doug11235

My guess is that 100% robustness wasn't a big concern. Getting 80% of a lot is good enough.

I wouldn't call a RAM scraper an exploit. ASLR isn't an effective protection against a program that reads from memory. Driver signing in newer versions of Windows is a more appropriate protection but will still fall short of stopping a motivated attacker.

You probably don't realize how much crossover there is between the military and intel. For example, the CSS in NSA/CSS - http://www.nsa.gov/about/central_security_service/

But here are a couple of things to consider.

1. If I make more than approx $106k a year, I cap out on paying FICA. 2. As far as I know, everything I buy at places like Amazon costs the same regardless of where I live (with in the US). 3. Many financial incentives are provided as a percentage instead of a raw dollar amount e.g. 401k's are usually matched by percentage, raises are often a percentage increase.

Are you serious? National security != fighting terrorists. From Wikipedia for the lazy.

> National security is the requirement to maintain the survival of the state through the use of economic power, diplomacy, power projection and political power. The concept developed mostly in the United States after World War II. Initially focusing on military might, it now encompasses a broad range of facets, all of which impinge on the non military or economic security of the nation and the values espoused by the national society. Accordingly, in order to possess national security, a nation needs to possess economic security, energy security, environmental security, etc. Security threats involve not only conventional foes such as other nation-states but also non-state actors such as violent non-state actors, narcotic cartels, multinational corporations and non-governmental organisations; some authorities include natural disasters and events causing severe environmental damage in this category.

Government contractors are not considered government employees.

> So your arbitrary code is running as admin - what more could a security flaw in the bundled installshield get you?

In the days of Antivirus products and executable whitelists, the "elevation of privilege" may be getting arbitrary execution as any user. Of course trustedinstaller.exe or whatever that has a valid Microsoft signature can run, why shouldn't it? No need to ship that file back home either for further analysis (as AV products like to do with unknown files), its a standard OS thing. Therefore my rootkit isn't burned either.

Yes, you are right - if dropbox doesn't have it then it won't work. But you imply that it most likely won't have it. And what myself and perhaps others are saying is it most likely will.

The DLL in the blog post is listed as 128KB, out of interest I looked at it separately and I see a .text section with a size of 0x132df bytes. That section will be mapped as executable and every byte in it is potentially useful. Intel doesn't require instruction alignment, has variable length instructions, and several different opcodes map to the same instruction in some cases. The probability of not finding the instruction sequences you need to successfully land an exploit is almost nil.

Additionally, this is loaded in a browser. The hardest part about browser exploits these days is defeating ASLR. Finding DLLs that aren't compatible with ASLR that can be loaded has been one of the main methods of defeating it.

Successful exploitation often requires chaining several vulnerabilities together to get what a single vulnerability would even a few years ago. Anything that can easily be leveraged in that chain is a problem and needs to be addressed.

Losing ASLR on a single DLL does provide that very specific known-address code.

I don't see where that says they spy on each other. I only see bits that mention they spy on other countries of common interest e.g. China and share that data.

I didn't realize extensions were largely javascript. Thanks for the pointers.

I read that article as explaining why a web application can't do crypto with javascript. As someone that knows almost nothing about browser extensions, can you elaborate on why one isn't a good idea for chrome?

Air temperature and pressure are much different at the higher altitude.

> If the government wants to recruit more hackers, they need to sweeten the offer; but how can they do so with (a) government-controlled funding and salaries, (b) strict background checks that are required for sensitive work, such as national security and (c) a mandate that many people they're trying to recruit simply don't support?

They can do it with how they are going about it. Lets look at what is going on here.

The US government is funding education that is tailored to focus on their topics of interest. These students then spend 2 years working for the government getting more education and experience.

At this point, (a) is remedied by leaving government positions for better paid contractor ones (I think the US government / contractor relationship is greatly misunderstood in general) or feeding off into private industry. If you read through several bios of people in the industry you find ties to DoD and intel agencies all over the place (some are as contractors). But the idea here is (in my opinion), the government isn't concerned about who is on their payroll, but rather they have more capable professionals trained for this type of work in the country. People whose skills they can pay for one way or another.

I think a lot of people misunderstand the requirements of (b). And those that can't qualify for top clearances can be fed as "infosec engineers" into other agencies where a secret clearance is all that is required (FAA for example). Again, just having more trained people spread about is the goal here.

Additionally, contractors can conduct work in non-classified environments with non-cleared personnel in some situations and/or you have more distant relationships. Think vulnerability selling / purchasing.

As for (c), it is often hard to tie someone's direct work to some mandate. Where do you draw the line? Not working in a specific group? Specific agency? Contractor? Supplier? At some level, Microsoft is supporting the work NSA does. Different people draw different lines at different places.

How do you know you weren't exploited? You say that you aren't a security expert.

I can't remember schedule exactly, but I feel like the Adonis Jot was on time.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/531383637/jot-capacitive...

I've backed one other project. It is severely late.

I've kicked into 2 projects and one has delivered so far. I expect the other will eventually.

Jot stylus - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/531383637/jot-capacitive...

They are still making progress albeit slowly. Openvizla - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bushing/openvizsla-open-...

You bring up education a few times. Given the length of his work history, is it even important at this point? Why are you so interested in it?

I ask because a lot of people claim that education only really matters for your first job. After that you let your experience speak for itself. So I'm interested in hearing you perspective.

> Any C/C++ application built with Visual Studio 2010 won't run on Windows 2000 or XP prior to SP3.

By default you can't but you can adjust the build settings and it works fine.

Which programming language(s) is/are used?

That was written by a kid sitting in jail for computer crimes. NOT the same as Hacker News.

CMake (or perhaps Scons, but I have no experience with that) might be useful for you. Although going through the motions of writing build scripts for you build system might not be something you want to endure.

In any case, I used CMake in one shop I worked in and it was nice to have the build files all managed in one place. We were able to manage builds for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris.

The search function does not work for me. I typed in 'Baltimore' and received zero results. But when I browsed the listings I came upon Beehive Baltimore ( http://desksnear.me/workplaces/32-beehive-baltimore).

"She maxed out on federal loans, borrowing $152,000 over four years, and sought private loans from Sallie Mae to help make up the difference. She also took out two loans from Wells Fargo & Co. for $20,000 each. Each had a $2,000 origination fee. The total amount she borrowed at the time: $250,000."

Am I reading this incorrectly? $250,000 for 4 years? Thats insane.

I think it is important to consider how comfortable a person is with the pay they receive.

That is, if I have to think and worry about necessities then I'm not fully mentally engaged in my work. Being paid enough to live a comfortable life is important.

Conversely, if the difference between 2 jobs is whether or not I can afford something I consider a luxury, then job satisfaction and other non-monetary benefits start to mean something.

Clearly necessities, luxuries, and comfort all being subjective.

And another feature I like about ({ }) macros (anyone know the proper name here?) is you can return values. Clearly more useful in an example a bit more complex but...

#define ADD_ONE(a) ({ a + 1; })

x = ADD_ONE(2);