01 August 2015, 18:02 | #161 | |
Total Chaos forever!
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01 August 2015, 18:21 | #162 | ||||||
Glastonbridge Software
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There are companies who have a policy not to use version n.0 of any software because they know it will be unstable until n.1. The first release is really the last stage of testing, simply because *you don't know what users are going to try doing until you give it to the users*. There might be bugs that only manifest in very rare circumstances you never thought of, and the only way to discover them is through thousands of user-hours of real world use. Sometimes they are not easily reproducible even when you do know about them. Sometimes they only happen with certain hardware configurations that the user happened to have, or with certain OS-level settings. We get bug reports like, it crashed when a Chinese person tried to save a file with a Chinese filename. Or it crashes only after 12 hours of continuous usage. Or it crashed when there was an R in the month and it was a blue moon and Venus was in conjunction with Mercury. Automatic tests can't find these things, and neither can we programmers. Quote:
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Last edited by Mrs Beanbag; 01 August 2015 at 18:27. |
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01 August 2015, 18:43 | #163 | |||
son of 68k
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Arrange so that you verify all data and input that comes from the outside, no matter how stupid it looks like. You DO know what users are going to do : it's "everything". Never rule out something because it looks insane, as fools are so ingenious. Never copy something to a buffer without checking its size. Always check return values, even if you think the callee will never return an error. If you do things well, if unplanned bad things happen, the user will get a friendly error message - not a random crash and it's a lot easier to debug. And by doing so you will remove many, many problems. Btw. there was a smiley in my comment, don't take me too serious |
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01 August 2015, 19:04 | #164 | |||
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If you really want direct hardware access, you CAN write Kernel modules (on Linux), but you seem not to be interested in that. Quote:
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I'd really like to replace some of our dependencies with home-rolled alternatives but you know, time and budget constraints. But you can blame the programmer all you want, nobody wants a piece of software that they need to use to be able to take out their entire system by accident. However badly programmed it is, for whatever reason, it shouldn't be able to do that. |
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01 August 2015, 19:09 | #165 |
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@kolla:
I`m also interested in how an amiga system could be "hacked" that is connected to the internet. Would you like to explain it a bit more detailed, please? What are the requirements (special or any kinde of tcp/ip stack, with or without acitvated protections like firewalls, browser/ftp client/irc/..., with or without javascript, pipe:, ...)? What can you do if for example a firewall is active? If you are in what kind of access do you have and to what (read/write access to everything or only some stuff, start executables/scripts)? If you are able to format can you bypass a format protection (I`ve it active on my 3.1 system)? I guess there is more but alas I don`t know. Would be very kind if you could tell me. Maybe someone is interested in an experiment of documented live hacking scenario. If I hadn`t a very bad analog inet connection I would give it a go. About 10 years ago we (me and a linux user) tried that over irc but the hacker couldn`t get access because his amiga os knowledge wasn`t good. |
01 August 2015, 20:17 | #166 | |||||
son of 68k
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This is one of the reasons i wish to have an amiga-like machine. I do not fear doing my daily internet usage on a system without memory protection. Because i know what it takes to do a takeover. Quote:
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You do not need to use badly written software, sorry. There should always be an alternative. And if not, well, they do not crash at the random that much (actually on the pc they do, for a mysterious reason). Quote:
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01 August 2015, 20:51 | #167 | ||||
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Or maybe the alternative exists and is very stable... but is just so awful to use that you'd rather just put up with the occasional crash. i remembered an example of an Amiga software that crashed pretty hard in unforeseen circumstances. ProTracker 4 Beta 2 had a Y2K bug. Well i know it was still a Beta version, but it would have taken several years to find this out. Bad programming? I hesitate to rush to judgement. Foolish assumptions, certainly; very easy to make. |
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01 August 2015, 20:53 | #168 |
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I forget the details now but I remember a similar argument on... it might have been the Amiga Format mailing list a long time ago about how the Amiga couldn't be compromised merely by viewing an email (this would have been in Melissa's day). Someone insisted that, yes, actually it could. Needless to say his argument was dismissed out of hand, so eventually he proved the point by posting a message that exploited YAM and APIPE: (I think) to open up a console window containing the word "Owned" when it was viewed!
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01 August 2015, 21:20 | #169 | |||
son of 68k
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Do not feel safe, however. Some day a BSOD might prove you that you weren't as protected as you thought. |
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01 August 2015, 21:22 | #170 | |
son of 68k
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01 August 2015, 21:31 | #171 | |
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Yes, amiga-like, but presumably with much faster CPU and modern amounts of RAM and hard drive?
Or maybe we could argue about what "amiga-like" actually means? Those are always fun. Quote:
BSOD, or "Kernel Panic" as Linux calls it, indicates a bug in the OS, rather than in user software. Of course it's possible and they do happen, and Linus Torvalds turns into Incredible Hulk. I had a fairly reproducible one on a computer last year, something to do with the USB subsystem, the same software ran fine on a different PC though. Too many different hardware combinations... |
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01 August 2015, 23:25 | #172 |
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02 August 2015, 00:35 | #173 |
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If you _really_ believe that, then you can only be happy with the original Amiga - as beautiful as it is - with all its uglyness.
This feels like deja vu as in the Tanenbaum and Torvalds exchanges. I'll do my best not to give any more replies in this thread. |
02 August 2015, 03:37 | #174 | |
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I don't know about you guys, but what I want from a modern Amiga-like system is not something which must be used in an RF shielded cage with no internet connection. Sometimes, solving the problem is not the solution, but some problems can't be solved like a Gordian knot either. |
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02 August 2015, 11:01 | #175 | |
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you know what, i have been having a think, and i believe it is possible to give Maynaf what he wants without putting anybody else at risk.
we shouldn't have a checkbox somewhere to turn off memory protection, in case anyone is tempted to click it, because "give the user all the privileges" sounds like quite an appealing option. But if it could be done with, for instance, some modification to a startup sequence, the elite user will be able to do it, but the average user won't. I have in mind a kind of multi-layered operating system, where the bottom layer is very small, but not like a microkernel, more like an extensible kernel, so you "build up" an effectively monolithic kernel by stacking the layers on top of each other during the boot process. I might investigate Raspberry Pi actually, maybe i could write this... Quote:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 Last edited by Mrs Beanbag; 02 August 2015 at 11:12. |
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02 August 2015, 11:24 | #176 | ||||||||
son of 68k
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Of course with more horsepower inside. Quote:
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Could as well be a special version of the kernel which i don't give to cowards and ignorants Quote:
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02 August 2015, 11:42 | #177 |
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There is μCLinux for that, no memory protection, enjoy.
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02 August 2015, 11:54 | #178 |
son of 68k
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02 August 2015, 13:41 | #179 | ||||
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Allow me to give a specific example... if you have, for instance, some table to look up some strings. If it is only a few strings, you can just scan through the list in a linear way and it won't be too slow. But if you have thousands, tens of thousands of strings... because there is more memory, and more hard disk space, and bigger files that people are creating. The faster CPU can only compensate so much, but it is worth implementing instead some kind of binary search tree - and maybe it would be better if you could make sure it was well-balanced (red black tree, for instance). Or maybe you choose instead some kind of hash map. This makes the code better performing with large sets of data, but it also means more code, and more complex code, which is more difficult to ensure there are no bugs. Especially in tree structures with nodes on the heap. Sometimes you just want to do something that an old Amiga can't realistically do. Lately i've been implementing boolean operations on 3 dimensional solids. Getting this to run accurately enough in reasonable time involves data structure acrobatics, there are so many different concepts involved. I even had to hand-roll a bignum class. It seems pretty stable now, but i can't be entirely sure some weird combination of shapes won't crash it. It'll get even more complex when i optimise it. Quote:
The scariest crash i've ever made my Amiga do, by the way (while developing in asm), it caused a Guru, and when it reset it came up "Insert volume DH0 in any drive"! And it wouldn't go away on reset, i had to switch off at the mains! I was having kittens at this point, but thankfully no permanent damage was done... but i had to power off for some time, amazingly the fault even survived the first power cycle. Quote:
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I think the point is, that no-one would market it for general home consumer use, like the Amiga was back in its own day. |
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02 August 2015, 14:08 | #180 | |
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What matters is that you are the devil's advocate because you practice proselytism. I am sure that your light switches are still not powered by an MMU and therefore without memory protection. |
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