japanese corporation getting hacked -- or perhaps simply for existing.

As a bonus, you could blame Sony for saying its security controls weren't strong enough, while still reserving enough blame for the US as the only "jackass".

Bravo.

Many of the same slashdotters who accept "experts" who claim NK didn't hack Sony will readily accept as truth that it was "obviously" the US that attacked NK, even though there is even less objective proof of that, and could just as easily be some Anonymous offshoot, or any number of other organizations, or even North Korea itself.

See the logical disconnect, here?

For those now jumping on the "North Korea didn't hack Sony" bandwagon that some security "experts" are leading for their own political or ideological reasons, including using rationales as puzzling and pedestrian as source IP addresses of the attacks being elsewhere, some comments:

Attribution in cyber is hard, and the general public is never going to know the classified intelligence that went into making an attribution determination, and experts -- actual and self-appointed -- will make claims about what they think occurred.

With cyber, you could have nation-states, terrorists organizations, or even activist hacking groups attacking other nation-states, companies, or organizations, for any number of motives, and making it appear, from a social and technical standpoint, that the attack originated from and/or was ordered by another entity entirely.

That's a HUGE problem, but there are ways to mitigate it. A Sony "insider" may indeed -- wittingly or unwittingly -- have been key in pulling off this hack. That doesn't mean that DPRK wasn't involved. I am not making a formal statement one way or the other; just saying that the public won't be privy to the specific attribution rationale.

Also, any offensive cyber action that isn't totally worthless is going to attempt to mask or completely divert attention from its true origins (unless part of the strategic intent is to make it clear who did it), or at a minimum maintain some semblance of deniability.

At some point you have to apply Occam's razor and ask who benefits.

And for those riding the kooky "This is all a big marketing scam by Sony" train:

So, you're saying that Sony leaked thousands of extremely embarrassing and in some cases damaging internal documents and emails that will probably result in the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment being ousted, including private and statutorily-protected personal health information of employees, and issued terroristic messages threatening 9/11-style attacks at US movie theaters, committing dozens to hundreds of federal felonies, while derailing any hopes for a mass release and instead having it end up on YouTube for rental, all to promote one of hundreds of second-rate movies?

Yeah...no.