There's a pretty good unwrapping of the payload here, and it's a pretty creative exploit of the javascript interpreter to execute shellcode. Just from a glance at the shellcode, I see a hand-crafted HTTP header so at minimum they're using the OS network stack directly to give the tor-level UUID a public IP coorelation. Beyond that, they could be doing anything since they're already through the sandbox.

If you believe this, remember that if you're ever tried in a court where the flag has gold fringe you can shout FREEMAN ON THE LAND and they have to let you go.

If they end up doing that it's likely they'll start doing market dependancies - "This app requires fooapi4.5, which will be installed with it."

The concept of a completely modular OS being updated piecemeal is interesting.

I disagree with your first statement - it's different to argue ease of compatibility between versions vs the benefits of sticking with ancient releases. I don't think anyone is happy about the continued market share of android 2.3, but from a developer perspective it's not world-ending to use some support libraries instead of natives for it. (It bloats the hell out of your base app size, though).

The unfortunate reality is that phone manufacturers see software updates as a 'feature' to sell newer phones - I don't think this will change barring a radical relicencing of android from Google. One thing that may give them impetus to move along would be forcing unlocked bootloaders - if they don't supply the upgrade, third parties will, and then all their tie-in bloatware goes away.

Except most of the new features you get on a new google release come with back-support libraries (Google or third party) that let you target older platforms. Writing an app for 2.3+ with modern features using HoloEverywhere was nearly as trivial as changing imports from com.android to org.holoeverywhere.

If you're doing CPU intensive work, you're going to target 4.0+ anyway, simply because no device that runs 2.3 stock has a modern processor in it.

They could rewrite the entire book, keeping only some of the sections with deliberate watermark errors, and it'd still be tracked down to them.

You miss out on the fact that they're not looking for errors - they're looking for specific errors in specific places. Think back to old detective novels with a piece of cardboard with little squares cut in it. Put it over the right page of what looks like a love letter and "we bust out of the back exercize yard at midnight" pops out.

With sufficient redundancy in their data (Come on, people, QR codes, PAR2? ECC? How does a group of computer people not instantly comprehend the idea of redundancy?) you couldn't be sure that random selection of bit flips would be enough to obscure your trail.

Right, it's finding the watermark removed that's the big red flag, not that they found it on a filesharing service. Do people think about what they type before prognosticating on /.?

Hey, if they didn't try to move everyone down to the minimum wage (or lower, see unpaid internships) then there wouldn't be pressure to make it livable.

What needs to happen is massive confiscation of the stolen wealth of this country.

You wrote that you're too stupid to get apache working on your machine, and you expect us to give a fuck that DEVELOPER TESTING software isn't a one-click install for you?

You're frankly too stupid to even cater to. Wayland (nor Xorg) get to dictate how the apps you want to use are written. Since basically everything now is doing the rendering themselves and pushing bitmaps, X11 is terrible at remoting. If you have control over your app then make it remote properly yourself.

Otherwise shut up and stop trying to tell the rest of us that running a text editor from 1992 is the be-all-end-all of remote graphical work.

Outside of those types and pathological configurations, remote X11 just works for all apps.

So running an app over the internet is a pathological configuration?

X11 is utterly garbage at remoting because it was never designed for it, it was designed for LAN use with near-zero latency. That's why the calls are syncronous.

Sure, it's possible to forward an X11 connection across 100+ ms of latency, but I wouldn't call the resulting clusterfuck 'usable'. There's a reason that the nX library is used to make it reasonable - and there's no reason that you can't do the same with a different library that's not inherently constrained by a 26 year old design with no concept of high-bandwidth/high-latency connections.

Per-window RDP is utterly trivial to implement and works better on modern connections than X11 ever has.

Drawing stippled lines in the server rather than via a toolkit = exactly like ripping out the command line.

Thank you for making your worthless comment and taking up my time.

How about instead of idiotic rube-goldberg contraptions that depend on people buying specific model years of cars and specific types of phones to go with them and are guaranteed to be jailbroken the day they're released to the public - we just dump that wasted money into self-driving cars? There's no reason that people need to be in control of 3 tons of hurtling death when computers can do the job just as well. When the LIDAR detects a non-automated vehicle in proximity it can mantain a safe distance (and warn surrounding vehicles so cross-streets aren't approached when they might run a stop, etc).

Or, you know, we could put up with nanny state nonsense and continue to sacrifice huge chunks of our day to the commute god.

I wish they were just tilting against the porn windmill. MADD has morphed into a neo-prohibition movement, and their stances align more closely with moralising than saving lives. Note how silent they are about idiotic movies like 5fast5furious or car commercials for vehicles designed specifically to go much faster than any speed limit. They're also not supporters of any sort of safe-ride program for people drinking - they just want you to not drink at all.

I agree with you 100%, the government should absolutely get out of the distribution business. Naturally, that means repealing all copyright statutes entirely.