I know this is off-topic, but I hadn't played this game in like a decade, and never think about it, but just last night I was sitting thinking about the times I used to play it. Didn't even know it was still around, might have to check out what their doing with it..

They really don't need to have backdoors, and that would present problems if MS and Apple allowed it. They could face lawsuits and what not, and hackers could find them and use the backdoors. Most likely what these 3 letter agencies do, is hire people to find 0-days in all the OSes and all the browsers. Modern OSes and browsers are so complicated, that this is probably easy to do. If a 0-day gets fixed, they can just always find more. It's the same effect as having a backdoor, but without the legal problems for the companies involved, and it works for all OSes/browsers. Hackers find 0-days all the time, and these 3 letter guys are probably much better and more funded, so..

You don't care about games and whatever else is windows specific, but others do. Hell I don't give a spit about what you do with your PC probably. Switching to Linux is a stop-gap measure, if most tor users used Linux, they could change the malware package to work on Linux, and the same bug would have worked in exactly the same way in either case.

Yea, that would make sense, except this vulnerability existed in, and was just as exploitable in Linux versions of FF as far as I know. Even if it was Windows specific, that's just coincidence since the Linux versions of firefox have vulnerabilities all the time that are just as exploitable. Do you actually know anything about computer security?

"So the vulnerability is in firefox and java, but they propose to stop using Windows?" Exactly. This could have happened in any OS, they just targeted Windows because that's what most users use. Ironically IE10 run in x64 mode probably would not have this problem, since it uses vastly more address space for ASLR. It's like getting a flat tire, then the guy you hire to change your tire tells you to buy his favorite brand of car to fix it.

Well, the galaxy is not spinning as you think of it with stars at a constant orbit. What happens is the galaxy's gravitational field is pulling everything towards everything else in the galaxy, very slowly, so it's more like water going down a huge drain, where it circles a few times then goes poof. Same principle with our sun and planets (or your golf ball example), it appears they spin forever at constant distance, but they are slowly being sucked into the sun. So yea the galaxy collapses into the black hole, but the black hole is just a manifestation of the gravity that caused the thing to circle in the first place, and then swallowed it all up so it spins no more. Point is, galaxies are not an eternal event no matter how it plays out, and it must always die and become useless. Where as this thing in the article, possibly does works forever.

Well, this is probably the blind leading the blind because I'm only a laymen as well, but my understanding, is that while a black hole will spin for a very long time, and you may somehow be able to extract energy from that (or not), eventually it will stop spinning and then evaporate. Talking about 10^50 years or more here, so a very long time depending on it's size, but eventually it will not be useful to any thing still around. Like I said, this device, will never stop, in theory.

Not sure if you meant what that says, but galaxies don't spin forever, they eventually end up in a black hole. Now that's a long time out, but this thing is supposed to actually spin *forever*, not get degraded by any other physical process, well that's how I read it anyway, I'm not a physicist.

Can we get something more definite than that? I mean if the submitter doesn't know, and it sounds like he doesn't, why even say anything.

"Let me guess, you ran it in 32 bit mode, then ran it again immediately after in 64 bit mode ... and then ignored the disk cache completely?"

Nope, I did dozens of runs for each, ignoring the first result that was obvious disk I/o bound (because it was much longer). As others have explained, and I said, some code benefits greatly from x64.

Depends on how you want to look at it, and who you feel like being cynical against. Easing the job of programmers is a good thing, if they can use 10x more ram and not have to write code to juggle memory as much, they have eliminated a potential source of bugs and a time sink, that is probably hard to maintain as well. Memory is cheap, I got 16GBs for $90 bucks, and though programs are larger, maybe unnecessarily so, nothing comes close to exhausting my memory. It seems like a much better method, than defining some arbitrary limit, stopping all progress, and telling programmers to 'stop being lazy sobs'.

Heard x64 was barely faster than 32-bit, wrote this program to find duplicate files on Windows: http://poshcode.org/3377 - it's at least twice as fast in x64 than 32-bit. Naturally it won't apply to everything, but for certain things x64 is really good.

Directed at you and falcon, these things are complicated, these actions have to be done in private, and are subject to abuse of bad people who get into a position of power. Yes, of course we could do better to weed them out, but there are diminishing returns to everything. And actually I see no problem with using these assholes to destroy our enemies, then turning on them because they are usually not much better. It makes more sense than trying to take all the assholes on at once, and making our plan evident to everyone. That would just not work. And we must do everything we can to make this work, it's easy to speak of it as if it's a game, but if we had lost the planet to the soviet union, that might well have meant eternal darkness for all of the human race forever. While it seems so far removed from our current reality, which is testament to our success I would say, any number of mistakes might have had a cascading effect and caused too many countries to go against us/for them, and so on. It's not easy to put the situation into words, but I feel people think this relatively nice reality we have was inevitable; it was not. That does not excuse gross abuse of our system for people's own ends, but I see that as an inevitable side effect of a situation we did not cause. And your last paragraph is spot on, you get no argument from me.

I know you will probably not give a damn what I think, but I think you see things too black and white. I think the US hates all these SOBs, but we can't be against every single asshole on the planet or we'd have no friends and would definitely lose the fight for the soul of the planet. We have to be 'friends' with some of them, which means, we are friends with them so long as they help us against people we judge to be worse, and that worse could be something the Berkley brigade would call greedy like financial help, but without a strong financial position the US and thus freedom parishes. So we have to make shitty calls all the time, I think (or hope) it's for a ultimately greater good, and one day the world will be democratized and all these stupid fucking dictator will be waiting tables and not bothering anyone (or even better, hung at war tribunals), but who knows. Without omniscience we can only make the best shit call we can out of nothing but shit calls. Just my opinion, take it for what it's worth. Oh btw, we didn't flee Vietnam, not the US anyway, after stabilizing the situation, and setting up South Vietnam to defend itself, the democrats in the US congress (which had a super majority that was too much for even a presidential veto) decided to abruptly cancel funding for South Vietnam, causing their military to collapse against the North's war machine. Now you may consider the democrats to be the US, but I assure you I think quite the opposite.

Defender catches the proof of concept code, but you could drop in your own code, for an unpatched vulnerability, and use the same technique described in the article. My advice is to use x64 IE. FF isn't sandboxed, and chrome isn't 64-bit.