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_quasimodo

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If VR really gets traction it's probably just a matter of time until Facebook releases a Second-Life-like MMO VR platform tied in with their social network. There will always be good MMORPGs that are subscription fee based, but the majority of VR experiences will be ad-supported with paid premium options.

  You were excited in 1996-Feb-29 when 5.002 was released?
Not everyone on hn is in their early twenties, i suppose.
GNU APL 1.3 12 years ago

I think it's part of their philosophy. They don't want to encourage people to use a non-free operating system.

edit: also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work

As far as i understood there weren't any "fake" pods, the third-party pods where properly labeled. Also, some might consider it a negative impact on the user experience if they cannot use third-party pods any longer, or if the original pods get twice as expensive.

I think he meant there is nothing good about complexity and bringing down the whole system on a crash. For the Linux kernel this is probably an unfortunate necessity, for an init system it is not.

Torus-Earth 12 years ago

"perhaps due to an advanced civilization with more aesthetics than sanity" :)

Since his comments seem to be broken (or he just does not accept any) i will comment here:

I believe it is very well possible (using the UEFI IP stack) to write a tiny and portable BIOS malware that loads hardware and OS probing code, filesystem drivers and OS specific payload from a c&c server.

Also i suspect that the checksums might be breakable, but i don't know which algorithms are used to calculate them.

My idea was that, if you have an object file open with write permissions, you can assume that it has been created/modified anyway, and people will expect the checksum to change.

Of course this does not work if the checksum is calculated before the file is closed by your backdoored compiler.

I dont think it is as hard as it it sounds.

Consider, for example, hooking all fclose function calls and testing on every call whether

* you have write permission on the file,

* its an object file,

* its in an architecture your exploit supports,

* it uses the fclose function (or the corresponding system call, if it is linked statically)

* and your exploit is not already present.

If those conditions are true, hook the fclose calls in the object file before actually closing it, otherwise just close it normally.

From the Discussion section:

  Removing all but the mov instruction from future iterations of
  the x86 architecture would have many advantages: the instruc-
  tion format would be greatly simplified, the expensive decode unit
  would become much cheaper, and silicon currently used for com-
  plex functional units could be repurposed as even more cache. As
  long as someone else implements the compiler.
:D
Bugger 13 years ago

Since i'm not using Flash anymore i wasn't able to watch the videos, but from the descriptions in the article i believe they would have added a lot to the text.

Appearently BBCs 'iPlayer' does support https streaming (for their iOS App), but only if you have an Apple signed client certificate.

:(