It might have been PC Gamer [1] magazine. I had both Worms Armageddon and Age of Empires II in the late '90s, and I remember some copies of this magazine lying around. I think this magazine would come with demo CDs pretty often.
This probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, but you might find Robert Darnton's essay "First Steps Toward a History of Reading" interesting. [1] It mostly covers the early modern period, if I remember correctly, not contemporary reading practices.
Adler's "How to Read a Book" (the 1972 edition) also recommends to avoid subvocalization and to use your finger as a "pacer" to guide your eye across each line. I was surprised to see that the author of this article suggests that these two techniques are not supported by scientific studies. I'm glad I have not gotten far in adopting these!
In Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men[1] (1775) he discusses the Caribs of Venezuela:
"As the savage state also protects them from gout and rheumatism, and old age is, of all ills, that which human aid can least alleviate, they cease to be, without others perceiving that they are no more, and almost without perceiving it themselves.
With respect to sickness, I shall not repeat the vain and false declamations which most healthy people pronounce against medicine; but I shall ask if any solid observations have been made from which it may be justly concluded that, in the countries where the art of medicine is most neglected, the mean duration of man's life is less than in those where it is most cultivated. How indeed can this be the case, if we bring on ourselves more diseases than medicine can furnish remedies? [...]
When we think of the good constitution of the savages, at least of those whom we have not ruined with our spirituous liquors, and reflect that they are troubled with hardly any disorders, save wounds and old age, we are tempted to believe that, in following the history of civil society, we shall be telling also that of human sickness."
> Does Subgraph isolate USB and network? The isolated serviceVMs for USB and network are in my opinion a very strong value proposition of Qubes.
According to Joanna Rutkowska, developer of Qubes: "Unlike Qubes OS, Subgraph doesn't (cannot) isolate networking and USB stacks, or other devices and drivers."[1]
On Qubes OS the networking VM runs a standard Linux kernel with no special security hardening at all apart from the simple fact that it runs in a separate Xen VM. If an attacker is able to compromise NetVM, they may not have direct access to user data, but they have dangerous access to perform further attacks:
- Attacks against hypervisor to break isolation
- Side channel attacks against other Qubes VMs to steal cryptographic keys
- Interception and tampering with networking traffic
- Attacks against any internal network this Qubes OS computer connects to.
So if you assume that remote attacks against the Linux kernel networking stack are an important threat, the consequences of a successful attack even against Qubes are pretty bad.
Subgraph OS hardens the Linux kernel with grsecurity, which includes many defenses against exploitation which have historically prevented local exploitation of most security vulnerabilities against the kernel. Exploiting kernel vulnerabilities locally is so much easier, probably never less than an order of magnitude easier. It's so rare to reliably exploit kernel vulnerabilities remotely even against an unhardened kernel that teams present papers at top security conferences about a single exploit:
I know it's contentious to say so, but I don't believe that anybody will ever remotely exploit a kernel vulnerability against a grsecurity hardened Linux kernel, especially since RAP was introduced:
The threat of remotely attacking the Linux kernel through the networking or USB stack was always low in my opinion, but as the threat approaches zero it raises some questions about how justifiable the system VMs are in Qubes OS considering the system complexity and usability impairment they introduce.
I agree with your comments about grsecurity making the kernel much more secure. However your comments about remote exploits and Qubes are somewhat contradictory. You claim that a remote kernel exploit is very rare/difficult, therefore the Qubes NetVM must be very difficult to attack because it runs no applications or services. It functions as a router and does essentially nothing else. By your own argument it would be very difficult to attack the NetVM. It is only the AppVMs or any others which run applications that are vulnerable, and if these are attacked, Qubes's design will likely prevent a permanent backdoor from being installed in that VM and make it difficult for the attacker to gain access to any of the other AppVMs.
I still think Subgraph looks promising and I look forward to your future work.
I'm answering a comment chain about how Subgraph OS does not 'isolate' the network or USB stacks which is frequently brought up as an important deficiency in comparison to Qubes OS. My point is that this isn't a significant advantage of Qubes because such attacks are rare and difficult, and because they're even harder to perform against Subgraph OS.
I wasn't talking about AppVMs at all, but you can of course persistently backdoor Qubes AppVMs in numerous ways by writing to the user home directory. In Subgraph OS we design our application sandboxes to prevent exactly this.
Thank you for your answer, I'll definitely look further into SubgraphOS and grsecurity. I nevertheless believe that the kind of attacks you describe, specially the one against hypervisor in NetVM to break isolation, are quite unlikely in Qubes.
Could you also answer my question about SubgraphOS main use case and threat model?
Is it mainly for anonymous and pseudonymous usage?
If it is designed mainly for everyday use (including non-anonymous use cases like banking, social media, personal/work email, etc.) as it seems to me I don't quite understand the design choice to enforce all traffic via Tor by default. That seems unnecessary as anonymity is not needed and even dangerous.
Yeah, we agree, actually. Tor probably won't even be the default. We are adding flexibility to network support right now. Soon you'll be able to have just cleartext SGOS, or be able to send sandboxed apps through different paths: one app might exit through a VPN, another through Tor only, another through i2p maybe, etc, enforced by the sandbox.
Mine is the same as yours: a circle with months going clockwise, Jan/Dec at 6 o'clock.
It occurred to me a couple years ago that thinking of the calendar like this might not be something everyone does. I asked my friend how he thought of it and he said he saw it as a LINE.
I see the months in a year as a sort of sine wave, with december at the bottoms and july at the tops. I guess it's like a combination of the linear and circular view.
Same here! But when thinking about weekdays, it's just a circle with Sunday at the bottom. Days themselves fill up vertically...I never realized how much of a hodge-podge collection of visualizations I've been using.
> When people on the far left and the far right agree, they're usually onto something.
A similar observation is the "horseshoe theory": "The horseshoe theory in political science asserts that rather than the far left and the far right being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, they in fact closely resemble one another, much like the ends of a horseshoe."[1]
The problem comes with narrowing all political variation down to "left" vs "right". More dimensions are needed to tease apart the differences / similarities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Gamer