Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Pie, Election, Alarm
Does he feel like Reese Witherspoon? Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier writes "After many years of trying, Branden Robinson has finally won the Debian Project Leader election. Linux Magazine has an in-depth interview with Robinson about his plans as DPL, the problems that face Debian, and what it's like to finally win the election."
(We mentioned Robinson's election a few days ago.)
In lieu of perfection, fixability is a good start. gyardley writes "After discovering that a company called United Virtualities was making use of Flash's Local Shared Objects to silently restore my deleted cookies, I decided to combat this marketer behavior with a Firefox extension.
Objection 0.1 adds a 'Local Shared Objects' line to Firefox's Options > Privacy panel, allowing you to delete them as easily as you'd delete cookies. It's still pretty rudimentary - all or nothing deletion, working on Windows only - but Slashdotters are more than welcome to improve it. Since Local Shared Objects have the same functionality as cookies, we need the same amount of control over them as we do over cookies - and built into the browser, not tucked away in some obscure Macromedia page."
Sure, come on in, there's still some punch and snacks left, I think. orv writes "The Unichrome project has issued a response to VIA's recent open source announcement covered on Slashdot.
The response (and further comment) clarifies the current Unichrome driver situation and whilst welcoming VIA's move suggests that VIA should become more involved in existing open source projects rather than simply issuing repeated grand sounding press releases. The Unichrome project has provided and supported a full open source driver, including MPEG support, for the Unichrome and Unichrome Pro chipsets for the past two years."
But this implies that 'perky' is the desired state. dhalsim2 writes "Yahoo reports of a Smart Alarm Clock Set for Perky Wakeups. On the heels of Clocky comes this new alarm clock that will monitor a sleeper's brain waves to determine the best time to wake him up. The device uses a microprocessor within a headband that wirelessly transmits brainwaves to the clock. When the person is in a light sleep and is likely to wake up 'perky,' the alarm will go off. Brain wave monitoring? Sounds a lot like Plankton's Plan Z."
on the heels of this, comes news of a Smart Alarm Clock for Perky Wakeups ...
... and then on alternate Tuesdays it doesn't wake you up at all and laughs in an evil way when you finally regain conciousness ... plus it always broadcasts CNN.
Yes, but make sure you don't get the Darth Vader edition of the Smart Alarm Clock for Perky Wakeups.
That one not only reads your brain waves, but instead of adjusting itself to help you, it uses the dark side of alarm clock force to ring just a little bit too much
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The unichrome link is broken:
http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/
I have blogged on this repeatedly and even mentioned a good article which should give some perspective on this whole cookie question. Its not that cookies are such a bad thing when used correctly. Some people dont want to use them and thats fine. For them let them log in repeatedly and see ads that arent relevant or contextual to what they have been doing or watching. Coming up with another way of tracking users isnt the problem. The problem is that users are scared of the tracking. Educate the masses on the benefits and advertisers would see positive results. Who knows maybe they wouldnt have to resort to making ever more annoying advertisements just to try and snare my attention.
But If I wore my tin foil hat, it would be kind of counter productive ....
Wouldn't it?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's already a watch that helps you wake up at the "optimal" time:
http://www.sleeptracker.com/
What if I go to sleep late? Will this thing let me sleep till 2PM? I don't really understand the use of this thing.
If only ATi would release drivers for its cards supporting 3d acceleration on Linux. Never buying from them again.
Hardware hack, anyone?
If you want to make it to work in the morning, you've gotta take the tinfoil hat off before you go to bed. And pay no attention to the black van with the three dozen Pringles cans mounted on the roof. We^H^HThey are not monitoring your dreams. Honest.
Firefox needs to disable third party cookies by default. There's no reason why images/iframes from other(3rd party) domains should be allowed to set cookies. I don't see any reason why 3rd party cookies should be allowed, they are frequently abused and used as web bugs that track your web browsing from site to site.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Something along the lines of:
Slashback: Because you enjoyed these articles the first TWO times around.
or
Slashback: The nice way to say DUPE!!!
or
Slashback: This time we realized we've duped a story before we posted it.
OTOH, what's to prevent unscrupulous editors from going back and editing the topic from Linux, YRO, etc. to Slashback in an attempt to cover their butts?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
I just want a clock that'll make my wife wake up non-grouchy. I'm sure there's a huge market for this device.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
1) I'm never likely to wake up "perky"!
2) I don't need an alarm clock to annoy my spouse -- I can do that just fine all by myself!
3) I've never actually used an alarm clock. I tell myself what time it is and what time I want to get up just before I go to sleep, then I wake myself up at the optimal point in my sleep cycle. Only problem with this is I tend to wake myself up too early!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
it is really annoying to have to mouse over to the button that I choose the most often.
btw, if there is anyway to change this behavior short of recompiling, I would love to know how. :D
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I'm probably not the first one who's thought of this but it seems to me that cookie abuse could be reduced dramatically without affecting most websites by doing the following:
"Disable cookies on all images that are being pulled from another domain."
That is, if a web page grabs an image from another domain (a banner, pixel, etc.) then pull it but don't send any of the cookie information for that image.
I mean isn't that the way that most developers track access across websites? You put a one-pixel image and set the cookie through there. Then by reading the http_refer, you know where they've been and associate it to a single user. To track across sites though, this pixel is usually on a separate domain than the site being accessed.
By the way, I originally thought to disable cookies on all images but realized some servers may do security checking via cookies before sending an image. But there is very little legitimate use for sending cookies on images that are outside the domain.
Also, the same could be said of ANYTHING that is pulled off a different domain including scripts, css, etc. If it is on the same domain, send the cookies. If not, then make the request but don't send the cookies.
I would say precious few sites would depend on this behavior and it shouldn't break anything except for the tracking (which we want to break). Not saying that a site couldn't be made to break on this but I can't think of many reasons why a site would.
By the way, I think cookies are great for the most part. SlashDot uses them, I use them, anything with a login (mostly) uses them. I find it humorous when people insist that cookies are evil and you shouldn't have a single one. You can just as easily fake a cookie for a session by sticking an ID in the URL which, personally, I think is worse. Now your personally identifying tracker is available for all to see.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
or does this guy look alot like the south park creator? - http://www.axonlabs.com/images/ben-whiteboard.jpg
Personally, I don't want anything attached to my head while sleeping that was built by this buncha goobers. - http://www.axonlabs.com/images/group-daniel.jpg
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
(Actually, I find it more disturbing that a Flash object in a web page could access a local webcam or microphone. Has anyone seen this capability in use?)
Thanks to "bigtallmofo" for bringing this to our attention in the previous YRO article. Who knew?
This may beat the 90-minute rule.
Sleep cycles are about 90 minutes long, so setting the alarm at a 90-minute interval from when you fall asleep will make it more likely that you'll wake up on the high side of sleep, and more likely that you'll feel refreshed. The rule fails if something disturbs your sleep pattern, though, which is where this device (if it exists) would be better.
To see anybody associated with Debian quoting "release early and often".
I asked this in the earlier Debian/Ubantu article but I think I was a bit late for it to be seen, so I'll try again.
Is there much of a reason to actually switch from Sarge to Ubantu? Right now I'm running a workstation and a laptop on Sarge. It seems to work very nicely, and it's very up-to-date because I keep it up to date with the Sarge repository, which with the occasional exception (eg. still waiting for x.org), is about as up-to-date as most other distros.
I was quite surprised to see the total bashing of Debian in the earlier article in favour of Ubantu. Complaining about Debain and its slow official releases might be justified for everyone who needs official support, but the only advantages I was really able to discern from people's posts was that the installer is apparently a lot nicer, and that it has official releases more often.
In my case at least, the installer isn't an issue. I already have Sarge installed and configured and it works very well. As a home user running it on my desktop, I'm also not too concerned about the official-ness of the distribution. Although "official support" doesn't yet exist for Sarge, there's stacks of unofficial support out there, whether it comes from the community in general or the Debian maintainers who are looking to keep their packages working.
I'm really just interested if it's worth me bothering to nuke Sarge to try out Ubantu. Is there anything other than its regular official releases and and an installer that makes it worth switching?
I find it easier just to use the Flashblock extension. In the (very rare) event I need to run a Flash display, I just click the play button.