temac

Weird take to claim "generally intelligent frontier" (whatever rhat means) and restrict availability based on "offensive" cyber security alone (how can this be handled at all compared to fixing software also remain to be seen) all while competitors but more importantly sw maintainers (eg curl) estimate that the capability in finding cybersecurity bugs is similar to what other modern models produce, and this has just significatively risen in the last months for everybody.

Is this an admission that you accept to implement complete garbage?

RT threads can be prempted by higher prio RT, and IIRC some kernel threads run at the highest prio. Plus you can be prempted by SMI, an hypervisor, etc

I dont know if the Python in Excel architecture as changed but last time i saw it, it was insane and unusable for me (data sent to MS servers where a linux container executes python: you need both a subscription and that the data in question not be regulated)

The USA spies all the time on everybody so by your own def they should be not really an ally of anybody.

I'm using OVH and the notion of it "just working" is all relative. It's tolerable, but certainly a bit buggy, and with far less services than aws and co. It is also cheap, but given the limitations I doubt they can increase the prices much...

The linux kernel already works perfectly fine with various base page sizes.

I've been trying to use auditing rules for a usage that seems completely in scope and obvious to prioritize from a security point of view (tracing access to EFS files and/or the keys allowing the access) and my conclusion was that you basically can't, the doc is garbage, the implementation is probably ad-hoc with lots of holes, and MS probably hasn't prioritised the maintenance of this feature since several decades (too busy adding ads in the start menu I guess)

The NT security descriptors are also so complex they are probably a little useless in practice too, because it's too hard to use correctly. On top of that the associated Win32 API is also too hard to use correctly to the point that I found an important bug in the usage model described in MSDN, meaning that the doc writer did not know how the function actually work (in tons of cases you probably don't hit this case, but if you start digging in all internal and external users, who knows what you could find...)

NT was full of good ideas but the execution is often quite poor.

Rust is possible and proves that you don’t need "optimizations" to optimize, but that optimizations are actually possible. Now that's kind of irrelevent for most of the article focusing about constant versus variable time which is not really an "optimization" problem but already an optimization one, but at least putting appart this rust proves that a langage doesn't need to allow nasal daemons to get good perfs. You just apply the technics when you actually know they are correct, not when you speculate the existence of the mythical perfect programmer (where this hypothesis has actually be disproven by studies on the subject)

Probably when writing "hate AI" here the meaning was hate the often useless text chat bot. Google Photo face recognition was there before the new hipe and is probably not designated talked by primarily as "AI" by the general public.

that's one of the (inadequate) methods that the CA/BF permits for verification at issuance

Why inadequate (in the absolute)? This can be automated and let's encrypt allows verification through DNS, moreover this allows verification for wildcard certificates.

Now in this particular case maybe they should have gone through HTTP, and even automated with ACME. But there is nothing inadequate in the absolute in DNS verification. Besides allowing wildcard it also allows verification when you don't control the web server(s), when you don't even have a webserver at all, when the standard ports are occupied for something else, etc.

Something like ebpf.

"It blows my mind that a kernel driver with the level of proliferation in industry could make it out the door apparently without even the most basic level of qualification."

It was my understanding that MS now sign 3rd party kernel mode code, with quality requirements. In which case why did they fail to prevent this?

What is the value of writing all of that, compared to the simpler approach? What will you want next in your quest of purity? Forbidding inline styles in the name of security, maybe?

Disclaimer: I'm not found of web techs...

There was actually "SUA" after "SFU", only removed in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

It's funny how cancelled projects are somehow making people almost more "nostalgic" than projects that actually shipped. One of the reason may be that cancelled projects don't need to be completed, to ship with a reasonably good quality, to have an easy to use interface, to be sustainable for a long enough period of time, etc.

The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity, but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for Apple at the time...

Nt has a dynamic HAL layer to adapt it to platforms. I'm not sure if it was publicly documented, but in any case yes the source code leak don't harm that kind of port, even if you "just" have to write a HAL.

This article inverse the notion of free software and of copyleft...

And chose an architecture really interesting where everybody will recode an half-baked version of the work-in-progress protocol so each desktop-env/window-manager will have different compatibility characteristics; and where tons of actual implementation mix the graphic server with the desktop-env/window-manager so that crashes are extra fun.

I find xrdp quite slow esp compared to a Windows RDP server. This is with the xrdp that comes with Debian 12. Maybe newer versions are faster.

"Portable" i could see a few use cases. No MSIL and only native code, however...

Also, iirc there is no Windows department anymore at MS. Hard to make a great platform in these conditions.

Unfortunately _FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 is documented as making some conforming program fail, and it seems hard to find precise informations on this subject, so i'd be hesitant to use it, as well as _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3

The problem could be abuse of a dominant position. Maybe Mac has now a market share good enough so that MS can pretend they are not in a dominant position in this sector, although if all it takes for an industry to abuse their users is that they all commit it together, each with their still high market share, that would also be an issue for citizens. Esp. in duopoly cases.

It seems completely illegal for MS to do that on EU computers, esp. with Schrems (but probably even completely illegal with just GDPR)

Not surprising when you compare some leaked NT code and some ReactOS code. I'm not even saying they straight copied the source btw, but some consider that disassembling as a reference is fine (and using MS symbols...). Well it might even be legal in some cases (more cases that some licence-aware people commonly imagine), but this is a really risky stance to take. For sure ReactOS is very far from clean-room.

I still find NT very fast when using through RDP, especially compared with any FLOSS solution that exist in the GNU/Linux world. I've not tried proprietary graphic remoting solution for GNU/Linux systems though.

NT has no notion of pipes that send structured objects, but it does have Unix-like pipes.

Maybe you are thinking about Powershell. Powershell is interesting (although in practice I find it not very practical to use), but is quite another subject than NT. It's really also its own segregated world, that relies on dotnet, that is really another platform than NT (although in the first place implemented on top of it, and of course there are some integrations)

Windows ACL are powerful in theory but hard to manage in practice. Look at this fine textual representation for example: "O:AOG:DAD:(A;;RPWPCCDCLCSWRCWDWOGA;;;S-1-0-0)". Hum; at least ugo+-rwx you can remember it, and actually POSIX ACL are also easier to remember than Windows ACL.

Windows NT is not even that much GUI first. There are tons of things that you just can't access through a GUI, let alone a user friendly GUI. Funny example: ACLs on tasks from the Task Scheduler: no GUI access at all. It would probably not even be too hard for MS to plug their standard permission Window so that you can access them with the GUI, but they never did it. So much for the GUI first. Oh, I'm not even sure it has a command line interface to set the ACL there. Maybe just the Win32 API.

I also don't think there is an integrated Windows tool to view for examples the processes in a tree, even less to show Win32 jobs.

HyperV by itself has nothing revolutionary but there are a few interesting ideas that it can bring when integrated in a few Windows component (some security related sadly reserved to Entreprise version, because it is well known that in 2024 making good security architecture unreachable from the general public and SME is a brilliant idea). But compared to Qubes OS for example, it is very little. Oh there are also no Windows GUI to show HyperV states for these integration (as opposed with regular full system VMs)

Now I still think there are a few good ideas in NT, but the low level layers are actually not that far from Unix systems. It's closer than Cutler would admit. (In particular, there are not so much differences between "everything is a "file"" and "everything is an "object"", at least when you look at what Linux as done about "everything is a "file"" -- this is quite ironic because Cutler particularly disliked the "everything is a "file"" idea)

This is ignoring security in depth, weaknesses, and security architecture. When ignoring that, you can not pretend, and MS did pretend, that you had a good enough stance on security. Fixing discovered vulns alone is mandated, it gives you maybe half a point, but the other 9.5 points or at least 5 before you can claim you care about security require more than fixing known vulns or waiting for world scale incident to "respond". You have to prevent issues.