worst summer ever
this was certainly the worst summer of my life, so bad i'm not even going to dig into the personal bits.
but it was also a bad summer for technology. lj-cut for the rants
apple fails in my eyes - to reduce pricing on their macpro's to anything reasonable whatsoever. and leopard will be the most gratuitous way for apple to make $129 per upgrade.
intel lost as well. they have the most powerful low-power chip with no vt-d features and barely any (even pressler) bioses support vt-x even.
meanwhile amd is going to actually do cool things with virtualization ala xen wizardry. but amd-v didn't make it out this summer entirely (no iommu or npt support yet) and all of their chip lines are twice as expensive as intel, especially bang for buck.
that's ok... my only computer is a one year old samsung i730 that i'm still very happy with. apple missed the mark with leopard... and microsoft is failing on the vista front as well. i think i'll stick with windows mobile 5 for quite some time.
i am hoping for some microsoft worms via yesterday's black patch tuesday.
camino is probably the best thing to happen to browsers and software this year (except hdm). when i'm not on somebody's macbook pro, i do seem to get along fine with my 3 web broswers under WM5... Opera 8.60 for Windows Mobile (which i'm using right now), minimo 0.016, and of course, IE.
i found this great wm5 app called dynamo, which is like mac os x expose for windows mobile. it's neat to have ie, minimo, opera, and newsbreak (wm5 rss reader) all visible back and forth and all-together. using toonel, i've managed to solve a lot of wm5 performance problems... and the new flash runs so wicked fast, it's cool to have sbemail available from everywhere. there are a few other tweaks i'm looking at implementing... with chip acceleration and memmaid. i finally got proxying in almost any fashion i want with wm5 (activesync features, HTTPSnoopProxy.class, toonel, webscarab, for wifi, bt, et al).
franklin wireless released a usb evdo modem, which is going to be great for the umpc market (another reason for me to go umpc). kinda bulky and low bandwidth compared to the new socket go wifi 300 802.11g sdio cards that just ccame out (a nice replacement and good timing since i lost my socket sdio card to theft recently).
webappsec has blown up, but nothing else has, and that's nothing new anyways. this is my opinion: but blackhat/defcon were a serious disappointment. johnnycsh and dmaynor rocked their presentation... but everyone else could have done a lot better. shame on apple for what they did to johnny cache and maynor, too. there is too much repeat material in security presentations these days.
there is little to look forward to in the future this year, though. apple clearly has nothing going on... nothing major until macworld 2007 at least. microsoft has little to celebrate early about, except sales of vista - which isn't anything that special and becoming less and less interesting by the day. unix and linux are practically dead to innovation at this point (compared to its overly impressive past). i did notice an upcoming book on bsd rootkits that seems interesting.
intel sold off xscale... so no new embedded shit. in fact, i may never see an upgrade to the pdaphone in my hands... monahans was supposed to double the speed of these devices when intel released it two months ago.... only they didn't release monahans and sold it all off to never see the light of day. maybe they and sony need to sell more pentiums and cheap lcds along with xp tablet edition until microsoft figures out what they are going to do without any chips to run the next version of windows mobile. palm, palmsource, etc is now a dying failure... treo can't even save them. blackberry got knocked back a little by fx's blackhat talk (note the reused content which makes headline news only now)... but rim is always going to suck and they'll always be back for more because people keep buying their crap for outrageous dollars.
so, barring the Wii and a few AMD prayers... there is no technology to look forward to unless you have 3 grand to drop on something made by sony (ps3, ux180p) or apple (macintel - also known as the "macs that should've been cheaper than the powerpc models of the past since they use cheap taiwanese parts and labor like dell does now - oh wait nevermind we're apple and we can still charge the same insane prices we always have because everybody else just lowered their technology bars, too").
i guess my next machine will be a umpc (the new tabletkiosk eo's and the dualcor cPC have hefty price tags, but cheaper than the oqo, and will drive the price of the gen1 devices down). i'll have to keep a hot ebay search on a gen1 eo or oqo or similar...
i could use some wm5 ideas or help, if anybody has any... maybe a copy of codenomicon, ida pro 5, or some extra devices and some java programming time would help spur some action on those fronts. i want to port mangleme/hamachi/etc, suru, zphone, tor, privoxy, et al - and fucking with usb, bt, and wifi drivers under wm5 would be neato. too bad xilinx doesn't have sdio card support (but the cPC cf slot is bound to be useful for this).
the only thing i really want to break right now is xskey and ilok... i need to figure out if olly or ida support x86 mach-o... or usb snoopy or equiv work under mac os x. doubt i'll finish any of this in time for toorcon... but maybe layerone 2007? need resources...
finally, that brings me to my other dying project: cable modem hacking. tcniso sigma x2 is out (even though the nostarch press book is not yet), and with docsis 3.0 on the horizon... 160Mbps at home sounds like uncapping has no ceiling for future abuse. meraki networks and wimax are shipping soon, which makes those uncapped 20Mbps cable connection even more useful.
but it was also a bad summer for technology. lj-cut for the rants
apple fails in my eyes - to reduce pricing on their macpro's to anything reasonable whatsoever. and leopard will be the most gratuitous way for apple to make $129 per upgrade.
intel lost as well. they have the most powerful low-power chip with no vt-d features and barely any (even pressler) bioses support vt-x even.
meanwhile amd is going to actually do cool things with virtualization ala xen wizardry. but amd-v didn't make it out this summer entirely (no iommu or npt support yet) and all of their chip lines are twice as expensive as intel, especially bang for buck.
that's ok... my only computer is a one year old samsung i730 that i'm still very happy with. apple missed the mark with leopard... and microsoft is failing on the vista front as well. i think i'll stick with windows mobile 5 for quite some time.
i am hoping for some microsoft worms via yesterday's black patch tuesday.
camino is probably the best thing to happen to browsers and software this year (except hdm). when i'm not on somebody's macbook pro, i do seem to get along fine with my 3 web broswers under WM5... Opera 8.60 for Windows Mobile (which i'm using right now), minimo 0.016, and of course, IE.
i found this great wm5 app called dynamo, which is like mac os x expose for windows mobile. it's neat to have ie, minimo, opera, and newsbreak (wm5 rss reader) all visible back and forth and all-together. using toonel, i've managed to solve a lot of wm5 performance problems... and the new flash runs so wicked fast, it's cool to have sbemail available from everywhere. there are a few other tweaks i'm looking at implementing... with chip acceleration and memmaid. i finally got proxying in almost any fashion i want with wm5 (activesync features, HTTPSnoopProxy.class, toonel, webscarab, for wifi, bt, et al).
franklin wireless released a usb evdo modem, which is going to be great for the umpc market (another reason for me to go umpc). kinda bulky and low bandwidth compared to the new socket go wifi 300 802.11g sdio cards that just ccame out (a nice replacement and good timing since i lost my socket sdio card to theft recently).
webappsec has blown up, but nothing else has, and that's nothing new anyways. this is my opinion: but blackhat/defcon were a serious disappointment. johnnycsh and dmaynor rocked their presentation... but everyone else could have done a lot better. shame on apple for what they did to johnny cache and maynor, too. there is too much repeat material in security presentations these days.
there is little to look forward to in the future this year, though. apple clearly has nothing going on... nothing major until macworld 2007 at least. microsoft has little to celebrate early about, except sales of vista - which isn't anything that special and becoming less and less interesting by the day. unix and linux are practically dead to innovation at this point (compared to its overly impressive past). i did notice an upcoming book on bsd rootkits that seems interesting.
intel sold off xscale... so no new embedded shit. in fact, i may never see an upgrade to the pdaphone in my hands... monahans was supposed to double the speed of these devices when intel released it two months ago.... only they didn't release monahans and sold it all off to never see the light of day. maybe they and sony need to sell more pentiums and cheap lcds along with xp tablet edition until microsoft figures out what they are going to do without any chips to run the next version of windows mobile. palm, palmsource, etc is now a dying failure... treo can't even save them. blackberry got knocked back a little by fx's blackhat talk (note the reused content which makes headline news only now)... but rim is always going to suck and they'll always be back for more because people keep buying their crap for outrageous dollars.
so, barring the Wii and a few AMD prayers... there is no technology to look forward to unless you have 3 grand to drop on something made by sony (ps3, ux180p) or apple (macintel - also known as the "macs that should've been cheaper than the powerpc models of the past since they use cheap taiwanese parts and labor like dell does now - oh wait nevermind we're apple and we can still charge the same insane prices we always have because everybody else just lowered their technology bars, too").
i guess my next machine will be a umpc (the new tabletkiosk eo's and the dualcor cPC have hefty price tags, but cheaper than the oqo, and will drive the price of the gen1 devices down). i'll have to keep a hot ebay search on a gen1 eo or oqo or similar...
i could use some wm5 ideas or help, if anybody has any... maybe a copy of codenomicon, ida pro 5, or some extra devices and some java programming time would help spur some action on those fronts. i want to port mangleme/hamachi/etc, suru, zphone, tor, privoxy, et al - and fucking with usb, bt, and wifi drivers under wm5 would be neato. too bad xilinx doesn't have sdio card support (but the cPC cf slot is bound to be useful for this).
the only thing i really want to break right now is xskey and ilok... i need to figure out if olly or ida support x86 mach-o... or usb snoopy or equiv work under mac os x. doubt i'll finish any of this in time for toorcon... but maybe layerone 2007? need resources...
finally, that brings me to my other dying project: cable modem hacking. tcniso sigma x2 is out (even though the nostarch press book is not yet), and with docsis 3.0 on the horizon... 160Mbps at home sounds like uncapping has no ceiling for future abuse. meraki networks and wimax are shipping soon, which makes those uncapped 20Mbps cable connection even more useful.