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What is the current status of the vulnerability in VLC Media Player reported by Secunia? I see that there has been some online discussion of this in places outside Hacker News (which I searched the other day for more information about Secunia's vulnerability report). http://secunia.com/advisories/52956/ http://secunia.com/blog/shooting-the-messenger-372 http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/10/1520245/vlc-and-secuni...…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about detecting Dell Speakers and automatically setting the max volume to 100%, with a notification so the user can give an a-ok if they want to go higher. That way, at least users know and can make a decision. Similar to the Android warning if you set your volume too high that it could cause hearing damage. I'd prefer to be warned rather than surprised by this!
That's impractical. VLC is just using the standard OS API to send some sound to speakers. Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior? Maybe Microsoft could regulate the output for junk speakers, but really, Dell is the one to blame here.
This is what MS Office does. A Microsoft engineer told me once that because many printers lie to the OS about their capabilities, they built a giant lookup table into the Office, that basically consists of "if printer model X, vendor Y and firmware Z, then don't trust it about the fonts onboard, render the text before sending instead".
Since then I have vowed never to buy Dell.
What is the current status of the vulnerability in VLC Media Player reported by Secunia? I see that there has been some online discussion of this in places outside Hacker News (which I searched the other day for more information about Secunia's vulnerability report). http://secunia.com/advisories/52956/ http://secunia.com/blog/shooting-the-messenger-372 http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/10/1520245/vlc-and-secuni...…
VLC is incapable of increasing the actual power past 100%, all that is being done is the waveform is being modified to be louder within the allowed constraints. If this wrecks the speaker, any other non-VLCed sound could just as easily, and the speakers are therefore underpowered for the laptops internal amplifier. Class action sounds in order.
Also many mastering engineers do the exact same thing to make the music "louder" because the record label/artists demand it. Maybe Dell should start making popular rock/pop music void the warranty as well.
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Arh, I remember all sort of speaker problem ages ago. Never got around to figure what was wrong. I suppose this is it. But does anyone have list of Manufacture that does provide speaker with BIOS Protection?. Does Apple do?
How would that work? Just detect signals with an abnormally high RMS and block them?
What is the current status of the vulnerability in VLC Media Player reported by Secunia? I see that there has been some online discussion of this in places outside Hacker News (which I searched the other day for more information about Secunia's vulnerability report). http://secunia.com/advisories/52956/ http://secunia.com/blog/shooting-the-messenger-372 http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/10/1520245/vlc-and-secuni...…
wait, so you currently have an infected computer on your home network?
Would I be better off just completely uninstalling VLC Media Player?
AFTER EDIT: I might have considered a direct answer to my question (whatever the answer was) more helpful than a silent downvote to what was, after all, just a polite response to a question that someone asked me.
AFTER FURTHER EDIT: After some more rebooting of the previously infected computer, the operating system and Secunia both report that VLC Media Player version 2.1.3 is installed, and that is not reported to have any problem by Secunia. So I will leave that alone. The computer from which I usually post to HN, a different computer on the same home network, does not have VLC Media Player installed. I try to keep a close-to-bare-stock set of installed programs on this computer, but other users in my household (= teenage boys who aspire to be hackers) tend to install programs I've never heard of on the other computer on our home network, and my wife, who has other things on her mind, occasionally doesn't notice installations of crapware or adware or bloatware that tag along with legitimate program updates on that computer. So that other computer tends to be the vector for malware attacks on the home network here. Thanks for any further comments participants here have on how to keep a home network safe when not all users follow strict quarantine policies.
What is the current status of the vulnerability in VLC Media Player reported by Secunia? I see that there has been some online discussion of this in places outside Hacker News (which I searched the other day for more information about Secunia's vulnerability report). http://secunia.com/advisories/52956/ http://secunia.com/blog/shooting-the-messenger-372 http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/10/1520245/vlc-and-secuni...…
We did a lot of fuzzing with 2.1.x though and we've fixed all the security issues that were reported.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if you've ever owned a Dell laptop, but I'll never buy one again. On a couple of occasions I have tried to play DVD's on them and cannot hear people talking with the volume up. Put headphones on and its too loud. Dell speakers are junk.
Um in my experience all laptop speakers of all brands are like that.
They are still terrible speakers, though. I almost laughed when showing a friend Star Wars for the first time; it doesn't even come close to doing the soundtrack justice.