Comment Re:Green is Population Control (Score 2, Insightful) 223
There's this incredible new product soon to be released, and it's called Soylent Green....
Comment Re:Best mod ever: nocd (Score 1) 287
Amen to that...before nocd patches were available, there were/are virtual drives.
And what about the Thief series? DromEd allows people to create their own missions/campaigns, and edit existing missions. After playing through the original game, you have the option to play dozens, even hundreds of fan missions.
And what about the Thief series? DromEd allows people to create their own missions/campaigns, and edit existing missions. After playing through the original game, you have the option to play dozens, even hundreds of fan missions.
A Few Firefox 3 Followups 407
An anonymous reader writes "Using data generated by the Mozilla Firefox download pledge page, the map on this blog post ranks countries, not by absolute number of pledges made, but rather on a per capita basis. This analysis yields some interesting conclusions about where open source is strongest and weakest."
Anonymous Warthog writes "That didn't take long. In a blog posting from the TippingPoint DVLabs security team (of Kraken and CanSecWest hacking contest fame), they confirmed that they reported a vulnerability in Firefox 3.0 to Mozilla a mere five hours after it was released. Additionally, there was a posting on the Full Disclosure security mailing list from someone that purports to have another vulnerability in the works as well. In the grand scheme of things, this probably means nothing to the general security of Firefox, but you can be sure the browser zealots on all sides will be watching carefully."
Finally, from reader Toreo asesino: "Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe) to Mozilla's Mountain View headquarters to congratulate them on shipping FireFox 3, which went live right on time last night." Congratulations are indeed due on both the browser and the release process — looks like the Firefox fever (despite some seriously taxed servers) resulted in more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
Submission + - VM-based rootkits proved easily detectable (stanford.edu)
paleshadows writes: A year and a half has passed since
SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced.
The idea spawned two lively slashdot discussions:
the first, which followed
the initial report about SubVirt,
and
the second, which was conducted after
Joanna Rutkowska
has
recycled the idea (apparently without giving credit to the initial authors).
Conversely, in this year's HotOS workshop,
researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled
"
Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities"
which shows that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable.
The introduction of the paper explains that
"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."
The paper concludes by saying that
"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."
"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."
The paper concludes by saying that
"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."
