I have been growing whole, working organs in my own body since at least 1984.

pfft... one set for personal use? Nearly all of us can do that. Even my cat managed it. Call me when you can grow something on demand. :)

A "gamer" is someone who plays games.

That's why pro-football players, the elderly Chinese men in a remote village playing Go, the seniors at the community center playing bingo, and the participants in the office hockey pool are all "gamers" too, right? They play games.

No, of course not. The vernacular use of the word "Gamers" doesn't include them.

And neither does it include grandmothers playing Candy Crush, no matter how many of them there are. That's a new thing. Its a big thing, but they aren't gamers.

But "gamer" means nothing.

Of course it means something. We use the word all the time and generally understand each other. A 'gamer' is someone who plays at least a subset of video games that meet certain complexity or difficulty thresholds, and considers them an important part of their identity.

You'd be included as a gamer even if you only play platformers. You can also be a gamer who only plays FPS. Or RTS, or MMOs or racers or roguelikes.

But it doesn't normally include people who only play casual mobile games, even if they play them a LOT. Nor if you only play chess, not even if its chess on a computer. And soccer? Maybe if its FIFA 2014, but not if your on a field somewhere with an actual ball.

As for your Mom... maybe. She plays a 'recognized' class of games to be gamer, and she's finished them... so if she considers it an important part of her identity etc then sure, she's a gamer.

My mom, though? With her Candy Crush on her ipad. No. She's not.

That's not what people actually mean when they say gamer, just as they don't mean people who are obsessed with golf.

Although I agree with you in general, the thing is that you need to think of what the effects of a false positive are. Imagine starting up your game of solitaire and then seeing a Gmail-like login window.

I'm not an android dev.. but on platforms I do write for, any app can determine the name of the foreground process/task.

So the worst that happens, is an oddly timed credentials box for the app you WERE using. That's going to set off far fewer alarm bells than you would think.

Hence my point:

"b) to remove untrusted apps ability to pre-empt the screen"

Its silly that this is possible, and hopefully we see patches real soon.

Everybody knows that 'carefully designed timing' and generalisable match very poorly.

Agreed -- however, a visible glitch or hiccup would that really set the majority of android users on guard? I'm skeptical.

Honestly, the entire timing element is almost superfluous; for a large number of users simply throwing up a fishing screen while they are IN another app would garner high success rates.

Launch gmail app... Popup "connection to server failed", "please enter username password". It would be horrifying to see how high a success percentage that gets you."

This attack is impressive in that it generates 98% success rate at detecting and invisibly injecting its phishing screen 'just so'. But honestly -- they'd probably snatch a shocking high portion of credentials simply timing the popup to coincide with 1-2 seconds after a given app starts for a large number of apps.

Granted the sophistication of a finely tuned and well crafted attack would mean even I'd fall for it without being any wiser, and it enables them to go after some more complicated apps, in more complicate scenarios. And yes, a finely tuned profile using knowledge about the particular model of phone, and particular application set etc are required for to pull it off.

But the reality remains that the low hanging fruit (dumb users + easily predictable apps) is going to be very easily harvested.

Memory allocation is still controlled by the OS. (At least insofar as apps request memory from the OS, and release it back to the OS).

Normally, an app would have no need to know what another app was doing with memory. However, the instrumentation for another app to track the memory usage of another app exists and is not restricted to elevated / trusted apps.

Clearly it should be.

I can't honestly imagine what a regular app would need this for anyway. Its very much a 'task manager' or 'debugging tool' class of information - and only developers and system level apps need this information.

That along with the fact that apps should not be able to pre-empt eachother and go into the foreground on their own. (iOS apps for example, apparently can't pre-empt; unless they have exceptional permissions (e.g. sideloaded by developers or enterprises or if the device is rooted/jailbroken) so on ios even if the app can determine the app activity, it won't be able to prempt it with its phishing screen.

An immediate work-around would be to randomly place the log-in screen within a pre-determined area such that the hostile app would be unable to immediately overlap it. The double image will tell the user something is wrong.

The double image will tell the user something is wrong.

How is that a work around?

Its a phone. The login 'window' is going into a 3" to 5" space and is full screen in nearly every implementation. The 'popup' that the hostile app preempts simply covers the whole screen.
All in all not a particularly powerful attack vector.

Quite the opposite. Its a very powerful attack vector; and given the surprisingly good ability to time the pre-emption a very dangerous one.

Blocking access to the memory space of other processes has been a solved problem since timesharing in the '60s and '70s, right?

Sure it was. That isn't what is happening though.

Its not accessing the apps memory itself. Its accessing the shared memory *statistics* of a process.

Then its using pre-calculated patterns of the shared memory usage (presumably allocation order, sizes allocated, NOT the actual memory contents etc) to guess what the user is doing in the other app. Then, when it detects a pattern that corresponds with "I'm about to log in" it pre-empts the app with its own phishing login screen skinned to look like the original. The user is -expecting- a login screen to popup, and one that looks right does... so they enter their credentials.

I assume they...

All your assumptions and proposed solutions were completely wrong.

The solutions are:

a) to remove untrusted apps ability to monitor memory USAGE statstics

b) to remove untrusted apps ability to pre-empt the screen.
c) better permissions controls and better CURATION limiting
d) it may also help to let apps enter 'critical sections' that cannot be preempted by other apps (?)

The premise was "given enough time...".

By taking the site down, you limited the time.

That's not an "exception", that's violating the premise.

Gravity isn't science fiction

Of course it is.

We actually do send people into space, and that kind of disaster could sort of happen.

But we didn't send anyone named Dr. Ryan Stone on space shuttle mission STS-157, and none of the other events in the film ever happened... so its CLEARLY fiction.

And it is science fiction because many of the antagonists/obstacles are consequences of the known rules of physics.

It handily meets any definition of science fiction I would ever care to use.

And that's really cool--what seems so much like SF is actually a real-life job that some people do everyday.

We all live moments away from science fiction. A fictional story about the challenge of escaping a car after it goes over a bridge into a river can be science fiction if the accident is modelled according to our understanding of science instead of just done for dramatic effect. The juxtaposition of the vehicles crumple zones with how they'd react hitting a river from 30 feet up, how much time would the occupants REALLY have, how could they REALLY get out... etc.

Most good Science fiction are simply stories about people reacting to their environment within the bounds of their humanity, and the constraints of known science.

That environment can be trumped up with constructs which are not explained... whether its faster than light travel, or an alien race governed by a hive mind... or it can be entirely mundane (as in Gravity or my imagined car accident story).

What makes it science fiction is that once the rules of the environment is established, the characters react to it constrained by the rules of science.

What separates good science fiction from fantasy is that fantasy is not bound to establish and then follow a set of physics. It's free to continually introduce whatever capabilities the characters need as the story needs it. Fantasy follows whatever path the author wishes without constraint. Science fiction's defining characteristic is that the narrative is constrained and driven by known physics or known or speculative physics.

Now you might say, but that's true of James Joyce's Dubliners; it too is constrained by the rules of phyiscs. None of the characters are magical or fantastical and nothing impossible according to known physics happens. And that's true. The difference between science fiction and ordinary (non-fantasy) fiction is that in science fiction the narrative is driven in part by the science. Dubliners narratives are not driven by science.

So even CSI could have been really good science fiction. Except its not, because despite the trappings of science they toss it out the window left and right. Star Trek with its particle-du-jour ... often is science fiction, because you are allowed to "pre-suppose" an alternate physics -- the trick is to play out the rest of the story constrained by it. Star Trek of course, as often as not, also fails to follow the rules it sets out for itself, and so deviates to space-fantasy or something... but many of its good episodes are good SF.

Or a kid's first attempt at a project... backed by his family... who knows.

There's also nothing stopping a thief from stealing a phone, dismantling it for the screen, then selling the screen.

So because it will only stop most phone theft crime instead of ALL phone theft crime that it's a bad idea? Is THAT your argument?

They say ASLR is disabled

I *think* what they are saying is that:
ASLR is disabled in their build of the software. (It must be enabled via compiler option).

However, ASLR is enabled in windows itself.

from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/secur...

As for EMET and ASLR:

Basically EMET can force recent versions of Windows to use ASLR even on applications that don't explicitly build with support for it:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag...

Not really sure which post is "GP" at this point.

I agree that there are better alternatives to sharing passwords in many cases.

I just think that the scenarios where "sharing" is so far-and-away the easier (perhaps even "better") solution that they shouldn't be classified as a 'rare exception'. Its pretty common.

For example, my wife and I both need the passwords to all of our utility accounts. The teenaged kids have the login to netflix. We all share the login to the HTPC in the living room rather than having separate accounts. These are all cases where I "have" to share passwords.

If I had a trusted guest house-sitting while I was away? Would I change the netflix and wifi and htpc and alarm code just for their visit? No. I could, but I wouldn't bother. Not in a million years. This is a case, where I *could* change the password and change it back... but I wouldn't.

If I had to give my some tech at my cell carrier my password so they could log into my account to look at it with me (something I HAVE had to do in the past) then yes, I do change it, give them a temp, and then change it back.

People need to think about it on a case by case basis. A "sharing passwords is always wrong" mentality is absurd... a "give your password to anyone who needs into your account" mentality is just as absurd.

Each case needs to be evaluated on its own merit... value of what is being protected, level of trust to the individual, level of hassle, etc. Neither scenario is exceptional or rare.

Unfortunately, the exemption you quoted doesn't cover what I am doing,

I read it as the law targeting drones that show a guided intent to record someone, you read it as the law including anything that happens to catch an image of anybody.

  It proposes "filming people unawares from a drone" as being a problem. I see that as being distinct from simply having an image of somebody in the shot as you fly by.

Just as I can tell the difference between being incidentally in the background of someone's photograph, and someone photographing me. Or the difference between someone behing behind me, and someone following me.

I see the law as only targeting deliberate use of the drone to take video of people unawares, not your backyard scenario.

I fly my drone I'm guilty -- for flying my own drone in my own backyard with the clear intent of videoing only my backyard. Oops, caught a bit of the neighbors again. Here come the cops....

So move where you have a less idiotic neighbor. Because even if they don't pass this law, the neighbor can STILL call the cops if he sees you flying a drone around his yard with a camera, and you'll potentially STILL get charged under the existing anti-peeping laws, or at the very least harassed and questioned, and have the contents of your camera examined to establish you weren't peeping.

Hell, you don't even need a drone. The minute you pull a camera out on your deck, those neighbors can call the cops and accuse you of trying take pictures through their windows... using a camera or telescope (or zoom) to look through your neighbors window is ALREADY illegal.

My point HERE is that if you have THOSE neighbors, you are already screwed.