Slashdot Mirror

I've read a couple of articles recently form good sources that predict #Twitter is dying. True? I can only hope so.

I've found Google trends to be a good indicator of popularity.

Twitter vs Snapchat vs Instagram

I was surprised that Snapchat wasn't more popular, but you can see Twitter has been in decline since 2013, and Instagram is showing lots of growth (I guess lots of people want to take what improvements we made with digital imaging, and have shitty filters that look like crappy cameras, while they take selfies of their duck-face and their crappy food.

You can see Slashdot has been on a loooong decline into irrelevance

I would like to have the ability to make my phone beep while on silent back so I can find the darned thing.

All Android phones have this. Yes, the phone still rings if the phone is on mute.

https://www.google.com/android...

>> "Can courts compel Facebook to provide analytics of who might be a criminal?...Or Google to give a list of names of people who searched for the term ISIS?

Facebook already publishes a guide for law enforcement: https://www.facebook.com/safet...
Google does too: https://www.google.com/transpa...

And when they finally do decrypt it, all they'll find is a grocery list. [ref]

The keys can be saved on the server and processes in the JS client.

Keys cannot be saved on the sever. If you give the private keys to Google, they can decrypt the messages at rest on their servers. This is why no encrypted storage uses server-stored keys: see Spideroak for an example of modern encrypted storage that keeps keys client-side only for a very good reason. Rule one of having keys: never give them to anyone.

The point is to encrypt email during transit so nobody can snoop

The point is not to encrypt email during transit. The point is to encrypt e-mail at all points between the correspondents. The mail should be encrypted clientside and remain encrypted while at rest on the servers as well as during transit. S/MIME and PGP/GPG do that. Encrypting only during transit means that plaintext is sitting around waiting to be hoovered up by Google (for ad profile building) and whatever other parties (NSA, hackers, etc) have access to Google's servers.

If you don't trust gmail don't use gmail.

Despite seeming an off-topic statement in a discussion about securing gmail, this is the root of the problem. Google is scanning gmail accounts and does provide governments (and any hackers it doesn't know about) with access to those accounts. Using client-side S/MIME or PGP/GPG solves that trust issue, for values of "solve" that require an attacker to expend more work than is feasible. Self-hosting e-mail also solves that trust issue in other ways, but it is out of the realm of discussion, since the topic is how best to secure gmail.

Alternately the keys can be decrypted with a user inputed pass phrase in the JS client, then mean even gmail would be unable to read your mail. Assuming they don't snoop your pass phrase themselves. But if that is a problem, why use gmail in first place.

The user passphrase is far weaker than an S/MIME or PGP key. That negates the point of having an S/MIME or PGP key, which is in effect a very, very long passphrase stored clientside. The difference between the two (certificate and passphrase) is important to cryptography: for this, see any discussion of the difference between SSH with keys and passphrases (or preferably both in combination). There is an advantage to having both, but there is no security advantage in having a much weaker link alone guard a much stronger one. Take a second to reread that carefully.

There is no JS solution to the problem of securing gmail; otherwise, one would have been written long ago. People have thought about the issue and realized that there is no good solution. That is why people have created solutions like the Firefox addon for S/MIME and the MyMail Crypt for gmail: they are plugins for a reason. You should try understanding that reason, because it will advance your knowledge of the dangers and limitations of cryptography.

I'm not saying this to be an asshole, but because you demonstrate a certain hubris when it comes to what you believe can be done with Javascript and how security works. That hubris could hurt some project that you work on, and that pain is unnecessary. You will be better able to contribute valuable work to your business or the community if you take the time now to learn the limits of what you should and should not do with encryption keys.

1) My grandmother thought the VCR was complicated

Yes, there will always be those who cannot adapt. However, the problem attempting to be solved is that there is a majority of people for whom Tor is prohibitively complicated.

2) "what difference does it make?" Is that you Hillary? (It makes a lot of difference, I'll spare you the details)

No, it's not Hillary. I too know it makes a difference. The problem is that the perception of the implications for most people is that they are trivial. Hence, why this is a social issue as much as a technological one.

3) Having the restaurants location data and knowing where it is in relationship to yourself is convenient. ____, inc recording and storing the details of your location is the problem

Yes, but Tor doesn't solve this problem. Running a Google search through Tor will show me restaurants near the exit node rather than my actual location, and then store that data.

4) In my life, sadly of which too much is spent online, I have never encountered 'Tor ransomware'. But maybe this is a reality for some?

I fix computers for dozens of people, from home users to small businesses. I've run into ransomware a number of times, and almost invariably, the instructions were basically, "send 0.5 Bitcoin using this Tor address...", or some approximation thereof. Clearly, not the EFF's fault this happens, or that it happens that way...but when the two most common ways people hear about Tor are "Silk Road" and "Cryptowall", it's difficult to argue that the battle to legitimize Tor in the court of public opinion is a steeply uphill one.

5) My understanding of Tor is limited, but by reading what is published it sounds like the problem with tor performance is similar to the problem Verizon has with a fraction of a percentage of its data plan (ab)users: a few dumbasses downloading pirate bay torrents kills the experience for everyone else.

That may well be the case. Unfortunately, there's no meaningful way to prohibit that sort of use.

6) Again limited understanding of tor, but wouldn't more users help the anonymity problem more than hurt it?

Tor isn't like Bittorrent - there are lots more 'leechers' than 'seeders'. Using a Tor browser does not also require you to be an exit node, and being an exit node means that you may be legally liable for the traffic, depending on jurisdiction. Even if not, it means that your bandwidth will constantly be saturated by other people's data. Thus, there's every disincentive to be one.

7) https://play.google.com/store/...

Android is the easy one. iOS...not so much.

Lucas was working on this 36 years ago.

There is a road which is on all the maps I have seen which doesn't exist in Morgantown WV. It was right behind my old apartment, here it is on google street-view.
https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
According to all the maps the road goes directly through the tree and both houses. This isn't an issue with GPS, it is an issue with the maps the GPS is based on.

I don't think that math adds up.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...

Custom plastic-based design with a 'slice' feature which allows extra case modules to be added to increase internal expansion space. Each slice adds 2 podule bays at the rear, and two drive bays (one 3.5 inch, one 5.25 inch) at the front

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Images with multiple slices: https://www.google.com/search?...

Wells American was doing this back in the 80s

https://books.google.com/books...

Microsoft has a strong reason to ensure performance and stability in their products: recurring revenue. Otherwise common sense dictates they would have gone out of business a long time ago.

Hobby software like Linux doesn't have that priority so it has no place in my mission-critical installations. But it's certainly fine for browsing, email and playing games.

No shit, Sherlock.

Linux file system corruption questions on Stack Exchange.

Though I'm a decline to state voter.

Interesting voter designation in California. It seems reasonable the two parties benefiting from the duopoly would defend themselves, eh?

https://www.google.com/search?...

A quick glance finds massive factual basis for that "myth".

https://www.google.com/search?...

Apparently it's location is not the only thing you are ignorant about.

How would you deal with continental drift? North America and Eurasia are moving apart by 2.5 cm per year.

At the very least this could be used to tare or zero the readings from a local survey monument.

Whats funny is the inch is officially defined as 25.4 mm. Dual scale measuring tape confirms this at multiples, as does using a unit converter

They misdefine harassment for starters, considering it not a person-to-person thing. Also allowing anonymous reports of harassment is too abusable.

I suggest people just not go to places that have policies like this.

Consider my contrast:
https://docs.google.com/docume...

Nah, libgen (and all its assorted mirrors posted by OP) sees way more traffic than slashdot these days. They do tend to block american ISPs to avoid the frequent harassment from american lawyers. Note that the proper name of this archive is libgen, scigen is just one of its mirrors. https://sites.google.com/site/...

They will often play a notification ONCE when the SMS comes in, and if you miss it, don't wake up, etc., you're screwed, especially if you're the only point of contact. A real pager will usually be much more persistent,

Yes, and there's only several hundred apps for Android which will make your phone more persistent about getting your attention, than any pager...

Come on, at least make it a link Give Google's Product Manager Your Feedback on Shutting Down PICASA.

Thanks for the link.

Too bad Google+ is a clusterfuck of mediocrity that only confuses people with an endless stream of goat piss.

I looked for a while and then I realized that there is no way this "person" will give a crap about anything the customer thinks unless it is total agreement with corporate overlords.

Picasa was the last Google service of any value to me. Now I'm better off without them. Might as well stop using gmail now, while its on my own initiative.

Come on, at least make it a link Give Google's Product Manager Your Feedback on Shutting Down PICASA.

This is nothing new. There apps that already do this. For instance, this one does it and it's not called MyShake. And I bet there are many more apps that do exactly the same thing if you just look for them.

Yep, back in the 80s the idea of owning a gigabyte of hard drive space was fucking ludicrous...you might have well dreamed of owning your own Space Shuttle. No one had a clue as to what you would possibly do with that much space.

And of course the idea of having a whole gigabyte of RAM was something we used to laugh about hilariously. I mean, the idea was just ridiculously insane. It was more likely that Kelly LeBrock or Cheryl Tiegs would ring your doorbell in the next 5 minutes and demand to have hot, sleazy sex with you.

Yep, back in the 80s the idea of owning a gigabyte of hard drive space was fucking ludicrous...you might have well dreamed of owning your own Space Shuttle. No one had a clue as to what you would possibly do with that much space.

And of course the idea of having a whole gigabyte of RAM was something we used to laugh about hilariously. I mean, the idea was just ridiculously insane. It was more likely that Kelly LeBrock or Cheryl Tiegs would ring your doorbell in the next 5 minutes and demand to have hot, sleazy sex with you.

I know perfectly well where Port Hueneme is. I lived much of my life on The Southern California coast.

You get 320 days of sunshine? Sure you do. And you're selling that bridge over there for only 5 bucks.

FWIW, Barstow in the Mojave Desert -- far from your marine layer -- gets a lot of sunshine. That's why it is surrounded with solar projects. It claims 260 clear days a year. (I'd have guessed more. Maybe they only count completely cloudless days.)

There's a table at https://books.google.com/books...
that shows clear days for a number of California cities. None of them comes close to 320 days a year. I'd expect the Naval Base to come in around the same as San Diego -- i.e. 180 days a year.

I don't know if there's anything you can do about the regular GPS units, but you can edit Google Maps yourself. https://www.google.com/mapmake...

This patent is the best reference I've found so far. It's all proprietary though, Lennox thermostats won't work on a Carrier furnace or air conditioner, etc. And the software seems to be really terrible on all of them.

Will the tiny forests have tiny herds of deer romping through them.

https://www.google.com/search?...

Why bother with all the cost and hassle of fighting off silly local state laws. Just supply the phone without the software and provide an international link to download and install the software like, hmm, I don't know perhaps a link to https://play.google.com/store. All you have to do is ensure the store and it's infrastructure is not in that location. Quite simply it makes far more sense to deliver phones in that condition, absolute minimum of software in the package, so that it complies with that locations requirements patents, regulations, what ever and they get the end user to, well, possibly technically infringe by downloading what they want (you only need to keep the host distribution centre up to date with local laws at it's location). Then you can point to your phone as sold and say, encryption nope doesn't do it, swippy stuff doesn't do it, funny faces doesn't do it, decode DVD doesn't do it, in fact the only thing the phone is capable of as sold is downloading software, that the user chooses to install from the internet. So the whole thing is kind of stupid, push comes to shove and it will happen, in point of fact it is actually the most sensible thing to do and they should be doing it by default already ie start off with a bare bones lock screen and the first thing you do is install the latest versions of the software included an upgrade lock screen.

Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, so these LUDDITES who play LUDDITE games like Hearthstone deserve to get pwned. Modern app appers play appy apps like Candy Crush Appy Saga!

Apps!

Hearthstone is an app.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

"Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."

Very perceptive, Slashcode. It IS yelling.

This is in California, where the land is probably 10x as valuable. Also about 10 square miles of space, maybe 5 square miles of solar cells. Another three of four square miles of solar cells 5 miles ESE of this spot.

https://www.google.com/maps/@3...

This is desert. Deserts will be covered on solar cells within 20 years.

I had one of these books growing up! I recognize which one, too. https://drive.google.com/open?... "Introduction to Computer Programming: BASIC for Beginners." I loved programming in QuickBASIC 4.5 (and then QBX, or 7.1). I am a sysadmin now, not a programmer, but I definitely got my love of computers from stuff like this.
Another good set of cherished computer books from my childhood was the Micro Adventure series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://keep.google.com/ is one of the "must-have" apps on my Andriod phones

To put it into perspective, it's nearly 10 square miles. Pretty big, but in context it's a tiny part of the country.

This is apparently it, although it looks like this is older photography from before construction:

https://www.google.com/maps/@3...

Wow, you need to disturb a lot of habitat to make that happen. Even in the desert. You can see it here though on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

Anyone else think the whole thing is just a false-flag operation?
Everyone's data is in the cloud already, and all the cloud providers have shown themselves VERY willing to help LEOs without requiring a warrant or subpoena.
Even with phones, there's already remote wipe/ring/lock it it so hard to believe they don't have a "remote unluck" or "remote 'backup'"?

...you wouldn't understand. https://www.google.com/search?... The same thing that I think to myself as I see these cars dead along side of the road.

Telemetry functions become malware at the point when even if you disable them they stay operational. It has then effectively become malicious software because it deceives the user. Many big tech companies still do this even if you explicitly say no . This worries me.

Most excellent. I'm going to presume you'll not go stalking me? I've met a whole bunch of Slashdotters (well, at least a couple dozen) in real life and none of them have yet stalked me or harassed me. In fact, we got along quite well. I see you have me on your "foes" list. I don't mind that, that doesn't bother me at all.

Nah, I don't care who you are -- only if you're persuasive or not. Apparently, at some point in the past I found you to be offensively unpersuasive...

Let me try this and we'll see where it goes. I might as well at least demonstrate that I don't pull numbers out of my ass. I don't know when you where in the industry last but, here's a citation for that figure that I gave you about striping and the value of it: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publi...

Ah, that article talks about rural two-lane roads, arterials, freeways, and interstates. Urban collector and local streets are conspicuous by their absence from the article (rural collectors are mentioned, and local streets are mentioned only once to note that they're omitted from a chart).

That's some overzealous marking - and check the signage around Atlanta (around the 285 as I recall?) where they've got signs for everything. Some of them don't even make sense! In the days before GPS was ubiquitous, I once followed seemingly every sign in the area (on and around that bypass) to find a suburb that began with an M... It wasn't Marietta, I know where that is and I remember the name. I followed them all... I turns out, When I wasn't on the bypass, I was missing the correct options to take.

Morrow or Mableton, maybe?

Anyway, I'm from Metro Atlanta and don't get down to the coast very much, so I don't know about the excessive signage on I-95. I certainly know about how the signage stops being adequate when you get off the interstate, but I can't think of any that's wrong on it. I wish you were more specific in that example (and also that you had an example of excessive striping near Atlanta -- or alternatively, a Google Maps link of your example off I-95 so I could see what you're talking about).

Back on topic: it seems to me that the UK's strategy here is to remove striping on the roads that are the least like the ones your link addresses, urban collectors and local streets. In terms of Panama City Beach, think of applying it to places like Front Beach Road -- the part where all the tourist trap stuff is, that's too choked with pedestrians for traffic to move fast anyway -- not US 98 and not highway 30 outside of town. Or for perhaps a better example, whatever streets constitute "downtown" in Panama City itself, assuming it has a downtown.

Or in terms of Atlanta, think of applying it to Peachtree Street in Midtown or Downtown, but not a road like Northside Drive (which, as you can see, is so pedestrian-unfriendly that they have Jersey barriers to keep people from trying to cross).

Most excellent. I'm going to presume you'll not go stalking me? I've met a whole bunch of Slashdotters (well, at least a couple dozen) in real life and none of them have yet stalked me or harassed me. In fact, we got along quite well. I see you have me on your "foes" list. I don't mind that, that doesn't bother me at all.

Nah, I don't care who you are -- only if you're persuasive or not. Apparently, at some point in the past I found you to be offensively unpersuasive...

Let me try this and we'll see where it goes. I might as well at least demonstrate that I don't pull numbers out of my ass. I don't know when you where in the industry last but, here's a citation for that figure that I gave you about striping and the value of it: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publi...

Ah, that article talks about rural two-lane roads, arterials, freeways, and interstates. Urban collector and local streets are conspicuous by their absence from the article (rural collectors are mentioned, and local streets are mentioned only once to note that they're omitted from a chart).

That's some overzealous marking - and check the signage around Atlanta (around the 285 as I recall?) where they've got signs for everything. Some of them don't even make sense! In the days before GPS was ubiquitous, I once followed seemingly every sign in the area (on and around that bypass) to find a suburb that began with an M... It wasn't Marietta, I know where that is and I remember the name. I followed them all... I turns out, When I wasn't on the bypass, I was missing the correct options to take.

Morrow or Mableton, maybe?

Anyway, I'm from Metro Atlanta and don't get down to the coast very much, so I don't know about the excessive signage on I-95. I certainly know about how the signage stops being adequate when you get off the interstate, but I can't think of any that's wrong on it. I wish you were more specific in that example (and also that you had an example of excessive striping near Atlanta -- or alternatively, a Google Maps link of your example off I-95 so I could see what you're talking about).

Back on topic: it seems to me that the UK's strategy here is to remove striping on the roads that are the least like the ones your link addresses, urban collectors and local streets. In terms of Panama City Beach, think of applying it to places like Front Beach Road -- the part where all the tourist trap stuff is, that's too choked with pedestrians for traffic to move fast anyway -- not US 98 and not highway 30 outside of town. Or for perhaps a better example, whatever streets constitute "downtown" in Panama City itself, assuming it has a downtown.

Or in terms of Atlanta, think of applying it to Peachtree Street in Midtown or Downtown, but not a road like Northside Drive (which, as you can see, is so pedestrian-unfriendly that they have Jersey barriers to keep people from trying to cross).

> There's an energy mix for a variety of reasons.

Exactly. One big reason is that some of the stable, reliable sources aren't as clean as we'd like (coal, natural gas, nuclear), while the clean sources are either not as reliable (wind, solar) or available only in very limited locations and amounts (hydro, geothermal).

The mix allows us to use the cleanest stuff when and where it's available, then throttle the slightly less-clean stuff like natural gas to meet demand, with something very steady like nuclear providing a base level that meets minimum demand.

If you're interested in the mix, here's a paper that may interest you. Of course all figures in the paper are cited to reliable sources. It seems like _maybe_ you don't care for math at all, and if that's the case this paper isn't for you. If you don't mind just a little math, this paper goes over many different sources in the mix, discussing the costs and benefits of each, and how they can be combined.

The figures for solar-electric have improved a bit in the last 2-5 years, so the solar-electric number in the paper are very slightly outdated. The conclusion hasn't changed though - solar electric is a good supplemental source, not a reliable inexpensive source capable of providing the bulk of of energy needs.

The paper, if you're interested and don't mind some fairly easy math:
https://docs.google.com/docume...

https://news.google.com/newspa...

That's the first one I came across. I've not had much sleep so you can take that and run with it or just use that one study.

There are several manufacturers with vehicles that have lane-sense and auto-steer technology. The systems have been on public roadways for 15 years now. You could at least fire up Google and search once or twice before being an asshole. Do I have to do everything for you? Here are 7 MILLION SEARCH RESULTS for "Lane Keeping System" you moron. https://www.google.com/search?...

I remember typing in the "Haunted House" by hand from Write your own adventure programs for your microcomputer"

The games I wrote never looked like anything the pretty illustrations -- I imagine they helped sell the book. :-)

That solution is nuclear power.

Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim.

Barack Obama (October 2007, before becoming president): ”It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table.“
(2009, after becoming president): "We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change.” (citation)

James Hansen (probably the most famous of the climate activists), 2013:
"We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power." (citation)

Fine. Here's the same road 3/4 mile to the east, still without traffic markings. If you look around, there are thousands of miles of streets in LA that lack longitudinal markings. I only used this one as an example because I used to live about 100 ft north of it.

We are witnessing the transition into a new era, made possible by the saturated of "walled garden" platforms and corporate curated software markets.

If nothing is done, in 5 years time the vast majority of users will be unable to even install ab-blockers, let alone use them. In 10 years time, ad blockers may be de-facto banned across the vast majority of the web anyway, with sites refusing access to browsers detected to have ad blocking software installed. This is already happening across some sites even now.

Good. Maybe without so much ad money the bulk of the web will atrophy back down to sensible levels (do we really need 5 billion google results for "blog"?) and then we can see a resurgence in parts of the Internet that aren't the web and email (and torrents). Of course, we'll have to convince the vast majority of the populace that Facebook is not the Internet, but it's not insurmountable. I'm dangerously close to showing my age here, but there are lots of neglected parts of the Internet that the web is trying really hard to subsume, like irc, nntp (except the binaries groups, maybe), ftp, gopher (well, maybe not gopher), and even email. I'm not saying that things were necessarily better before the web exploded, but if a decline in the Web is what it takes to get some of the other parts of the Internet some attention, then I'm all for it.

Do you have some kind of citation for this bit of wisdom?

https://www.google.com/search?...

As it appears that CNN, Fox, Fortune, Forbes, and many others disagree with you, I would love to see where you get that idea. The US fracking has pretty much shut down while Saudi Arabia is flooding the market to try and cause all the fracking companies to go out of business, we will see if it works.

Here's a well-traveled street straddling Beverly Hills and Los Angeles. It has no longitudinal traffic markings, and particularly from 3:00PM to 7:00PM has heavy traffic. The accident rate is modest, particularly given its narrow width and placement parallel to and between two major arterials.

Here's a well-traveled street in Fairbanks, AK. From October until April there is regularly snow that can quite effectively cover lane markings for days or months at a time. For example: I noticed this morning, only because the packed snow and ice had finally worn away enough to make the markings faintly visible, that I was driving through a painted median. A week ago I noticed three cars side-by-side to make left turns into two receiving lanes because snow had obscured the lane markings; they worked it out when the light changed and nobody died.

Three years ago, as the traffic & safety engineer, I was designing the signs and markings for a rural two-lane road that hadn't been previously paved. One discussion was the necessity of the inclusion of longitudinal markings. In the end, we painted the center lines and excluded the edge lines.

In the US, the MUTCD establishes a base requirement for center line markings on roads "that have a traveled way of 20 feet or more in width and an ADT of 6,000 vehicles per day or greater" or on two-way roads "that have three or more lanes for moving motor vehicle traffic." On many roads, center lane lines are already optional and their exclusion isn't an inherent problem. I might argue differently about reactionary idiots, however.

FYI, from what I have read, the TS level documents had to do with HUMINT. It is classified from the source, but somewhere along the lines the classification was removed. Whoever removed the markings is in deep shit, as that is a serious federal crime.

https://www.google.com/search?...
(pick your source, some people don't like many sources for some reason...)

HUMINT is always TS - HCS, as the release of such data would lead to the asset becoming exposed and either killed or jailed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This was a serious breach, and as an "Original Classification Authority", Hillary was expected to understand what should and shouldn't be classified, so either she is incompetent, or negligent, or she was intentionally breaking the law.