Re: Windows Genuine Advantage -- Indeed?

Sea Wasp <seawaspobvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
The graphics are impressive, but that's not really complexity in
the relevant sense.

"Quantity has a quality all its own."

In this case, it's the difference between Rick Moranis and the
Incredible Hulk. Which is far beyond "oh, it's just a little more
computation" and into "Ah, youth, my Visualization of the Cosmic
All.." territory.

Completely wrong. The kind of complexity that can lead to
vulnerabilities is the kind that involves interactions between
different functions.

I'll give you a concrete example of how unexpected interactions let
people log in on ITS about a quarter century ago:

Users who weren't logged in still got a prompt. They just couldn't
do much with it. One thing they could do was see who's logged in.
Another was use the SEND command to send a real-time message to anyone
who was logged in at the time. If the recipient wasn't logged in, the
SEND command would then automatically invoke the MAIL command. And
from within the mailer one could do <ESC>E to invoke Emacs. And from
within Emacs, one use ^X^V to load DDT (the exec) and ^X^W to write it
over SEND. Then one aborts out, and invokes SEND a second time. Only
since SEND had been replaced with a copy of DDT, you'd be in the
exec, fully logged in.

The kind of complexity that gives you an elaborate 3D dungeon on the
screen, or that lets you rapidly calculate the first billion zeros of
the Riemann zeta function, isn't of the same class.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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