Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

Vanek got his second hat trick of the year and the Sabres, who were down by two late in the game, came back to win 4-3 against Tampa Bay tonight. Vanek’s hat trick was a natural; he got all three goals in a row to end the game, even picking up the gamewinner in overtime.

The man with 12 goals in the last 11 games also factored into Roy’s goal, which opened the Sabres’ scoring. Harry Neale said, “I could hear Vanek quacking like a decoy over there,” to explain how Roy’s glance at Vanek froze Tampa Bay’s goalie just long enough.

Connolly also played a big part. He was in on both of Vanek’s last two goals, tipping one and passing the other. This, while he’s managing pain to stay in the lineup for the remainder of the season.

Winning 4-3 can really help Campbell, who has gone -6 or something crazy in the last few games. Some awesome defense has been on display for those losses, even though all sorts of speculation swirls around the market price of the top Sabres’ defenseman leading up to the trading deadline.

In other news, during intermission Mike Robitaille admitted, “I always wanted to play high school hockey, the problem is I never made it to high school. … I got kicked out for not shaving.”

You may find this odd coming from a relatively security-conscious sysadmin-type person, but I’m not totally convinced that having everything run as root (if that is indeed true) on the iPhone is a bad thing. See The iPhone’s biggest security pitfall: All applications run as root at iPhone Atlas and Effective UID: 0 at Rixstep.

As first blush, yes, it seems like a horrible idea. Enabling root is bad. Running as root is bad. It’s anathema to even think these things … the whole device running as root? What about privilege separation? Doesn’t that expose user data and so on?

Yes and no. It exposes more than if the device were running everything in an unprivileged account, certainly.

But … the user will presumably always have access to his or her own data. You could probably separate privileges here somehow, but I’m sure that would have downstream effects on performance, usability, complexity, and even on the amount of storage required to run the iPhone’s operating system.

So, if you can get malware onto the device, it appears illogical to me to think that you could really protect the user data simply by not running everything as root. Therefore, root or not, the data must depend upon other protections. Presumably the attacker would get access to the system, but on a 4 or 8 GB device, the delta between that and the user data is small; most of the value to the attacker would be in user data. This would probably be followed by some kind of input logging to collect more such data over time.

If you’re going to trojan the iPhone, wouldn’t it be just as easy to do that in user space? It looks like launchd is there (and being PID 1 on Mac OS X, I’d assume it would have to be), so all you’d have to do is slip in a Launch Agent running as the user. Boom, as we Mac people like to say now, you have a process that starts up with the user. I don’t know how or if Mac OS X protects input, but the possibility of capturing it is probably the greatest risk of running everything as root rather than a less privileged user.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. I think the iPhone is less secure with everything running as UID 0 than it would be if that were not the case. Security — like many things in life — is all about tradeoffs. The tradeoff here is probably a smaller operating system that fits on the device and is still able to provide some pretty amazing capabilities that we wouldn’t have associated with a phone one year ago. We will see if the tradeoffs are worth it over time.

One bit of good news, however, is that the iPhone is, for all intents and purposes, a single click away from a complete restore. Let’s for a moment assume that this wipes the file system and doesn’t just overwrite existing files. (Am I the only one concerned about securely deleting the iPhone? Can’t be.) If so, we can nuke and pave it, eliminating harmful files/executables that may be in its storage.

A difficult problem: What if someone manages to get something malicious on an iPhone, and it is able to jump the barrier from the device back to the host computer?

TSN: Oilers sign Vanek to offer, Sabres match.

Things are officially getting insane in the NHL. At this price, I would have let Thomas Vanek walk. Take the four draft picks. But then again — with Roy and Paetsch apparently heading to arbitration and the unrestricted free agency defections of Briere, Drury, and Zubrus this week … maybe there is no choice if the Sabres are going to field an NHL rather than AHL team next year. Oh, and Larry Quinn made that promise earlier this week. Sigh.

Man, this must be giving Drury fits, with his paltry 5-year, $35.25 million contract … plus, he’s saddled with the cost of living for New York City! It makes Briere’s 8-year, $52 million contract look shockingly normal. And Edmonton has, singlehandedly, increased the asking price of practically every player in the league. Thanks, jerks.

Interesting ideas of note from the WGR-550 coverage:

• Vanek is perhaps the highest-paid athlete in Buffalo — in any sport — at the moment.
• It may mean that sports franchises in Buffalo won’t be economical by the end of his contract.
• What if Edmonton had to pay some compensation for a restricted free agent offer that is matched — at the very least, to prevent this predatory behavior from becoming the norm?
• The Sabres are already very close to their payroll from last year — but have lost both captains, one other center, and have only signed their leading scorer and a few other players. They still have Roy and Paetsch to deal with. They’ll be pushing the salary cap with those signings.
• What if someone does this to the Rangers, with Henrik Lundqvist? Or any other team that’s already near the salary cap and has a key RFA?

Meanwhile, in a press conference today, Sabres GM Darcy Regier says, “I want to say to everyone in the National Hockey League, If you want to shop that way, don’t come shop here.” Maybe the Sabres really did have enough of an idea this was going to happen before Briere and Drury were lost — and if so, it would have had to factor into their handling of the whole free agent situation. In fact, Quinn said as much, referring to Vanek’s agent’s behavior for the last month.

While some are still complaining about Regier not signing players before the situation gets this dire … why the frick would any player ink a deal early in this environment? Hang on, Mr. Player, you’re virtually guaranteed a crazy-big contract from whatever team is most desperate this off-season!

[Initially via Sabre Rattling.]

The class demonstrated in the wake of the hit on Buffalo’s Chris Drury continues. For example, take this clip from the Ottawa Sun’s Rematch brawl the rage:

Murray said he is concerned the usual “code,” which allows the most talented players on the ice certain relief from abuse at the hands of the tough guys, has been shattered.

“What’s happened now is the respect for the skilled players is not there between us,” said Murray. “Beyond that, we'll dress a lineup and try to get the two points.”

Er … yeah. This is the same code that lets Chris Neil make a late hit the Sabres’ co-captain and leading scorer, Drury, in Thursday night’s game. The same code apparently condones the twenty stitches and concussion suffered by a player who apparently isn’t talented enough to be afforded “certain relief” in Murray’s estimation. The code only applies when the Sabres retaliated against his team’s skilled players when no penalty was called. The same code is brought up by Murray, after earlier blaming the seriousness of the injury on how loose Drury’s helmet was, claiming that the veteran wasn’t wearing it correctly (yes, he really did, I watched Murray say so in the postgame on Thursday). Since the league takes the ridiculous stance that Neil’s hit was a clean one, the NHL is now complicit.

It should be noted that what Neil did would most likely have been a penalty if Drury had been hit into the boards. The only difference I can see is that the hit came in open ice. Why that was not a penalty at the time is beyond me, and why the NHL denies it was dirty is also unfathomable.

It is for this and many reasons that the Sabres’s owner, B. Thomas Golisano, wrote a public letter on the matter to the commissioner of the NHL (PDF). Bravo.

More quotes as I find them. Especially if I can find some that were mentioned during the tonight’s rematch as supposedly uttered by Chris Neil.

It’s been a while since I posted, let alone mentioned the Sabres. I’ve watched almost every game this year, and the team has not disappointed. This includes the recent stretch where Ryan Miller was out and Marty Biron got several games in goal. I meant to post after each and every game to demonstrate my fan cred, but oh well, I missed that mark. So let’s make up for it.

During the recent series of games, the Sabres:

• Beat the Hurricanes 7-4. I think I tuned it in when the Sabres were up 3-0, and thought “wow, that was fast!” They gave up that three-goal lead—I still don’t like Williams’ goal—but eventually held on to take the game. Mair scored his first goal of the season. This game set the franchise consecutive road wins record.
• Lost to Ottawa, 4-2, even though I think Buffalo led at one point (wow, the memory gets fuzzy quickly). The Sabres had four players out, which might have contributed to their second loss of the season.
• Defeated the Penguins, 4-2. Max came back and scored an early goal, and Crosby had a sweet goal for the Pens. The Sabres wore their throwback uniforms, and Marty wore a jarringly white goalie mask. I lacked an explanation for the undecorated goalie mask until later in the telecast when either RJ or Lorentz said that he’d been having problems with the helmet straps.
• Were blown out by Ottawa, 4-1, in a game where both teams looked listless. Even Christen was frustrated. It was okay when the Sabres were ahead and then tied, but it really started to hurt when they gave up the lead. RJ and Lorentz commented that both teams were playing their sixth games in nine days, so this was an endurance match that the Sabres lost. It’s also not cool that they’ve now lost two games to the Sens.
• Rebound 7-2 against the Lightning. Admittedly, I missed this game so we’ll have to disregard it. According to the recap, Buffalo had six goals in the second period. Gaustad and Vanek both had two for the game. Wow.