[LUAU] get ready for apple security bugs
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/11/exploit_released_for_unpatched_1.html The vulnerability is the first in a series of daily bug details to be released over the next 29 days as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs project. LMH said we can expect at least five more Apple kernel bugs to be detailed in the coming days, as well as kernel flaws in Linux, BSD, and Solaris 10 systems. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] get ready for apple security bugs
My my, will Maynor, Ellch and Krebs ever let it drop? My understanding is that HDM found a vulnerability independantly and implemented an exploit for it. Not sure what this has to do with Maynor not letting it drop... jim Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] get ready for apple security bugs
My understanding is that HDM found a vulnerability independantly and implemented an exploit for it. Phleeze. Its the same old send a malformed IE in a probe response (or beacon) frame crapfest that was in the Maynor/Ellch exploit. sure, but since maynor wasnt telling, HDM had to write his own fuzzer to identify the vulnerability and develop an exploit. Hence independantly. Much as Apple did when identifying similar issues. Not sure what this has to do with Maynor not letting it drop... The Krebs connection. He's trying to get some respect after dropping the ball (on his foot) over the whole Maynor/Ellch affair. So it's not Maynor not letting it drop? Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
Would the system be safer if it was all on a CD and there was no hard drive? In a way. The system could still be attacked and used by attackers to stage attacks against other machines, but without a way to save any persistent state, you'd get back to a clean state by just rebooting (barring any bios hacks or using USB storage for persistent state, which some CD based systems do). Of course, if an attacker could get into the system before the reboot, they'll be able to get in again after the reboot, as the system will be essentially the same. Would you be able to make a CD based system fast enough for a basic user? Yes. --Peter Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
It's apparent that this is quickly becoming religeous. It is not my intention to start a religeous OS battle... Linux is great. I use it all the time. FreeBSD is great. I use it all the time Please. Windows is *full* of holes, and by default, it essentially runs as root (or the Windows equivalent). As I stated earlier, most malware doesn't rely on software vulnerability. It doesn't matter if there are holes when malware isn't using holes to install itself (in essense the human behind the computer *is* the vulnerability). It is true that most windows users are effectively running as root and this gives malware some benefit (but remember, malware can operate perfectly fine in a non-root role), but in fairness, a large majority of linux users also run as root (albeit smaller fraction than in the windows world). The root argument isn't very compelling. There is a long history of privilege escalation attacks on all operating systems and a large number are being found regularly on ALL platforms, including windows, linux, *BSD and OS X. The step from local user to local administrator is a much smaller hop than from external attacker to local user. If I was a malware author, though, I wouldn't even bother. You can get the job done just fine from a non-administrator account. I've had linux machines on the wide-open net for years with nary an issue (save a RedHat machine in 1999 or so that got rooted when it was sitting in my home at the end of a T1 line.) That's funny, in that same time period (I believe 2001) a study showed that on average it took a few minutes for a fresh redhat 7 box to be owned when it was put on the network. If anyone is interested I can hunt down the study (it was part of the honeynet project). Linux security has come a long way since (they werent even configuring packet filtering in the default installs and were, by default, running a lot of unneeded services) but so has the security of Windows. Go ahead, put your XP machine up on a raw, unfiltered IP connection. See how long it lasts. Unfiltered as in not behind a firewall? People do it all the time. I do it occasionally (though not regularly). XP comes with its own packet filter installed and configured since XP SP2. In its normal configuration there are no externally accessible ports. So unless an attacker is hitting a vulnerability in the TCP/IP stack itself or in a service that the user explicitely added to his system, there's no remote server exposure. It's the client stuff you have to worry about since firewalls don't protect connections that you initiate. jim PS: re: Julian's message -- I'll buy the argument that a faster patching cycle for Mozilla would be less advantageous for attackers. It still wouldn't prevent malware, but it would reduce the effective window of attacks that rely on a vulnerability. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
Can one write malware for a non-Windows platform? Sure. Can one run malware from a non-privileged account? Sure. Can one get people to install malware on a non-Windows platform? Sure Does Windows offer a more attractive target, especially because a) its huge installed base Yes. b) its proclivity for running in a mode where very few restrictions are in place c) its got more holes than swiss cheese No. Sure. But now we're back to its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet. Why, so that the installed base of another operating system grows and the same exact situation arises again for another operating system? This is the entirety of my point -- removing all windows machines does nothing to solve the problem. It just changes the preferred platform of attacks... Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
Safely running Windows on the Internet is possible, but its a lot like being locked in a souring, mildewed terror-bunker watching black water pour in over the sill as a society poisoned by Lysenkoist (*) denial drowns in its own spew. I'm not sure what purpose this comment serves. It doesn't convey any information other than Jim Thompson really really thinks running windows securely isn't very easy. It doesn't say why or provide any facts to back up your point of view. It doesn't even say that the situation is any better on other platforms (although I'm betting you believe it is). The truth is -- the security on windows platforms today is roughly comparable to the security of linux and OS X platforms today. Some are slightly better and some slightly worse, but they are all within an order of magnitude. Some may say windows is slightly worse than average (I wouldnt), and some may say slightly better, but in my opinion, thats just splitting hairs... There exist attacks against all the popular platforms. They are found on a regular basis. Attackers can and do exploit them, but there are more automated attacks found against Windows platforms due to their popularity. Any interested observer can find a long list of new and recent vulnerabilities for all platforms in security mailing lists and databases run by security vendors, operating system vendors, security organizations and government agencies. The amount of remote vulnerabilities in server software is definitely declining on all platforms and the surface area exposed over the network is a lot smaller due to inclusion of packet filtering in all popular platforms and the choice to disable services by default. The amount of vulnerabilities that allow local privilege escalation is staggering on all platforms. Even if it were not so, compromising the account of any user who performs administrative access (sudo, LUA/UAP, etc..) allows easy compromise of the administative account without the use of additional vulnerabilities (ie. PATH, trojan, debugging features, terminal manipulation, keystroke logging). Even if all of that were not true, malware is still a potential issue on all platforms. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
If your point is that stupidity will dominate, so people will install malware no matter what kind of OS you've provided, then there is no solution short of welding the hood shut. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE. Was that your point? If so, we need a new sign: You must be at least this smart to take this ride. Well, sort of. I think there's a huge problem that has a small technological aspect to it (we can make it easier for people to know the difference between a good choice and a bad choice) but a much larger educational aspect to it (if people knew what bad choices were presented to them and why they were a bad choice, more people would avoid making bad choices. Not everyone is stupid, some people are just not in posession of the right information). I would never suggest that only well trained people should be on the internet. The risk is simply miniscule compared to the net benefit. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
Ok, this is just silly. If you ban windows machines from the internet you'd just get a bunch of linux and osx botnets... Botnets run on windows because they are the majority population, not because they are inherently easier to write botnets for. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Its time to simply ban Windoze machines from the Internet
Its not that simple. Windows boxes are a heckuva lot easier to populate with the software that creates botnets. They're an open infection vector. I don't agree at all. There are sufficient server and client vulnerabilities in *BSD, linux, OS X and windows. Many of the attacks don't even rely on any software vulnerability but on the poor judgement and bad practices of end users. These same problems exist in the unix population. The software for all aspects of a the malware would be substantially similar across all existing popular platforms. The only major differentiator is the return on investment. Writing attacks for windows makes more economical sense for attackers. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] not using SED to extract song, artist, and album from my iTunes Music List Export
Primarily to flesh out the better XML parsers for those trying to be language agnostic. I also have a morbid curiosity at seeing an awk solution as suggested earlier in the thread. :) XML is a problem in search of a problem -Vince Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] not using SED to extract song, artist, and album from my iTunes Music List Export
Since XML was brought up, does anyone want to try some programming golf with their favorite language and XML library? Eww.. why? -Vince Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Using SED to extract song, artist, and album from my iTunes Music List Export
I am wanting to generate a human-readable list of my iTunes library.
I want it to look something like this. Automagically wrapping quotes around
the song title would be idea.
1. The Happy Organ Baby Dave Cortez Rockin Instrumentals
I cant tell if your file is tab-separated or if they are all aligned
by adding spaces... It makes a difference in the solution and in
the tools you might use..
If the file is aligned out with fixed-width columns, its really easy to
get at the fields using the cut command. For example, if you want the
characters from 6 to 7 an from 11 to 15 on each line:
$ echo this is a test |cut --output-delimiter=' : ' -c6-7,11-15
is : test
Cut can't reorder the columns and it cant put quotes around your results
(although it can put things between your results as shown above).
You can also used sed for this situation. Its actually not that
complicated, but a little messier. We use the rule
's/pattern/repl/g'
to globally replace pattern with repl. Here each dot is a wild card. We
count out as many dots as we want to skip and as many dots as we want to
capture and put the captures in parenthesis (sed requires the parenthesis
be quoted with backslashes). The final '.*' means as many dots
(wildcards) as needed. That makes up the pattern we want, the second half
uses \1 and \2 to fill in the part we captured with parenthesis in
the replacement string:
$ echo this is a test |sed 's/^.\(..\)...\(\).*/\1 \2/g'
is test
or with the fields reversed and quoted:
$ echo this is a test |sed 's/^.\(..\)...\(\).*/\2 \1/g'
test is
if on the other hand things are tab separated you can use cut with its
-d flag (sets the field delimiter) and -f flag (pick out fields):
$ echo 'thistabistabatabtest' |
cut --output-delimiter=' : ' -d'tab' -f2,4
is : test
(you might have to type control-v then tab to get a tab in your shell).
There's a similar solution using sed but its a bit more complicated than
the previous one, and it turns out to be really easy in awk so I'll
skip the sed solution here and give this instead:
$ echo 'thistabistabatabtest' |
awk -F 'tab' '{ print $4, $2; }'
test is
$ echo 'thistabistabatabtest' |
awk -F 'tab' '{ printf(\%s\ \%s\\n, $4, $2); }'
test is
What's going on here is you're telling awk that fields are delimited
by tabs (the -F flag) and giving a little awk script that prints out
the fourth and second fields. The print command is simple but doesn't
let you format the results very much. The printf command is more
complicated but gives you more control (here we used it to put
quotes around each field).
If you know perl or python or some other more general scripting language
with good regular expression support, its probably easier and cleaner
to implement what we did above and as others suggested, thats the
way to go. But, if you don't know one of those languages, learning
a little bit of sed or awk (or even cut) can get the job done and is
a lot easier to pick up than a new (general) language...
--scott
Hope that helps..
Tim Newsham
http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
[LUAU] community wifi and mesh routing?
How close is mesh routing to be ready for prime time? It sounds like the city of new orleans is finding it indispensible. How strict is oceanic and hawaiiantelcom about bandwidth sharing? Wasn't HOSEF setting up some community wireless projects? If so, what were they using to provide bandwidth to the internet? Are there any community efforts to provide free wlan meshes here? It seems like wlan has penetrated the consumer market thoroughly... In my area, at least, I can see about as many APs as I can see houses... They're all just last-meter spokes off of some broadband link, though. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Edubuntu thin client screen logon
One more question here folks, I ( me and Derek Esibill) have installed Edubuntu LTSP in Derek's science lab and in the new Boy's and Girl's club here at Kailua Intermediate School. The thin clients boot up (with PXELINUX NIC's) to the Edubuntu login screen, but when you login, the login screen just recycles itself. It goes away for a second and then comes right back to login. Does anyone know how to get past this problem? No idea. What's happening here is most likely that its executing your X server, window manager and clients and they are failing (probably the X server itself) because of some configuration issue. I usually debug these types of problems by running the X server from a command line on the console and seeing what it does. An alternative is to find the log file its writing and look over that for error messages. Sorry I couldn't be more specific. Hope that helps at least a little.. Scott Foulk Tech Coordinator Kailua Intermediate School Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] MS to EOL Win98 and WinMe - July 11
be extremely surprised. The best I've ever found is one that will propagate to shared drives on the network that have manually turned on read/write sharing on the root of the hard drive regardless of whether they set a password on the share. No sharing is enabled on windows ME by default. I would be very suprised if there isn't some SMB based remote vuln that works against ME when there are no defined shares. The code quality of most MS products pre 2001 is pretty poor. (I have no idea how secure an ME box is with all windowsupdate patches applied) Windows NT/2000/XP all were vulnerable to several classes of network worms because they had retarded default security settings with open ports for running services normal people would never need. All of these ports are firewalled by default in XP SP2, and almost all computers that have been built since August 2004 have SP2 built into the installation/restoral CD. Until a worm comes out that hacks the firewall itself (hasn't happened yet, but isn't impossible), all of these XP SP2 machines are safe by default, and can only be hacked via self-inflicted security holes (running randomly obtained exe files, turning off the firewall, etc). I wouldn't call a client vulnerability self inflicted. They can't be attacked at the whim of the attacker and instead must be initiated by an action of the user, but client vulnerabilities are still very serious. Using client programs in their normal mode of operation can result in your machine being rooted and there is little the windows firewall can do about it. The attack surface here is huge -- all your network clients, any program that is used to process files from a third party (media, documents, etc.), files you place in certain folders (put a shortcut to www.google.com on your desktop that runs cmd.exe, and guess what happens when you type www.google.com into IE?) and probably a lot of other things I forgot to mention... Furthermore, a windows machine of any sort that is alone behind a hardware firewall won't have any hackable open ports either. Depends... sometimes it will and you wont know it. Can you say teredo? Don't know what that is? Thats the problem. It seems like almost all broadband ISPs give their customers NAT firewall routers/modems nowadays, so this mostly just leaves dialup and static IP users of windows NT-2000-XPSP1, who either haven't been to windowsupdate before the viruses came out, or who managed to find an installation CD for one of those old OSes, which is an increasingly small segment of windows users. It helps, for sure. It helps a lot. But there's still lots of exposure. At least you're not in a race condition when you hook up your windows machine to get to windowsupdate as you would be if you didn't have a firewall (well, assuming nobody on your LAN is infected). There's a large computer company that shall remain nameless that had a large network and had a huge problem with worms. The network was so large that there were always new machines being brought up. These new machines would invariably become infected before the worm could be eliminated on other machines and they had old worms running around their network for a long time even though all new machines were dewormed as soon as possible. Not much their firewall could do to help... The only people who have it right are OSX and a few linux distributions. OSX has no open ports by default. Almost all Linux distributions have ssh enabled by default, which has had a few exploits. I strongly believe that ALL open ports should be an opt-in policy and not an opt-out/firewall policy. I don't disagree, but this alone does not ensure security. -Eric Hattemer Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
[LUAU] wlan question
I've been having some wlan issues here off and on for a while and it seems like it has been getting worse. Where I'm at I can see about about 7 APs, including my own. Sometimes a few more, sometimes a few less. Typically the other APs are on channels 2,6 (several), 10 and 11 (several). I have tried various channels trying to avoid the crowds, usually 8, 9 or 4 (since the 6's and 11's are closest to me, at least in terms of signal strength). I am sitting about 8 feet from my AP right now and still getting 15-25% packet loss! I'm receiving about -57db from my AP and -79db from the nearest competing AP, so its not clear to me that the interference is necessarily coming from other APs. One other thing to note, sometimes I start getting a lot of drops (usually when I'm further away from my AP) and resetting the AP (d-link, 802.11g) seems to fix the problem for a while. Any ideas on what might be causing the poor performance? Is this normal performance for this amount of congestion? Is this due to a cheap AP? Is there anything I can do to track down the interference or make adjustments that will increase my reliability? Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] wlan question
What will help is selecting the strongest AP, and then getting your AP on the SAME CHANNEL. Try it, if you really want the math behind why it works, let me know, but right now I'm remote without an AC adapter, so I literally can't afford the time to write it down. I'm definitely interested in the why. Btw, I gave it a shot. I'm still getting a bit of loss (about 35% right now, but I'm a bit further away than earlier). I think overall the results are on par with using a free channel that is two away from any nearby broadcaster. It's possible that this isn't an interference issue, but that seems to be the most logical explanation so far (unless someone knows of interop issues between dlink and various laptop builtin drivers, such as intel 3945abg). Jim On Jul 1, 2006, at 10:50 AM, Maddog wrote: You might try a third party firmware. There are several out there. I know that fixed an issue i had with my Linksys router and it added so many cool new features. Google for third party firmware for your model. There are quite a few hacks sprouting up out there for D-link too. MD - Original Message - From: Tim Newsham [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: luau@lists.hosef.org Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2006 10:39 AM Subject: [LUAU] wlan question I've been having some wlan issues here off and on for a while and it seems like it has been getting worse. Where I'm at I can see about about 7 APs, including my own. Sometimes a few more, sometimes a few less. Typically the other APs are on channels 2,6 (several), 10 and 11 (several). I have tried various channels trying to avoid the crowds, usually 8, 9 or 4 (since the 6's and 11's are closest to me, at least in terms of signal strength). I am sitting about 8 feet from my AP right now and still getting 15-25% packet loss! I'm receiving about -57db from my AP and -79db from the nearest competing AP, so its not clear to me that the interference is necessarily coming from other APs. One other thing to note, sometimes I start getting a lot of drops (usually when I'm further away from my AP) and resetting the AP (d-link, 802.11g) seems to fix the problem for a while. Any ideas on what might be causing the poor performance? Is this normal performance for this amount of congestion? Is this due to a cheap AP? Is there anything I can do to track down the interference or make adjustments that will increase my reliability? Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/ ___ LUAU@lists.hosef.org mailing list http://lists.hosef.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luau ___ LUAU@lists.hosef.org mailing list http://lists.hosef.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luau ___ LUAU@lists.hosef.org mailing list http://lists.hosef.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luau Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Ubuntu... Legalities
Hotels (on the mainland) have figured out that people will preferentially stay where there first was WiFi and now folks will stay where its free. This is especially true in the 3 star level places. (Nobody expects water to be free in the Four Seasons.) I'm currently staying in a Hyatt in a tech-heavy area. The majority of the people I see in the lobby are here on business with a large technology firm. Wirless is $10/day as is ethernet in the room. (There are the occasional 3 stars down the road that have free wifi.) Jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Ubuntu... Legalities
Compared to the rest of you, my knowledge of such things is very limited, so this may be an embarrassing question. Are there any city or state governments trying to do this as a service for their citizens? If so, have any of them been successful? Will the Net eventually evolve into something like roads and sidewalks? Not embarrassing. Remember: there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.. The city of Philadelphia is trying to roll out free wifi. Google wants to roll out free (ad supported) wifi in SF. There are various community efforts in many cities to offer free wireless hotspots. There are probably more efforts that I'm unaware of. --Peter Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Ubuntu... Legalities
If you had a choice to buy gas for $3.35/gallon right down the street on King Street or drive to Millilani (if you live in town) and pay $3.09/gallon, where would you most like fuel up? A large majority would go to the more expensive station out of convenience. I think you'll find they're better off paying the $3.35/gallon at the local station. You've just proved the validity of his analogy. Now compute the cost of installing your own codec versus buying a package with the codec installed. Be sure to include the value of your time. You definitely have to drive a lot further when you do it yourself. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] wither VIM?
The scripting language is a joke, you can't compare it to elisp (gnu emacs is written in elisp, so the entire is available to elisp programs. VIM's scripting support is more like Visual Basic, the VIM authors decide which bits of the VIM 'machine' to expose to outside scripting languages. But why run emacs if you already have an operating system? Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] hawaiiantel internet and e-mail
Under Verizon, I always threw out the setup CD and connected via a router. Works fine without a router, too. Its basically just DHCP over ethernet (the dsl bridges the ethernet to the head end). There's 802.1x in there too, it seems, but I'm not using that and I guess its not required... So.. should work out of the box for most systems by just plugging in. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Linux-Hackers-onMac
Maybe it's just me, or maybe english is my second language; but this sentence has a tone of irony. One would think that a skillful artist would not use an axe as their tool of choice. So, it seems the intent of this sentence is to suggest that an artist can be SO skillful, that he can use a tool as coarse as an axe to create something beautiful. But this only reinforces the notion that hacking at something is an extreme act, and not the norm of skillful activity. Look at some of the amazing things people do with the blunt object known as IA32. Jimen Ching (WH6BRR) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Linux-Hackers-onMac
I was under the impression that hacker came from neat hack used as a term of approbation for a program, or a method, that achieved superior results with nothing more than an improved algorithm. Supposed to have been used at MIT by members of the model train club that got involved in computer (Stephen Levy, _Hackers_). Jargon dictionary says originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html and then goes on to describe its use in computer culture starting at TMRC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy goes into more detail and suggests other origins. Reguardless of its origin, one skillful enough to make a chair using an axe captures the spirit of (one of the definitions of) the word. [The original poster asked why they would use the word hacker (implied derogatory by the poster) to describe the people who got xp running on a mac] Karen Lofstrom Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Linux-Hackers-onMac
Why label intelligent knowledgeable OS capable individuals Hackers, As a tribute to their skill? As in he's so skillful at making chairs that he can hack one out of a block of wood using just an axe? Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
[LUAU] language shootout
Nice project to perform some language comparisons based on similar code: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ You can see how implementations of similar programs differ for different languages and how they perform relative to each other for cpu time, memory size and LoC. If you think a particular implementation is flawed, you can contribute your own. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Windows Vista will be an improvement in security and stability...
Windows Vista In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system. - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931914,00.asp To their credit, Microsoft has been dumping more resources into security over the past few years than any other company I know of. The Vista system introduced several new (to windows) architectural security features that should prove useful in containing security threats. For example, you can be logged in as an admin user (and lets face it, most windows users log in as admin) and be running with less than your full administrative rights, but still be allowed to elevate your privs when necessary (akin to su or more accurately sudo in unix systems). This is taken from a Slashdot user comment (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178809cid=14821229). as much as I hate taking opinions from slashdot I'd just like to add that depending on the amount of new/re-written code introduced into the Vista operating system, you will not see any improvements to the state of Windows security. The consumer market is trained to demand something brand new and flashy. See also the 'disappointment' to Apple's recent announcement. The Windows market demands new features and therefore new code and therefore the accompanying new security holes/risks. This is more or less correct. There's a lot of new code in windows (there always will be) and that will definitely have an impact on security. Add to that -- retrofitting new security systems on to old systems is difficult. More so when you need to maintain backwards compatibility. The Windows security mechanisms were already quite complex. In Vista they are more so. Linux on the other hand follows a largely iterative process to software development. Hah! yah, linux security just keeps on getting better and better! ;-) - Julian Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Splitting video
Anyone know the specifics about splitting video? One of my teachers wants to see his video on his video terminal as well as his projector for the class. I've seen it a dozen times before but have not had occasion to use it myself. Lots of systems provide dual outputs for this purpose. For example, my laptop has an LCD built in, and a SVideo and a VGA video port. The LCD display is seperate from the other two outputs (which show the same signal) and the video card can drive the LCD and the output ports seperately. In Windows you can use these two outputs as seperate displays or as mirrors of each other. In XP the video control panel has an option to display multiple monitors or a single one, and, if multiple, the resolution of each display (shows up as two boxes, #1, and #2). When using both outputs some programs are hip to the second display and automatically display full-screen on the second display. For example, powerpoint and windows media player will both show output in full screen on the secondary display while showing just a window in the primary display. Theres usually a CRT/LCD button for switching between using the primary only, the secondary only, or both (showing the same image). On my box its Fn-F8 (in blue letters it says CRT/LCD). I'm not entirely sure how this is usually done in Linux (or other unices) since I dont have a dual display on one. Scott Foulk Tech Coordinator Kailua Intermediate School Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Putting the UG back in LUG
I'd vote for Asterisk + fax server as the next sample project, I would think those should go together nicely. I've been planning to build one of those myself, to leverage all the multi-function jacks I installed around the house. In one of the usenix ;login: issues they integrated asterix with mythtv, so you can even tie this back in with the original project. (Stuff like putting caller id on screen instead of ringing the phone when watching a movie). Clifton Royston -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Is Google going to create its own Linux distro?
orkut (http://www.orkut.com/), on the other hand. Who actually has an orkut account and uses it? Then again, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't orkut the only Google site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_services_and_tools) built on ASP.net? These things tend to take off in one community and not another. I know for a while the orkut community drew in a lot of technical types, especially in the computer security sector. Friendster has a big following in the bay area, even amoung non-techies (well, as much as there are non-techies in the bay area). Seems like people in Hawaii like MySpace. Obviously people want to sign up to the social network that all their friends are already on. Personally, they all look like big information gathering utilities to me. Not sure what's so great about BBS's. I already have teh email and teh interweb. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Help needed with a c program
I am looking for sample c code that connects to a URL. I tried to cobble
something together but it isn't working out too well.
All it needs to do is connect to a url like
https://www.example.com/sample?option1=matt%option2=darnell%option3=please_help
Does it have to be C code? If not, you can use a utility like curl
or wget to do the work for you, or you can even use a general utility
like netcat:
(echo GET /url/here HTTP/1.0; echo) | nc hosthere 80
Anyway, below is some C code. It's written for a unix system, but
since it looks like you're coding this for windows, I tried to include
hints for converting the code to windows (they use a socket API for
networking access which is similar but not identical to the one used
in unix).
Matt
Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
/* in windows you would include windows.h and winsock.h */
#include errno.h
#include stdio.h
#include string.h
#include unistd.h
#include sys/types.h
#include sys/socket.h
#include netinet/in.h
#include arpa/inet.h
#include netdb.h
/*
* Things are slightly different in windows. They use different types
* for sockets than are used in Unix. To make it clearer I added the
* following defines for Unix. You wouldn't need these in windows.
**/
#define SOCKET int /* a socket handle */
#define INVALID_SOCKET -1 /* A bogus handle indicating error */
#define SOCKET_ERROR -1 /* error return value */
/* resovle an IPv4 host. Return 0 for success */
int
resolvHost(char *host, struct sockaddr_in *ad)
{
struct hostent *hp;
memset(ad, 0, sizeof ad);
ad-sin_family = AF_INET;
/* try it as a dotted-quad */
ad-sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(host);
if(ad-sin_addr.s_addr != INADDR_NONE)
return 0;
/* go to dns */
hp = gethostbyname(host);
if(!hp || hp-h_length != 4)
return -1;
memcpy(ad-sin_addr.s_addr, hp-h_addr, 4);
return 0;
}
int
conUrl(char *host, int port, char *path)
{
char buf[1024];
struct sockaddr_in ad;
SOCKET s;
int len;
if(strlen(host) + strlen(path) 900) {
fprintf(stderr, url too long (%s: %s)\n, host, path);
return -1;
}
/* resolve the host then connect to it */
if (resolvHost(host, ad) == -1) {
fprintf(stderr, bad address %s\n, host);
return -1;
}
ad.sin_port = htons(port);
s = socket(ad.sin_family, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
if(s == INVALID_SOCKET) {
perror(socket); /* use WSAGetLastError in windows */
return -1;
}
if(connect(s, (struct sockaddr*)ad, sizeof ad) == SOCKET_ERROR) {
perror(host); /* use WSAGetLastError in windows */
close(s);
return -1;
}
/* send our request */
sprintf(buf, GET %s HTTP/1.0\n\n, path);
send(s, buf, strlen(buf), 0);
/*
* read back the result -- this is for testing since you
* indicated you don't need the resulting text.
*/
while((len = recv(s, buf, sizeof buf, 0)) 0)
write(1, buf, len);
close(s); /* use closesocket in windows */
return 0;
}
int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
/* initialize with WSAStartup in windows */
if(conUrl(www.lava.net, 80, /~newsham/) == -1)
return 1;
return 0;
}
[LUAU] control flow fun for the whole family
http://www.c-jump.com/ Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: Python (Was Re: Hosef)
So is this going to be a Python, etc.. meet up? Yes, If people show up. If not hopefully Scott can keep me busy with something. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
[LUAU] programming books.
I just tried it again with both Firefox and IE and it doesn't load. It looks like a dns problem - it can't find the server, and nslookup doesn't work either. Strange...I tried another online NS Lookup tool at http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html?host=www.programmingebooks.tktype=Aserver=forward=Look+it+up and got three IP addresses that didn't work, either. Can somebody else test this link? This is kind of wierd. It works here. The address it's connecting to is 62.129.131.38. If you try to open http://62.129.131.38/ you will get a 404 though. Try putting it into your /etc/hosts or system32/drivers/etc/hosts.txt. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] doing 'e'
Here it is in haskell. This shows some of the strengths of haskell, but also some of its weaknesses. Dealing with random numbers is more tedious than it should be. Some of the awkwardness could be caused by the programmer's lack of experience with the language. - e.lhs - Literate haskell for computing e the hard way. Translated from lisp code by Jim Thompson (see e.lisp) module E where import Time import System.Random Some siliness so that the random numbers are different for each run. randomSeed :: IO Int randomSeed = do -- XXX Could be a lot better. t - getClockTime = toCalendarTime return $ hashStr $ show t where hashStr s = foldl hashAdd 0 $ map fromEnum s hashAdd a b = (a*13) + b A sum is the accumulation from 0. We call it sum' because there's already an integer sum function. A list of accumulated sums is made by keeping each intermediate sum value. sum' = foldl (+) 0.0 sums = scanl (+) 0.0 Average of a list is its sum divided by its length. average x = sum' (map fromIntegral x) / (fromIntegral $ length x) length of series items whose sum does not exceed 1.0. waitTime x = length $ takeWhile ( 1.0) (sums x) A number of waitTimes drawn from successive items in x. waitTimes x 0 = [] waitTimes x n = let wt = waitTime x in wt : waitTimes (drop wt x) (n - 1) putLine x = putStr $ (show x) ++ \n main :: IO () main = do seed - randomSeed let variates = randoms $ mkStdGen seed mapM_ putLine $ [average $ waitTimes variates n | n - [1,10,100,1000]] Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] doing 'e'
Lets see a perl/python/... equivalent to this lisp exercise for obtaining 'e': [...] Euler's number, 'e', is approximately 2.7182818284590452354, and this is a highly-inefficient way to extract it, but the function does tend toward 'e'.) Jim If you like this kind of stuff, you'd probably get a kick out of Doug McIlroy's The Music of Streams, available on his home page: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/ I toyed with the code in python a little: http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/powerseries.py http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/powerseries2.py but neither is as elegant as his (pseudo-) haskell implementation Heres your python code: #!/usr/bin/python import random uniform = random.random # gratuitous rename def waitTime() : Return the number of uniform variates whose sum just exceeds 1. sum,times = 0,0 while sum = 1.0 : sum,times = sum+uniform(), times+1 return times def repeat(n, f, *args, **kwargs) : Return the results of running a function n times. return [f(*args, **kwargs) for n in xrange(n)] def average(l) : Return the average of a list. Raise an exception for empty lists. return float(sum(l)) / len(l) # show some waitTime results print Some waitTimes, repeat(10, waitTime) # show averages for increasing lengths of repeat(waitTime) print average waitTimes, [average(repeat(n, waitTime)) for n in 1, 10, 100, 1000, 1, 10] Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] doing 'e'
Doug, of course, is a long-standing member of the Unix community. And of course inventor of the unix pipe: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/mdmpipe.pdf http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/mdmpipe.html One of many great historical tidbits on Ritchie's home page. A must-read for anyone interested in unix or computing history: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: Python (Was Re: Hosef)
We will be at McKinley the next three Saturdays from 10-2. On the 10th we'll be there a bit longer for our organizational meeting. This is a month when we will be paying for the space, so we'd love for attendees to become members of HOSEF. My input: A saturday afternoon such as Dec. 3rd, around 1pm or so for a few hours (2, maybe 3?) with an aim to teach and learn new stuff by exchanging code and reworking it for demonstration purposes and discussing it? Geeky enough? This works well. Let me know ASAP, though. If you do it this Saturday, the 3rd, our friend Michael can possibly host us as late as needed. Other Saturdays we will need to make custodial arrangements. I'll aim to be there from noon till 2 (or later if there's a need and Michael is around to let us stay later). If others are planning on coming down please let us know. For those who may not be familiar with the lab: http://www.hosef.org/pn/index.php?module=Static_Docstype=userfunc=viewf=mckinleylocation.html Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
[LUAU] language...
Likewise for the Perl example: to even know whether it's good or bad, one needs to know, for instance, that split (like many other functions) implicitly operates on the $_ variable, this convenience is one of the things that has oft annoyed me about perl. Yet you make good use of pronouns in your english compositions. Is it the poor choice of name ($_), the subtle (or non-uniform?) rules about what they reference, or just lack of familiarity? I think pronouns are a great thing, in spoken and programming languages: http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2000-03 ... and I'm no defender of perl. jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: Python (Was Re: Hosef)
for ( ; *s++ = *t++ ; ) ;
while (*s++ = *t++) {
/* empty body */
} ;.
I always found continue to be a lot more explicit in situations
like this:
while(*s++ = *t++)
continue;
the empty semi-colon being the least attractive alternative (did
he really mean to leave the body empty? not to mention the greener
programmer will easily overlook the semicolon).
In any case, both examples have the issues of the side-effects of the
assignment (being used for the test here). The author of either example also
has to worry about the loop terminating (finding a null pointer).
No complaints about assignment in the loop test? :)
(Another sure way to confuse the younger C coder).
For all but trivial copies like this memcpy() (aka bcopy()) is probably a
better solution, though of course it won't terminate on a null pointer like
the above.
But strcpy() will :)
Jim
Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: Python (Was Re: Hosef)
Would anyone be interested in starting up a very informal Hawaii Python Users' Group? Probably more of an occasional meet-up and chat, but we could see what evolves from it. Ok, so lots of people are interested. What's the next step? It would be good to come together sometime and I guess talk shop. Obviously it would be better if we could do it somewhere where people had computers and the internet. I'm not sure where that would be. Perhaps the hosef lab space would be usable? Scott? So... when and where? With the holidays coming up I'm sure people's schedules are hectic, but I imagine most interested people could make a saturday morning/afternoon time at some point in the next few weeks? Beyond that, what are people hoping to get out of this? I'm sure different people will have different answers. If we do all meet up, whats our agenda? Are we going to talk advocacy? Go over some tutorial type stuff? Swap code and talk about it? Talk about particular technologies that interact with python? Also further into things.. how much room do people want to allow for other topics (rails, ruby, perl, lisp, etc...) My input: A saturday afternoon such as Dec. 3rd, around 1pm or so for a few hours (2, maybe 3?) with an aim to teach and learn new stuff by exchanging code and reworking it for demonstration purposes and discussing it? Geeky enough? Clifton Royston -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] PS: I occasionally goof with some small code bits and post them to my scrap directory. There are lots of small python files here which might be fun for people to look at: http://lava.net/~newsham/x/machine/ Mostly small digestable implementations of popular algorithms (like min-edit distance used in diff(1)). Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: Hosef
The programming skill that is most critically needed is, hold your breath, StarBasic (or any Visual Basic equivalent that works with OpenOffice.org). I completely disagree. The programming skill that is most critically needed is: The one that gets programmers started along the right track most easily. The exact language is immaterial. The language du jour will change many times (and I don't think starbasic will ever be one of them), but that doesn't matter, because a programmers can learn programming languages a lot more easily than they can learn programming concepts. I'm sure your goals of getting more open office support are important, but if you teach teachers to teach a better programming language and they in turn get more children hooked on programming, they will be programming long after starbasic and openoffice and MS office (and MS) fade from prominance. Wayne Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: Hosef
I'm pretty versed in Python, Plone and Zope. Python's pretty easy to learn but you won't find courses which teach it. Courses don't tend to teach dynamic scripting languages exclusively. They tend to stick to the safety languages of C++, Java, etc... I always thought that python should be taught to young students (elementary, high school, first year college or non-cs college interested in programming). Its fairly clean and easy to learn and use without having a deep understanding of programming. I showed my wife, who is not technically inclined, a few things and she got it pretty quickly. Its still fairly new though and I wonder how many teachers who teach this class of student knows about it. I think it would be great if HOSEF could play some role in pushing this kind of knowledge to teachers who could then have an impact on young minds. Julian Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] You know this world famous hacker?
Jim -- who won't admit that he has a complete 'brick' of TAP and a Bud set somewhere, or that he ever got TAP in the mail while he was in Jr. High, (likely putting him on the FBI watch list for life) or that he once, back when computers consumed his life, coded a DSP to generate not only a complete set of blue, red and black boxes, but also one end of a UUCP Phrack magazine published some code to generate (encode) and detect (decode) DTMF tones: http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=50a=13 The code detected blue box MF, but didn't generate them (although its fairly easy to modify it to add that functionality). Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] How do you delete over 500,000 files in a directory
find . -name 'mgetty*' -maxdepth 1 -print | xargs rm Also beware of filenames with spaces when using xargs. If you know none of the files have spaces, then the above should work fine for you. If you aren't sure something like: find . -name '*mgetty*' -print0 |xargs -0 rm will do what you want. You might want to look at other find flags as well (like -type f, for example). You'd think that by 2005, arbitrary length command lines wouldn't be an issue (assuming they could all fit in memory, or kmem, or some suitable place). I wonder if anyone has made a more up-to-date unix like system that fixes these warbles.. Oh yah, plan9. ;-) Clifton Royston -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] How do you delete over 500,000 files in a directory
You'd think that by 2005, arbitrary length command lines wouldn't be an issue [...] Note that the expansion itself is no problem, rather it's almost always an exec(2) system call which fails returning E2BIG. Remember that all that crap has to be copied into kernel space for an exec [...] All true, but hardly a good excuse. They could allow arbitrary sized argument vectors and environment and argument storage. E2BIG on rm * on a machine with 2G of ram is pure silliness. There are systems (as I pointed out) that don't have this limitation. jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] You know this world famous hacker?
http://www.bethephonecompany.com/documents/itexpo_la/DSC00495.JPG He was a phone hacker.You need to have been around in telephony for a little while. Lemme guess - likes to offer back massages to young boys at cons? Matt Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Interesting article - $100 laptop being developed at MIT
They're targetting developing nations, but this could be a real boon [...] laptop, in my opinion. Heck, with the dynamo crank, its even enviro-friendly! That is really cool! I just hope that in 5-10 years we dont have a few billion laptops going into landfills in developing countries. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Appletalk services daemon under debian
Hey gang: While deleting S20netatalk out of the rc.d directories will work...is there a more elegant way to get rid of appletalk services? This server takes forever to come up because it sits there forever and a day trying to find all the appletalk services on the subnet. You can enable and disable services during startup with the chkconfig tool. It basically adjusts the symlinks in the rc.d directories for the various run levels (the real files are in init.d). # chkconfig --list # lists all scripts at all run levels # chkconfig --list syslog # just lists syslog # chkconfig syslog off # turns off syslog at all levels # chkconfig --level 2345 syslog on# turns on syslog for 2,3,4,5 There's nothing wrong with manipulating the symlinks directly, the chkconfig script just provides a more convenient and less fault-prone interface. /brian chee University of Hawai'i at Manoa School of Ocean Earth Science Technology Where you always part of soest? I thought you were part of uhcc/its. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] RR DNS servers changing
As they did a few years ago, Roadrunner is changing their DNS numbers without telling anyone. Please alert your users of the following from the RR network status page: [...] You'd probably do better to direct them to an authoritative page with this information on it. You don't want to be pointing your machine to rogue DNS servers on the say-so of some email you received from a third party. Therein lies phishing. -Jeff Mings Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Slingbox @ CompUSA
Interesting product. Unfortunately my wee little uplink from verizon just wouldn't cut it. This is something I am very much interested in finding out. 768kbs may not be as bad as we think (depends on the compression I suppose). There is another option called ORB, which requires a PC at the transmitting end. The Sling is a standalone box. My uplink is consideraly slower than 768kbps. Try 160kbps-ish. I've often wondered why PBS dumps a ton of money into HDTV instead of streaming their content online. Streaming video is for the general public, whereas HDTV is for those who can afford one. When the president of CPB used to be a co-chainperson of the you-know-what party, which way do you think the funding is going to go. You can blame in on the reps if you want, but the HDTV push happened under the dems in the late 90s. What!? you say, The democratic senators are against us [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yah, its a shocker. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] on-topic, finally!
So, not so hypothetically speaking, if you were going to customize a Linux kernel-based OS distro to run on, oh, let's say a 512MB or 1GB USB device of some sort, and wanted to add onto that the libraries and drivers you'd need to run a user-friendly desktop and a basic suite of office applications, how would you go about it? My first instinct would be knoppix. For example: http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/ I've contemplated this often while lugging a heavier-than-average laptop during pedestrian commutes. Not nearly on my mind as often now that I don't commute (and usb keys are finally priced right for it). Andrew Maddox, madsox squiggle radix point net I will not do anything bad ever again Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] OT: Looking for networks-off topic
I've had more practice in analytical and exploratory programming in the last two years than I ever wanted. And then there's always a certain amount of fear that you're going to program something wrong and burn it up. You get over this when you finally do. Get over it? I hope not. That's the best part about programming! It's nice to be able to ask the question online in hopes of making your life easier, but if you haven't figured out the answer before someone else answers it for you, you're not working in an exciting field :) Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Job Posting Seeking Cisco Installer
Twenty-five bucks an hour? For an honestly skilled network installation gig Well then dude, you better stay in DC, 'cause I'm thinking the culture shock is gonna kill you. You haven't heard the phrase the price of paradise yet? I don't know. I don't do work for Hawaii based clients myself, but I have a hard time believing that a full-time job in Hawaii doing network engineering wouldn't pay more than $50k a year. Contract work should definitely go for more than that. I live in Hawaii and I bill out at more than double that myself. I've got no shortage of work (I've actually been turning away contracts recently). -Charles Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] swap ram?
So I upgraded some ram in one of my laptops and now have an extra 256M notebook 200-pin 333mhz ram module. Btw, I have an unused Epson stylus color 777 printer here. When I bought it at Fry's it cost little more than the ink cartridges (which is around $20-$30 I think). Its currently out of ink but I believe it still works. If anyone wants either of these, please email me. Both items are free for the taking (A $50 Value!). I'm located in Waipio Gentry. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] goofy RAM question
Under the 'x86' architecture (32 bit), the system can only address 4 GB of allocated memory. Traditionally yes, but not always: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAE But it does look like 4GB minus about 680M. The machine is probably not capable of PAE or the kernel being used is not built for PAE support. jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Everybody Loves (Eric) Raymond
http://spinster.org/photos/als/20.html more so than most. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
[LUAU] swap ram?
So I upgraded some ram in one of my laptops and now have an extra 256M notebook 200-pin 333mhz ram module. Of course the only other machine I have that might have been able to use it in takes 144-pin notebook 100mhz ram modules. Anyone wanna trade? If I get no takers I'll probably just give it to whoever wants to pick it up (its only worth about $30 new). Btw, I have an unused Epson stylus color 777 printer here. When I bought it at Fry's it cost little more than the ink cartridges (which is around $20-$30 I think). Its currently out of ink but I believe it still works. Does HOSEF take printers? If not, whoever wants it and will pick it up can have it. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Intel Doubles Down on Linux
Any computer architecture that needs anti-virus software has failed. I'm sorry. I have to take issue with this. The need for anti-virus software doesnt prove anything other than popularity. There is no existing security technology that can prevent virii. Abstinance is the only solution. [... stuff about rainbow books ...] users. Many existing systems (e.g., PCs running DOS) lack even these basic protections required at C1, thus allowing a virus executed by any user to infect any part of the system, Yes, and this makes writing and propogating a virus a lot easier. However, we've not had these systems in wide deployment for the last 5 years. Mac OS X, any windows on NT and everything running a unix kernel has basic C1-level security. The NT system even passed a C2 cert (at least in a very limited configuration. The goal was to get the checkbox checked, not to provide a real C2 system). integrity. WinXP goes further, and by default, logs itself in as something a lot like 'root' on a *nix box, putting the entire system at risk. WinXP need not auto-login as any user. On my systems it comes up to a login screen and lets you choose which user to log in as. Not that this has any bearing on virus propagation. Commencing with the B2 level of trust, I expect that there will be no fundamental design flaws that allow the security mechanisms in the TCB to be circumvented. You do not have to have any design flaws to allow a virus to propagate. But perhaps I should remind you that the A1 security level is the ONLY level that provides any real assurances of security. And even then, its still software. Any unforseen software defect (ie. coding bug, but not necessarily architectural flaw in the trusted base) will allow some level of compromise. The fundamental problem in computer security is that software can not be automatically verified. Software is way too complicated for us mere mortals to get right, and thanks to Church and Turing and other people who are smarter than people should be, we know that most of the analysis problems involving computer programs are unsolvable. As a result of this, the best design practices are focussed around mitigating the risk of software flaws. At increasing orange-book levels, you get better partitioning between the system components, but the fundamental issue of software vulnerability can never be entirely removed. At any rate, most of this is moot when discussing virii. Virii can use vulnerable software to propagate, but the needn't. They can do plenty of damage without violating privilege. I run a program or open a document with a program, the virus attaches itself to some other files that I have access to, and at some point those files get shared with other people. In fact, this is how most virii work. Worms are more active and often use vulnerabilities to propagate, but virii primarily just use the current user's privilege. It helps that a lot of users are running with full system privilege (root, administrator, whatever), but it would still work if most people did not. You could argue that a virus capable of infecting each and every user in the system (one that was present in the text editor, for instance) would be reasonably effective at accomplishing some missions (e.g., denial of service). Thus, the value of an intact TCB in the face of an otherwise completely infected user population is moot. Yes :) I would argue just that :) it is here, if anywhere that we may find some solace in operating systems such as OSX, Linux and BSD. Not because of their (lack of) mainstream popularity, but more because they are not chock-full of a large number of legacy security issues, all of which not only leave the barn door open to potential infection, but also remain unfixed, because fixing them would wreck havoc in the installed base. OSX and Linux arent chock full of legacy security issues, they're chock full of brand new ones :) BSD on the other hand has the legacy kind :) Seriously, they all have bugs, some in varying quantities. However, of all the vendors around these days I would have to say that Microsoft is putting a lot more money and focus on computer security. This wasn't the case as recently as four years ago, but they've put some serious resources into it. jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/ [ps: we didnt even discuss the usability of MAC-based systems.]
Re: [LUAU] Intel Doubles Down on Linux
What makes you think its not Intel-dominated now?Show of hands, please, how many in the audience here run linux on anything other than an x86 processor? I have a sparc running BSD and solaris (and more off topic, a parisc running hpux), does this count? No, they're not in wide use.. the x86 boxen plus vmware is so much more useful :) Oh phleze X must die. Hear! Hear! Seriously, if linux had managed to carry gnome onto raw hardware, rather than surfing the packets through an X server, then they might have had something. Better, if *nix had aligned around something like NeWS, then Windows would seem completely creaky in the GUI department. Plan 9 got it right. Provide a generalized system for resource access (including devices), allow it to be accessed over the network, and provide a device for performing graphics operations. Then its just a matter of writing a simple graphics interface and it can magically be used remotely (and even recursively) where ever you want it. All at miniscule sizes (by comparison). Here's to good design. Any computer architecture that needs anti-virus software has failed. I'm sorry. I have to take issue with this. The need for anti-virus software doesnt prove anything other than popularity. There is no existing security technology that can prevent virii. Abstinance is the only solution. And all of this in the service of writing documents, (typically in some proprietary binary format (Word)), reading email, and surfing the web. Jim, please don't stifle Bill's ability to innovate. ;-) jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Intel Doubles Down on Linux
Intel's move should (and I hope will) put a lot of pressure on the Taiwanese peripheral makers, which, until now, have been selfishly ignoring the Linux market by failing to provide even the most rudimentary drivers for Linux, not to mention participating in the open-source (or even open-spec) movement (and got away from it). This is a very exciting development, and I hope AMD will respond soon. Wayne This could be win for linux, but could turn out to be a lose for other platforms. Many vendors are inclined to provide binary-only drivers. This would definitely aid the vast linux community but might make it harder for other operating system communities to convince vendors to provide the information needed to write drivers for their platform. Lets hope the pressure encourages the release of technical information that enables open source driver development. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Do you have a meeting this saturday?
We will also be returning to the good ole days of having an open, free-form workshop to fix, chat, troubleshoot, and geek out. This will be from 10-12 the next three weeks at McKinley. If *anyone* has a specific technical top to start the session, step up. Who usually shows up to these things and what kinda stuff usually goes on? I'm considering coming down. I dont have any specific technical topics, but I guess I'll bring my laptop. There's lots of good toys on it, like VMS, 6th and 7th edition unix, plan9, etc.. :) --scott Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Do you have a meeting this saturday?
Wait, you've got VMS source code, or an Itanium laptop? Nope, running in SIMH within XP (runs equally well on many other platforms). You can get a free Hobbyist license for VMS from HP these days. You can also run a lot of other historically significant systems: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html V6/V7 unix can be had here: http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub/projects/ Ancient_Unix/PDP-11/Trees/ Or any of the many TUHS archives: http://www.tuhs.org/archive_sites.html Thanks muchly to Caldera, despite their many other shortcomings. And who can forget the great Lions' commentary, also freely available these days: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/ Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
[LUAU] solaris day
Today solaris is open-source. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/ Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] solaris day
Open, but not Free. Free for my eyes, which is cheaper than it was yesterday. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] solaris day
The CDDL is yet another reason why the OSI (started by Perens, Raymond and others to re-brand Free Software) was a really bad (and dangerous) idea. I complained to Larry Rosen (who approved CDDL as an OSI-compliant license) and others about this back at TPOSSCON. I'm concerned about Free as in speech. Its not clear that the CDDL permits software Freedom. *shrug* They come in all flavors. I don't mean to start a licensing war, but all licenses have some restrictions or other (and hence not strictly free). The only truely free IP is in the public domain. I have my favorite and licenses I care less about. I'm glad to see sun grant access to their sources, no matter how you want to categorize their license. Would I want to use it in a product? Probably not, but it will be useful the next time I need to know EXACTLY how something works. Jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] interesting article on Mark Spencer/Digium
HOSEF has its monthy Board Meeting on the 2nd Saturday of each month. The next one is tomorrow, Saturday, 11 June from Noon 'till whenever at the Pizza Hut in Stadium Mall located at 4510 Salt Lake Blvd, Honolulu 96818. If you don't know how to get there, look up this address on your favorite mapping site (www.mapquest.com works for me). The phone number at that Pizza Hut is 486-2681. The meetings are open to the public and we can put just about anything HOSEF related on the agenda for discussion and action. Formation of such a technical group in conjunction with or cooperating with HOSEF would be appropriate, I think. I'm heading out to the meeting today. I've been meaning to meet the hosef people but kept putting it off. As far as forming a technical group, I'm the wrong person, trust me :) See you all there. Ron Fox Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] interesting article on Mark Spencer/Digium
showing. :-)Its nearly trivial to setup. Does LUAU/HOSEF have technical get-togethers with speakers? (Or is that CyberPizza? (And what about those of us trying to cut down on carbs?)) I brought my new linux-powered car PC to the Talk-Shop on Monday, but the only other people who showed up were Scott and Ted, so we talked about the DOE. This is the kind of get together I've been looking around for. If there is one (or if someone wants to start one), let me know. I havent had an opportunity to attend any of the hosef meetings yet (tis a shame, I think they do a great service to the community), but the few cyberpizzas I've gone to so far have been very high level and non-technical. I'd definitely enjoy talking with people who've played around with iax and asterisk (I've done a little here, but not a lot) and who like to talk about coding, algorithms, and the gory details of the latest technologies. Some media think PowerPC is proprietary as well. Its less proprietary than Intel's processors. Feel free to counter with the but you can't run MacOS on open hardware argument. S'ok, they're all intel IA32 by this time next year. Jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: VoIP (was: Re: [LUAU] interesting article on Mark Spencer/Digium)
I've been using Matt's service for a few weeks now and so far it works great. I'm using Residential Road Runner and I haven't needed to prioritize my traffic. However, if I'm downloading or uploading while on a call we start to breakup. Which is exactly what Matt had told me would happen. Do you do any traffic shaping/rate limiting? I've found that somewhere between my modem and the head end there's a bunch of buffering that starts filling up when I push more bits upstream that the line can handle. (I've noticed this on a DSL/PPPoE box with SBC as well as a normal DSL bridged ethernet box that verizon gives out. I bet the PPPoE boxes oceanic uses do this too). Its too bad they dont just drop the bits on the floor, because then tcp would react by limiting the amount of data it sent more quickly. Instead you get lot of latency on your uplink, which is sure to muck up your voice traffic. If I rate limit my uplink to just under the up limit my provider gives me, I hardly see any additional latency during a large xfer. As for the phones, I've tried just about every linux based soft phone I can find and the only one I could get working reliably was the Debian unstable version of kphone. Its very simple to use and it just works. The only problem is that I haven't figured out how get an incoming call to ring on my speakers and not the USB headset. I liked the iax phone for win32 a bit. Aren't their ports to other platforms like linux? Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Re: [AWN] Wi-Fi traffic jam in Hawaii
p.s. you are probably aware that the connection between sitting on the toilet and WiFi use is quite strong. Nearly everyone has done both at the same time at some point. uhh Nearly everyone? I think this falls under there are better things to do. Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] watchdog to make sure a log file is growing
(I should write this in lisp just to show off how short programs are in lisp, but I doubt there are three other lisp hackers in the state.) I'm sure you could find at least three. I goof around with lisp from time to time. This program would also be quite short in python (and probably as short but less readable in perl). jim Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] Relative Newbie Questions
Q1: What utility can I use to find out where the bulk of my files are? I'm running out of room and have created some bigger ext2 partitions and want to map the larger stuff over there. I tend to do du -sk *|sort -rn|more in successively deeper directories to track down where the space has gone. Keep in mind that * doesn't catch dot directories. If you have reason to believe a lot of space might be taken up in a dot directory (rarely the case) then du -sk * .?* would be more appropriate. Q2: Is there an easy way just to move my stuff to the new partition, so that the system will appear the same. I think I can do this manually with editing of /etc/fstab, but... - format and mount your new partition/drive. - Find a directory that contains a lot of storage that you want to move to another drive (ie. /usr/local). - copy the data to a new drive (ie. cp -ax /usr/local /mnt/newdrive). For best effect this should be done while nobody will be adding new files to the directory (ie. single user). - Remove the old files in the directory. You can defer this step till later if you want to be sure that everything is working. - unmount the new drive. - add the new drive to /etc/fstab, mount it, and check out that everything is in order. Jacques L. Yerby [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
Re: [LUAU] a different open source issue, from Maui
There seem to be a lot more than that one page: http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000501.html If you follow the links in any of these pages, you can find more and more. Some of this may not be proven in a legal sense, but I think its unlikely that there's no code shared between the two. I suppose some of these may be libraries automatically added by compilers for all I know, but some of it looks pretty bad. I also looked over this. The majority of the evidence on this page is tied to same string type evidence. I dont think thats an invalid approach but they never bothered to track down the source of the common strings. Are the common strings due to the pearpc source code or can they be attributed to a common library or artifacts of compilation? There are one or two pieces of information that seem more damning; the best one I've seen is in relations to openvpn and not pearpc itself. If these people are serious why dont they do a proper analysis. Get the pear pc source code. Identify functions in cherryos with IDA pro. Determine if their function is similar to one in pearpc and then compare the disassembly with the source code. Identify common strings between the source code and the cherryos binary. Compile the pearpc binary with the same compiler as was used to build cherryos and compare functions from the pearpc binary that are from the source code (and not third party libraries) against the cherryos binary, using the object file relocations as wildcards. There are tools out there to help. There are people out there who know how to properly analyze binaries. Also statements along the lines of 'setup your voip phones to dial the developers number repeatedly' don't help their cause. If it turns out that cherryos is blatantly stealing, they will get theirs in court. -Eric Hattemer Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] a different open source issue, from Maui
The latest in this sad saga: http://www.ht-technology.com/cherryos-pearpc/cherryos-pearpc.html libhfs -- Is this cpt? http://libhfs.sourceforge.net/license.php Not a gnu license. cygwin -- you can link against cygwin's .a/.dll in commercial products http://cygwin.com/licensing.html St10bad_typeid -- Is this even from pearpc itself? Google comes up with several non ppc binaries that have this string in it. Possibly a compiler-generated string? Maybe a common library? oops this code is wrong -- cant find other references to this maybe he has something with this one? I dont know. I'm not terribly convinced so far. That was just a cursory look. The person posting this seems a bit overly eager (pointing out libhfs and cygwin) and does not seem to have much experience analyzing binaries or comparing them to source code. I'm not saying that he is wrong, but I dont find his current argument or his methods very convincing. If he (and others) are wrong, I would hate to be the one facing an overly rabid open source mob. Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Might I Be Hacked II
folder. On a subsequent reboot of the system, the system is not coming up. During the boot-up process, after the default system font is set, the prompt for Interactive bootup comes up and then the screen blanks out as if going into X windows. The X changes into an hourglass and keeps turning and turning. It never seems to come up. I can't ping the system, so I guess it isn't going into that part of the startup. Try rebooting the system with command line option 3 to go into runlevel 3 (which doesn't start X during startup), or command line option -s (which hardly starts anything at all). To do so, simply add the option to the end of the boot line. To do this in grub scroll to the menu option you want to boot, type e to get the editor, scroll to the line you want, type e to edit, then make your changes. If I got that wrong for some reason, the notes at the bottom of the menu will have details. And the kicker-I have been working on this site and JUST got the last bit of it up this morning and intended to back up everything now that it is completed...ARGH! As Vince pointed out, probably the first thing you should do is backup your data before you poke around more. Good luck. --John Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Might I Be Hacked?
doesn't work(not that I suspected it would). My concern is that I might have gotten hacked somehow. I know absolutely zero about how to go about seeing if my system has been compromised. I know this is a totally newbie question, but would appreciate a couple pointers. Thanks in advance! You might have, or maybe not. You really need to investigate a bit further. Start by taking a look at what the box is doing. What processes are running. Are there things running that aren't normally running? Which process(es) are using up the most resources? Are any of these programs ones that were recently updated (does your updating tool keep a log)? Take a look at the network traffic into and out of the box. Is anything going on that shouldn't be going on? Obviously it helps a lot here to know what a healthy system looks like in order to see what is unusual. Google might be helpful to track down things you don't understand. You can also boucne questions to the list, or to me. Start out with the following: - ps - top - tcpdump or ethereal (be careful to filter out your own packets if you are connecting to the machine remotely or you will generate a loop) it might be easier to stop a number of your normal services first. For example, telinit 3 to get out of X, and then go into /etc/init.d and stop your normal services. This would help you eliminate them. --John Johnson Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] programming question, buffer problem?
Other than the 1/2 the available memory thing (which may be the culprit), neither am I. Check out objdump on the binary to see the sizes and loading locations of your various segments. You should be able to tell if your program is over the 2G limit. Some systems will allow you to use more than 2G of VM. (2G comes from some systems splitting the VM space in half for kernel vs. user addresses so that both can be accessible at the same time while running in the kernel. In theory you can allow userland to use the full 4G space. Some systems slice off a smaller chunk of VM for the kernel). If the OS platform is not as important as the application, you may investigate running the program on another operating system (or tuning the existing one if there are options. I'm not too familiar with the ability to adjust linux in this reguard). Or perhaps even using a cpu with a larger VM space (64-bit systems). We kind of lean away from dynamic allocation for this program. I'm trying to tweak around with sbrk() a bit to see if I can fudge things a bit. I think you should distinguish dynamically allocating memory during the running of the program from dynamically allocating memory at initialization. The latter is has no performance impact on your program. When the program is loaded. Nothing gets executed. Doesn't even hit _start in crt0? What does GDB say when it loads? -Charles Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] programming question, buffer problem?
I have a program that uses quite a bit of buffer space. There are four major chunks of buffer space, three declared something like short mybuffer[32][4M], and the fourth int myotherbuffer[4][4M]. Total buffer usage comes in at somewhere under 800MB. by 4M do you mean 4*1024*1024? Now, I've seen this happen when you declare to large a chunk of data in a function, where I think basically the stack barfs and you get a segmentation fault because the data didn't fit. But these buffers are declared in a header file, and I *thought* that meant they'd be loaded to the heap, and not have the same problem. If you declare local variables (non-static) they are allocated on the stack. If you declare global variables they are either in the BSS or data segment (depending on if they are initialized to zeros or other values). There are limitations on the amount of space available on the stack. I'm not familiar with limitations in the bss/data. However, you can avoid them, if they exist, by allocating the data at runtime using malloc or a similar function. In that case the data will be on the heap. Where in the startup does the crash occur? -Charles Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Helping the Schools
This Saturday at CompUSA, HOSEF will be assisting our schools by testing and loading the equipment being donated by the public as part of the Computers for Kids recycling day. With a generator, two tables, and 14 power cables, we will make sure that the equipment powers on. For those of you who have volunteered time at this event, you can appreciate how hectic it can be to select and load stuff. What time? Which CompUSA? Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] fedora question
I need to debug into glibc for some stuff, and I'm having trouble getting things set up. I was wondering if anyone's done this or has suggestions.. Ignore this, I got some help and have it all worked out. Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Re: Installing Mandrake?
last i knew, it didn't work in sp2. did they ever fix that? I don't know, I have been avoiding sp2 so far. Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Re: Installing Mandrake?
The instructions on the Mandrake web site don't seem to cover burning CDs from Nero. Anyone here know what I'm doing wrong? btw, for those running XP who just need to burn ISO's, IsoRecorder is free, and has the simplest interface I've seen: you right click on an .iso file and select burn to CD. http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
Re: [LUAU] Open Source Ghosting
We need to image the machines as needed to preserve their ability to serve the foreign students their windows goodies. If we do a Linux install on the machines, we need to return the lab to its initial state. How about booting linux diskless? Then you dont have to touch the current install at all (other than putting a different boot loader on it). Grub has netboot capabilities, does linux support it? (My bet is yes). Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Open Source Ghosting
of Linuxes, each and every one is bootable, on the same hard disc. The command cp works for me b/c I never use hard linking. But I wonder how ghost or DriveCopy/DriveImage handles hard linking? The linux cp(1) command should preserve your hard links as well if you use the appropriate flags. cp -ax should do the trick for copying a filesystem from a single partition. These flags are not universal to all unixen (gnuism?). Tim N.
[LUAU] networking -- off topic?
This may be slightly off-topic (is there a better place for asking things like this?) -- Is anyone here aware of a reasonably priced broadband solution that has good uplink speeds? The two obvious broadband solutions, verizon dsl and road runner, have quite low uplink caps. Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Intro
never say never. :-) OK, port Linux to an 8051 with 256 BYTES of RAM and (at most) 64k of ROM. :-) Not quite the same thing, but in a similar vein: http://lng.sourceforge.net/ There are of course many other examples of similar systems running on various 8-bit microprocessors. Yeah, all those older images that include SSH support (I don't know if any actually do, though I made some that did) all used OpenSSH and therefore had to include OpenSSL. Cost you a LOT of space... Why not just strip out the pieces of SSL that openssh needs? OpenSSL is a large library, OpenSSH only uses a fraction of it. Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Intro
Yes. But a kernel alone, a system does not make. This is the linux kernel we're talking about... They keep moving more and more userland stuff in there :) Since our main goal was to reduce risk, we try to accomodate Redhat as much as possible. And we also needed Qt support, which pulled in X. Why not pull apart the Qt support libs from the graphical stuff? Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Gentoo
Has anyone had any luck installing Gentoo Linux (http://gentoo.org)? I don't run gentoo, but I found this great web site of gentoo resources: http://funroll-loops.org Enjoy, Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] Does this shock you?
regsvc.exe http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/backdoor.irc.cloner.html lsass.exe http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sasser.b.worm.html csrss.exe http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.dalbug.worm.html smss.exe http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.dalbug.worm.html the URL descriptions dont match these programs. They're standard windows services (registry, security subsystem, win32 subsystem, session manager). If you are still wondering if Linux can replace Windows on the Desktop, I can assure that it can, it has, it does, and in cases like this, it must. I'll be documenting this in a case study, but for now I had to share this horror with someone else. I agree that linux can be an effective desktop in school settings. I'm not sure I buy your argument though that virus infection is a good reason to run linux. From a pragmatic point of view it is true -- viruses tend to target win32, and running something other than win32 will reduce your exposure there. From a technical point of view though, there is no inherent technical advantage here. Linux systems do have flaws as well, and they may well be exploited to your detriment, although most likely not by a virus or worm. If the system is operated properly, most users will be using low-privilege accounts and the entire system wont be at risk. The same holds true for win32. If they run windows xp, 2000 or 2k3 and disallow the average user from logging in as the administrator, the system will be much less vulnerable and more manageable. --scott Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] intro
didn't you wrote that format string attack or buffer overflow paper? I I wrote a whitepaper on the technique (though I did not invent the technique). mixed up with someone else, I think you were the guy at GST or HOL a while back, I was helping a friend starting up mahalo.net before they Yes, I was a system administrator at Hawaii Online (aloha.net) in 1995, prior to the GST purchase. wars on hawaii.inet-providers, btw, do you know what happen to Dr. M J, did he die or some thing? I am getting flashback... stop now! Dr. M J? I'm not sure who that is. Tim N.
Re: [LUAU] intro
why your name stick out like a sore thumb, then it hits me.. ahh.. you are that dude! complier and security.unix. you made me dig through my bugtraq emails also. Yes, I do computer security work and used to usenet a lot. Which compiler stuff? I've done a little compiler type work but not a lot. Tim N.
