f13.net

Is there any truth to this?

One day someone needs to explain to me why the fuck we aren't still using VMS for serious business.

I thought UAC -=was=- the security feature in Vista. Sorta the same principle as sudo, cept executed in a way to ensure maximum irritation.

That it can't be fixed?

If find it unlikely that anyone credible would make that claim.  It's a program, it can always be changed.  The rest of it?  No clue.

It's still in use in various places. Like airports, i.e. air traffic control systems. But on older existing systems. New ones will run on "contemporary" operating systems, since coding for VMS is something apparently only senile people still do. Like coding in COBOL, too.

That it can't be fixed?

If find it unlikely that anyone credible would make that claim.  It's a program, it can always be changed.  The rest of it?  No clue.

In this paper we demonstrated that the memory protection mechanisms available in the latest
versions of Windows are not always effective when it comes to preventing the exploitation of
memory corruption vulnerabilities in browsers. They raise the bar, but the attacker still has a
good chance of being able to bypass them. Two factors contribute to this problem: the degree to
which the browser state is controlled by the attacker; and the extensible plugin architecture of
modern browsers.

The internal state of the browser is determined to a large extent by the untrusted and potentially
malicious data it processes. The complexity of HTML combined with the power of JavaScript and
VBscript, DOM scripting, .NET, Java and Flash give the attacker an unprecedented degree of
control over the browser process and its memory layout.

The second factor is the open architecture of the browser, which allows third-party extensions
and plugins to execute in the same process and with the same level of privilege. This not only
means that any vulnerability in Flash affects the security of the entire browser, but also that a
missing protection mechanism in a third-party DLL can enable the exploitation of vulnerabilities
in all other browser components.

The authors expect these problems to be addressed in future releases of Windows and browser
plugins shipped by third parties.

One day someone needs to explain to me why the fuck we aren't still using VMS for serious business.

It's -=a=- security feature. It's not the only thing they added. At any rate, even with UAC deactivated, and this bug able to get around memory protection, that still only puts you at around XP levels of danger.

Only one thing irritates me about UAC, it blocks remote connection confirmation dialogues, you have to be physically there.. fun things for our VNC support. Either then that I don't see how its any more annoying then OSX's lock, admin password request, etc.

Edit: Yes i know this is the whole point of UAC, just my only "annoyance" with it ;)

I don't use Vista but I do use Mac OS X so this is only based on what I've read but my understanding is with the default settings with UAC it comes up quite a bit. With OS X it rarely prompts you for your password to do "sudo" type stuff -- i.e. it's mostly when you are installing Apple Software Updates. Regular software installs (which are a trivial click and drag operation) and day to day stuff you never get prompted for your password.

Hey, I make a fuck-load of money coding in COBOL.

No matter how good the rest of it is, you still have a goddamned crack addict with keys to the place.

I know that on my regular installations of Office 2008 for Mac, I'm prompted for a password. Another thing to bear in mind is that Apple isn't as paranoid as Microsoft in this regard, and can aford not to sudo everything in sight.

If the install is so complicated that it has to spread crap all over the place

I am mildly curious as to what the installer does on Mac OS, which I hear is some sort of linux.

If Office 2008 requires an "installer" like the kind used in the Windows world then yeah I'm not surprised it requires a password. Normal Mac apps are self-contained folders and you just drag them to wherever you want install (and you can just throw the folder into the Trash to delete) and as long as you have permissions to that folder it won't ask for a password. If the install is so complicated that it has to spread crap all over the place including "system" folders (which is typically what the Apple Software Updates need to do) then you'll need your password.

This is 1 of my top 5 beefs with windows.  There is simply no "please get the fuck off my pc now" option.  Every program should be registered in add/remove programs and you should have an easy button that bypasses the need for a CD/Original Network Install Folder/Internet Connection/Registry Edit/Go to this website and look at a fucking survey in order to uninstall our product.

Whose installer what? The Mac OS X kernel is a fusion of Mach (or the grandchild of Mach via Next) and FreeBSD. It doesn't have anything to do with the Linux kernel.

Personally I don't use the ODM for anything (I usually only see it used for device drivers in third-party software) and I only use smit for NIM due to NIM being complicated enough that smit makes sense.  If I see someone using smit for basic system stuff, they get the n00b label right quick, but then I'm the kind of guy who uses undocumented commands to do things.  Disdain for the menus is good, my friend.   :grin:

An exception is when I do something new, I might do it through SMIT first and just use the smit.script to make my own script.  Saves time and effort.  But really, all of our custom stuff uses good old config files, even if they are IBMy config files.

If you have ever used YAST (SUSE), you'll have new appreciation for smit.

It was the basic system admin stuff that I had to root around for AIX commands for, which just wasted a ton of time for some obscure method of using a basic command that you'd only ever gather from getting SMIT to tell you what the shit it wanted.

Ah, suddenly I lose interest.  I was talking about the Office 08 installer for Mac, curious as to what underlying mechanisms existed on the Mac... then you said Mach and Next and suddenly I didn't care anymore.  :awesome_for_real: 

This is why there aren't very many AIX specialists.  We're a small, incestuous cabal.  It's a nutty mix of System V and BSD conventions with lots of IBM-proprietary stuff like the ODM and the LVM.  I happen to love the LVM, it's sexy.

I don't think there's an equivalent to the Windows Registry in OSX; though a fair number of things are still controlled by BSD-style text files in /etc, like apache, php, other standard *nix type stuff.  Most of that is hidden from the non-power user, for example the standard /var, /etc, /usr, etc are all hidden in the Finder; you can get to them, but you need to go to the menu and choose 'go to folder...' and type in the path.

Yea, I meant the P series hardware, the X are the Intel ones, right?  Doesn't count.  I can see the Windows people from my cubicle but I don't go over there.  They use VMWare now, keke.  Also I'd have to walk past the AS/400 people and get dangerously close to the Lotus Notes people, so I'm just staying right where I am.  :grin: