Tuesday, April 04, 2006 |
MLBAM Screws Non-Windows Users
"When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here.Wow -- not only does Microsoft sell lousy software for PCs, but as the article continues, their X-Box machine also has the same problems, as rootkits infest those dedicated boxes as well. Microsoft's idea of security is that it's your problem. Sure, they make public pronouncements every now and then about how security is their top priority, but the bottom line is that trojans, worms, viruses, and the worst of the lot -- rootkits -- still exist and are being loosed in the wild at an amazing pace....
He cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines. "In that case, it was so severe that trying to recover was meaningless. They did not have an automated process to wipe and rebuild the systems, so it became a burden. They had to design a process real fast," Danseglio added.
So score one for those of us bold enough to walk away from that ongoing catastrophe. After coming to work one day to find my Windows machine clobbered from a virus (I left it on overnight and it became infected with a virus that caused it to reboot shortly after I logged in), I switched to Linux. Three years later, I haven't been back, and though it's not as nice -- mostly interoperability issues in multimedia -- the lack of other distractions more than makes up for the problems, and multimedia problems had more or less been minor.
Until now. Starting this year, MLB.tv and MLB Gameday Audio no longer support RealMedia, and only support Windows Media Player. Fair enough, but given that Microsoft has discontinued WMP support on the Mac, this makes for a pretty seriously constrained listening experience for the users. Moreover, while there is WMP support available on the Mac via Flip4mac's WMV, it doesn't support all encoders and also doesn't support Microsoft's DRM.
Linux support for WMP is pretty much limited to mplayer, which is frequently satisfactory, but again, not every encoder is supported and the DRM aspects, which are embedded in the Windows kernel, are not supported, either. In short, unless MLB decides it wants to support non-Windows customers in the near future, I'm going to discontinue my subscription. There's no reason to have to worry about viruses just because I want to listen to games I can get off terrestrial broadcasts anyway.
I was wondering where the real player option had gone. Even though I hate Real, I hate M$ even more. Since MLBAM changed their site on April 1, my WMP plugin has been hanging at the connection stage whenever I try to watch a game. It connects about 1 of 20 trys. It was sometimes slow before, but it would at least connect to the media. I'm bummed, because I being in DC, I can't get the Games without getting a gameday package.
: 4/04/2006 10:42:00 PMRegarding, your comments on MS security policy (not that reinstalling the operating system is generally called a 'policy'), I went off to wikipedia and read up on rootkits at (written in layman English): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit.
In the case of rootkits, you may not have a choice but to go ahead and reinstall windows. The rootkit replaces core drivers or kernal libraries, in order to avoid detection and to do its dirty work. Under the subtitle "Detecting rootkits", the author(s) had this to write:
"The fundamental problem with rootkit detection is that the [local installation of the] operating system cannot be trusted. (For example), actions such as requesting a list of all running processes or a list of all files in a directory cannot be trusted to behave as intended by the original designers (ie, certain processes or files will be filtered out so that the antivirus software will not 'see' them)."
My favorit line is:
"Rootkit detectors which run on live systems, currently only work because rootkits have not yet been developed which hide themselves fully."
There really bad news is that rootkits are not unique to Windows, and in fact were first built for Unix/Linux based systems. I am programmer, but not a systems programmer, but seems to be something to be concerned about that the linux kernel is open source. And no, I don't work for microsoft.
There are some clever and evil people out there.
And now back to baseball, GO DODGERS!
: 4/05/2006 10:41:00 AMhttp://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13902
I got Flip4Mac working last night on my G4 Mini, and on Rob's and my MacBook (Intel) this morning.
Except that on Linux and every Unix system ever made, userspace programs don't need to leap to privileged status without bypassing the kernel. This is the fundamental problem all MS code has; all Linux/Unix system calls require entry into the kernel. It's slower, but far safer. MS has traded off performance for security. It is simply not possible, as a regular Unix user, to install a rootkit by way of playing a CD -- but you can using Windows! This to me is the telling problem of Windows "security" and Microsoft's fairy stories about the numerous flaws in Linux -- all such flaws demand the active participation of the victim, as the root user.
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