The MOOC course is very interesting. Do you know if there's a way to get enrolled? It looks like the registration is closed and there's no upcoming offerings available currently. Thanks.
As a Chinese, I guess that this probably won't happen at least for the next decade. Non-IT professionals in China aren't even aware that Linux system exist.
Why wonder? I worked it out once and for the USA you'd only need an area the size of Edwards Air Force Base, and the existence of Edwards AFB proves that such allocation of space is not objectionable.
"... we arrive at 496,804,500,000 square meters or 496,805 square kilometers (191,817 square miles) as the area required to power the world with solar panels. This is roughly equal to the area of Spain."
As was pointed out, that's the whole world, not the United States. And the Sahara Desert is 3.629 million square miles. Sounds like that would be a great place to site 200,000 square miles of solar panels. Of course, this would be infeasible for any number of reasons ranging from geopolitics to superconductors, which is why it's a thought experiment.
It depends on your video card and drivers whether WebGL will be automatically enabled / supported. I had to go to chrome://flags and enable the
Override software rendering list Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
Overrides the built-in software rendering list and enables GPU-acceleration on unsupported system configurations.
Lucky enough for the guy who wrote this. He didn't try it long enough to know that there's this thing on Windows OS called "Virus/Worm/Trojan" that eats up everything on his PC. ROFL.
People often say this, there are a lot of complicated technical reasons this is not true, leaving those aside, here are two very simple ones:
1. You download virusBin in Linux, you cannot run it- it does not have execute permission by default.
2. OK so either graphically or at the terminal (chmod u+x) you make virusBin executable.... (I'm not sure why you did this...) If you run it, all of its access outside of /home/$USER is read-only, the system and other users are safe, maybe your data is not.
So if you really want to mess up your machine
1. Download virusBin
2. Give virus Bin execute permission
3. Assuming you are the systems admin, you can now run it as root... sudo ./virusBin..
To get a user to do all that it is going to take a LOT of social engineering.
1) Ever since XP SP2, anything that has been downloaded does not have execute flags. The downside is the user is prompted in a manner that allows them to override this.
The question is, how did the executable get there in the first place? Most of the explots that really hit windows are bugs in browsers / addins.
A lot are also spread via 'naughty things', to view this really degrading porn of some celebrety you must first do this survey and execute this code. Or even bundled in with pirate versions, over a few beers a buddy who works for a small design software firm was laughing at how many people had become infected by a virus which was spread by just one torrent of their product (not by him!).
Or like 419 scam emails, really obvious things, that weed out the people with an ounce of sense to leave only those dumb enough to run it. People like my Dad, who typed in the admin password because he was running as regular user :( Then threw a hissy fit when I suggest he not know the admin password in future.
Sure administrator as default is dumb, really dumb. But most of these attack vectors would still be open on linux, in fact we've seen some for the bsd based OSX last year.
In recent versions of Windows you are right about the exec perm and run as admin prompt existing.
"The downside is the user is prompted in a manner that allows them to override this."
Exactly right. Since both of those prompts are "click OK to continue" types it makes the barrier they present is much lower than Linux where you have to change a file permission, then type your password again (and probably from a terminal to use sudo). I would say the barrier is so low they seldom work from what I have seen.
My family members who run Linux don't even know how to use sudo... they just use the Ubuntu software center/synaptic.
"in fact we've seen some for the bsd based OSX last year"
I have not used OSX in 4 years so I can't comment meaningfully on this. My gut tells me Apple probably takes a lower barrier approach like MS, but I don't know.
Commenting on the state of OS X right now: There's this 'Gatekeeper' feature (which can be disabled, but starts enabled) that makes it so a developer has to have a signed certificate from apple in order to run on OS X. If someone starts releasing malware with a previously obtained certificate, Apple will send an update that disables that certificate.
I think that, once smaller developers start getting their apps signed (I'm not sure how hard it is to do this) then this will be a wonderful tool, and already probably is nice for non-power users. I currently leave it disabled because enough of the stuff I use isn't signed, but in the future it might be a nice step forwards for security.
In case you hadn't stumbled upon this, you can bypass gatekeeper on individual executables by ctrl clicking and selecting "open" from the context menu.
Actually, being very un-scientific and subjective. I've not seen that.
Most things I've seen spreading are already infected executables of pirate code. Or exploits.
Now we can talk about the fact running as Admin is stupid, and UAC is just a way to allow bad habbits to continue. But, just look how complex (and sometimes elegant) the average entry in pwn2own web browsers are. Side stepping ASLR, breaking the sandbox, privlidge escalation.
All of those things can and are possible on any operating system, this includes linux.
I exploit a bug in any of your networked client software to run locally. Since it's running under X11, I can now log all of your keystrokes. If you ever run sudo and type in your password, I have root. On the other-hand I don't really care about running as root, since most of what a botnet is used for can be done with non-root permissions anyway.
