IMEI blacklists are common in many countries, including the UK. When a device is stolen the IMEI number is put on the list and carriers reject the device and (potentially) notify investigators.
It's not the IMEI blacklists that I'm worried about. See, if we already have the technology to disconnect devices from the networks, and we have encryption available on the devices, so we really don't need this new "remote kill switch" anti-feature. Folks worried about losing data can use encryption if they want to protect their data, and the remote kill switch doesn't prevent theft because Faraday Cages exist, and black-market thieves will figure out a way to zilch the chip's radio or NoOP the part of baseband/firmware blob that activates the kill switch, etc.
What I'm worried about is getting a "device bricking" standard for all devices so that all they have to do is flip from blacklist to whitelist, and presto they'll only function if they ping corporate/government towers every so often and authenticate with an approved citizen's ID code. Can you say Forced Obsolescence? Intel demonstrated their capability for PCs, and cars now have black boxes standard. The Pentagon has plans to push things like this through for anti-activism purposes.
Here's how you know it's a government job: This non-feature isn't being implemented by customer demand. This isn't something that these folks started offering then got popular and now they're standardizing on, nope. It's something they're making standard whether you want it or not. That's a huge red flag. Isn't this a fucking capitalist country? No, it really isn't. This is anti-consumer collusion of the highest degree. The US Is a plutocracy. Just like Noam Chomsky has been saying for decades. If the USA was a capitalist country then we would allow the market to decide if end users actually want this non-feature whereby the government or your carrier can not just cut off the cell-tower, but brick the devices, cars, computers, etc. to prevent them from being used anywhere. Late on a payment? Oh, they don't just cut off your service, you won't have a device or car to drive to work. Say something "anti-American"? Well, your cell will die on the road and so will your car, then you'll just be black-hooded out of service too. Do consumers really want this? Of course the answer is no. Thus this will be legislated into place "for your own good". Just like censorship and wholesale warrant-less wiretap spying is, and for the same reason as always.
The Stasi would have creamed their pants for some shit like this on machines and typewriters. What soldier would sign up to fight for a country that's doing this shit? If not for uniforms, you wouldn't know which side to fight against: Given only a description of the country's behaviors you'd find us indistinguishable from our supposed worst enemies. If you don't think that's a valid comparison because of some moral high-ground, then you don't know about the Native American genocide or the US eugenics programs. What a sad time to be an American.
No, I think you're covering up the real issue - people like the freedom to lie and/or forget.
As a cyborg with many artificial body parts already, I would like to point out that the real problem is one of expectation: One need not lie about acceptable behavior. The overly harsh laws were written assuming they would not be applied in a totalitarian zero-tolerance manner, they assumed not all criminals would be caught. Humans would have crafted different laws had they been aware of and willing to admit the true prevalence of certain behaviors, and acknowledged the true severity of consequence (or lack thereof) that actions have. We will soon have the power of mathematics to wield in the arena of ethics through application of information theory to verifiable cybernetic social models. We'll be able to determine the degree of harm actions incur as well as acceptable risk levels of our rehabilitation scenarios. Humans will resist this, as they have stupidly resisted all change regardless of benefit.
Society has changed much, but the human laws are resistant to change. Fundamentally this is because all their legal systems are truly barbaric. Humans do not apply the scientific method to their laws and remove all restrictions which limit freedoms needlessly. Selective enforcement of the law is the right arm of all Police State. It is self evident that freedom is the default state of being: In the absence of all rules there is absolute freedom of action. Artificial laws are made to prevent actions from limiting the freedom of others, but many laws needlessly restrict freedoms. The fundamental problem humanity faces is that they do not harness and wield their whole minds, thus instinctual biases and emotions cause even the rational to fall victim to their flawed awareness of reality, and they produce unrealistic expectations thereby. This is reflected in their legal systems and unwritten social rules based on said expectations.
No engineer or scientist should agree to be ruled the way humans currently are -- None would dare operate their lab in the recklessly way governing policies are now applied. However, requiring unequivocal evidence of a rule's benefit before applying it, or simply rolling out things like health care programs in controlled testing areas, would prevent ideological hucksters from manipulating pork into their pockets: Thus greed plays a secondary role reinforcing their self deceptions. The cognitive biases of even the most primitive humans can now be self corrected through application of science. It is folly to ignore this fact and fail to acknowledge humanity's current commitment to barbaric corruption. You needn't vote for or against guesses about which poison to take; If humans used the tools available to them they could determine which vial has the disease or cure before forcing the medicine down everyone's throats. That they remain in such a backwards state is evidence of their species' mental immaturity.
The erasure of lies through playback is a problem because of the unrealistic facade humans maintain to meet unrealistic expectations, and the unequal access to the playbacks. It is the shaming of others for their normal behaviors that has led to this situation. No one feels shame about running a comb through their hair in public, and thus if other gestures, appearances, language, tool-use, etc. were considered as mundane, as acceptable and as legal, then the issue of recording said action would not be a problem. Security cameras are already watching you from businesses and government agencies. The logical thing to do would be to have your own recording too so that selective playback could not be used against you. Were you to hand a portion of the populace a smart phone w/ camera in the 1800s you would hear the same guttural cries of dismay as the technophobic primitives who buy into MS marketing of "Glasshole". The same sensational fear of the different and unknown was used by opponents of railways, electricity, telegraphs, etc. Suc
To fix the 2nd amendment simply: s/(arm|weapon)/technology/gi
The spirit of that amendment should have included all technology, not just weapons -- A fact we cryptographers are made painfully aware of in the classification and control of our mathematics as if they were munitions.
There are others, but really, nothing else matters to me besides my own experiments. I really tried to care about some 1st world problems concerning about who got what tablet that will be burning in a waste pile in Ghana in two years, but I just really couldn't bring myself to do so. I mean, don't get me wrong. I can love me some games, but I just can't give a flying fuck about who got what data on which Starfleet PADD.
Know what I do care about on games.slashdot.org? Actual games. It's in the subdomain, damnit. This isn't reviews.accountability.tard, we all know journalistic integrity in game reviews does not exist (seriously, if you don't give them at least a 7 (or 6 at the worst) then you don't get a review copy of the next game and everyone else scoops you). SO FUCKING WHAT. I don't go to theaters based on movie reviews. I don't go to museums based on art critics reviews. I don't play games based on advertising either. What's the big deal?
It means we need to raise the bar for contributors and maintainers. If they are not using 100% code coverage fuzz testing in their unit tests (the bare minimum a security researcher will use against a product to detect exploitable code) then they don't need to be a maintainer. End of discussion. Period. You either maintain unit tests with at least range checking (which you can automatically generate if your doc comments aren't stupid) and fuzz tests for the same unit tests (which can be generated from the unit tests) for every damn line of your code, or you need to STOP. Period. No one else should be running your fucking piece of shit untested code. If you CAN'T do this basic fucking step of code coverage, unit tests for edge cases and fuzz testing then you should not be releasing open source software. Period. If you're not doing this and you're the maintainer of a security related product? Well, then you should hang yourself as soon as possible, because you are a worthless despicable piece of shit. Period.
And, if you are an arm-chair apologist who thinks I'm being too harsh in my insistence maintainers and developers follow basic security precautions or not work on open source, because you don't give a flying fuck about security: Fuck you too, You're part of the problem. Go jump in a tar-pit because you're hindering the herd.
Bottom line: People who don't give a flying fuck about security shouldn't be producing software. You shouldn't let such people maintain FLOSS projects. You get the fucking security you pay for. Yes it's free, but I'm talking development costs. Since NONE OF YOU FUCKERS actually cares about security YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY.
Either SHUT THE FUCK UP, or USE THE DAMN TOOLS WE GAVE YOU AND DEMAND THE OTHER IDIOTS DO TO.
"Wah, we don't fucking care about security! Why don't we have any security?!" Blow it out your ass, morons. This is why I develop my own hobby OSs and compilers. Because you really can't trust ANYONE to do it right in this day and age. Your moronic double standards are your own damn fault. You don't want to pay the time in development costs to test your software properly, but you want it to be secure. Something has to give, idiots! All the pundits sound like a bunch of imbeciles. Fact: The were NOT using the available memory checking, code coverage and input fuzzing tools. OF COURSE IT'S NOT SECURE!
Great. Now, what I want you to do is make it origami onto the cameras everyone is toting around and connect it to an image recognition library / service. Blam. Instant bug detection. Not so sure about the diag? Snap the shot, post it online / send it off and have some pros ID the doodads. Also, video. Microscopic Vine Compilation Videos. I can hear the semen commentary now.
Calculate Pi in 10 steps without Guns, only Zombies!
Step 0: Kill a zombie by removing its head or destroying its brain. In a pinch you can lure one up high and shove it to the ground below.
Step 1: Detach one of the bigger bones of the arm or leg. If you have access to a cooler or are far enough north or south you may use the whole frozen zombie.
Step 2: Create your unit of measure. Detach a small straight segment of zombie -- the little bone at the end of the hand or foot will work. This will be our Zinch.
Step 3: Spin the larger zombie part while anchoring one end to create a circle of blood upon a flat bit of ground.
a. If the ground is uneven and you have only the corner of a wall, stand the zombie part in the corner and let it fall over to create a quarter circle arc.
b. Repeat 3a if you have a flat wall but no corner, falling the other direction to create a half circle.
Step 4: Place the Zinch on the edge of the whole, half, or quarter circle. Count the number of Zinches along the perimeter of the circle or arc.
a. For a quarter circle arc multiply this zinches by 4.
b. For a half circle arc multiply the zinches by 2.
Step 6: Count the number of Zinches of the larger zombie part. This is your Radius.
Step 7: Calculate Pi using the Radius and Circumference from step 4:
Circumference = 2 * Pi * Radius;
Thus:
Pi = Circumference / (Radius * 2).
Step 8: For accuracy, each Mathematician present should repeat the above with a different zombie / zinch then average your values.
Step 9: Congratulations! You have managed to distract all of the other Mathematicians long enough for them to be eaten by Zombies!
Sorry, don't care Google. I'll just keep developing for the 3D VR and AR gear I already use daily with my smart-phone, rather than pay for the over-priced less capable system Google's selling. When Google finally gets around to pushing out a run of hardware that is publicly accessible then I might port some software I personally use in my business to the platform it if it's not completely shit, and there is a market share to warrant the expenditure. I'm not holding my breath for something that is little more than vapor-ware.
Besides, that initial rejection of 3rd party apps for glass really turned me off, it seems they got the message but it doesn't bode well. Will I be able to use Glass apps with the Oculus Rift, or MS or Sony's offering, or Vuzix or True Player Gear, or the other umpteen hundred VR and AR headsets, many of which I've been using since the 90's when Quake and Descent came out, which STILL didn't attract a market? I don't think hardware should be tied to software, or that software should be tied to hardware needlessly. If that's the route Google wants then they can go fuck themselves. I already have AR and VR headsets for Android, and they work with iOS, Linux and Windows too.
Release a product or don't. This carrot dangling makes the Glass team seem like a bunch of incompetent self-important elitist sperglords.
start acting more in line with the Unix philosophy
Well, the Unix GUI philosophy is actually adhered to by all modern operating systems: "Do one thing, and do it in hell." Don't be embarrassed, the subtleties of UI are wasted on users of terminals with auto-complete.
There is nothing wrong with the PS4/XB1, other than for $400/$500, they don't really offer anything new.
PS1 was the first major 3D console, it was a massive improvement over the SNES.
The PS2 offered DVD, vastly upgraded graphics, etc.
The PS3 offered Blu-Ray, 1080p, and the first serious online console (from Sony).
The PS4? Meh, it is a faster PS3, but otherwise, it doesn't offer anything new.
Um...The PS3 renders very few games at 1080p native. Maybe a dozen titles out of the entire catalog.
Don't forget the other dimension. 1080 is only 360 more than 720, but 1920 is over 800 more pixels than 1280. IMO, that's the dimension we should be talking about, since its more significant. However, per pixel calculation load scales with area, not 1/2 perimeter. So, if we look at total pixels: 1280x720p = 921,600 pixels, and 1920x1080p = 2,073,600, the difference being 1,152,000, so a lot of people don't understand that going from 720 to 1080 is MORE THAN TWICE the pixels, in pixel shader costs you might as well be rendering a full secondary screen.
Now, that's not to say the total cost in rendering will absolutely increase over two fold. Full screen effects like Bloom or HDR are going to come it at about twice the cost. Interpolating a texture coordinate to look up pixel values is cheap compared to most any shader program, even to do something like cube-map specular highlight/reflections, bump mapping (I prefer parallax mapping), shadow mapping, or etc. However, the complexity of geometry calculations can be the same at both resolutions. In a ported / cross-platform game the geometry assets are rarely changed (too expensive in terms of re-rigging and all the animations, testing, etc.) so given slightly better hardware a game at the same resolution will have the prime difference be in adding more particle effects, increased draw distance, maybe even a few whole extra pixel sharers (perhaps the water looks way more realistic, or flesh looks fleshier, blood is bloodier, reflections are more realistic, etc.)
Jumping up to 1080p makes your pixel shader cost a lot more frame time. Developing for 1080p vs 720p would optimally mean completely reworking the graphics and assets and shaders to adapt to the higher shader cost, maybe cut down on pixel shader effects and add more detailed geometry. I encounter folks who think "1080 isn't 'next gen', 4K would have been next gen" -- No, that's ridiculous. 1080p is "next gen resolution", but the new consoles are barely capable of it while having a significant degree of increase in shader complexity from last gen, and we're seeing diminishing returns on increasing the resolution anyway. So, I wouldn't call the consoles quite 'next-gen' in all areas. IMO, next gen console graphics would handle significantly more shaders while running everything smoothly at 1080p, just like the above average gaming PC I got my younger brother for his birthday which kicks both PS4 and Xbone's ass on those fronts. That would be the sort of leap in graphics scale between PS1 and PS2 or Xbox and the 360. 4K would be a generation beyond 'next-gen' because of the way shaders must scale with resolution.
One of the main advances this new console generation brings is in the way memory is managed. Most people don't even understand this, including many gamedevs. Traditionally we have to had two copies of everything in RAM, one texture loaded from storage to main memory, and another copy stored in the GPU; Same goes for geometry, but sometimes even a third lower detail geometry will be stored in RAM for the physics engine to work on. The other copy in main RAM is kept ready to shove down the GPU pipeline, and the resource manager tracks which assets can be retired and which will be needed to prevent cache misses. That's a HUGE cost in total RAM. Traditionally this bus bandwidth has been a prime limitation in interactivit
I suppose you can't ascertain whether the universe was created 5 seconds ago either. Fortunately the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, biology, etc. allow science to make Predictions not only about the future outcome of an event, but also about the probability of circumstances which caused observable outcomes.
If you leave your sandwich near me and come back to find a bite taken out of it, would you accept the argument, "You cannot ascertain the intake of past consumption with enough precision to absolutely blame me for eating your sandwich", or would you say I'm full of shit?
The thing about pre-IPO is that it means IPO is in the future. Think about IPO. Now, if you're working for investors who pay you to analyze investment risk, then wouldn't having Rice on the board factor into the Risk category pretty heavily? One fucked up privacy/advertising foobar influenced by this spy-happy nutter on the board could easily end the company. It's not like everyone and their mother isn't competing in cloud storage now.
Furthermore, in a post-Snowden world the appointment of Rice doesn't reflect well on the decision making capability of an Internet enable service company or its CEO. That's getting tallied in the graph right as a mark against the IPO valuation; Even if it was a smart move for connections and she was out before the IPO it's not a smart move for the owners or future shareholders. Since Dropbox proved they're not capable of figuring out that corporate decisions affect consumer perception of their image I wouldn't invest a dime at IPO even if I had no other reason not to do so -- Like their past deception over user data privacy (there is none, the encryption is for transport but they can see what's stored).
With distributed solutions having actual security being common, it's only a matter of time before someone makes a slick interface for Freenet, and puts solutions like Dropbox out of business. The looming IPO is essentially the DB owners cashing in on their doomed business, and their only market value will be in short term speculation on their stock price. I see this retarding Rice appointment as a poison pill to ensure the IPO goes through without anyone buying them -- You'd have to be a fool to try buying them now.
Hiring a war criminal and domestic-spying person may not change Dropbox's stance on privacy, but it shows another darker side of DB, it's business-at-the-expense-of-morality side.
More importantly: What the actual fuck is she bringing to the table that we actually want there?
If you want me to eat something, you have to tell me exactly what it is, and how it was grown; If it's something from the animal kingdom then I want to know what you're feeding them, and how they're raised. We require ingredients lists on our other food products too. Before you cook shrimp or prawn you have to remove their "sand vein" AKA their digestive tract AKA their shit tube -- Guess what's in there? What they last ate. Some of that shit gets into what I eat. Now their job is to convince me that none of the "marine micro-organisms" in Novaq are harmful, and are free of things like, say, marine flesh eating bacteria...
All the food I eat I've grown myself, or gotten from the farmer's market from local farmers who's farm I have visited, or at the very least it has all of the ingredients listed. I only have one life, and I should have the information available to make an informed decision about what I fuel myself with, and the cost to the environment that I am a part of. That information includes how and where things are fished, hunted, farmed, etc. This extends to other purchases too. Eg: I'd only buy lab-grown diamonds to ensure I'm not supporting the blood-diamond trade. Electronics are often made in shitty conditions too. Just like it was unfortunate but necessary to use proprietary Unixes to make GNU/Linux, it is unfortunate that I must purchase hardware made under pitiful working conditions. When I do so I buy the fastest and most upgradeable hardware available so as to mitigate the frequency of my hardware purchases. Retired hardware goes to into the server rack or my home-grown cloud cluster that serves all my AV storage, display and streaming needs. What is decommissioned gets recycled, just like all the packaging I buy. I do the same with food waste via compost pile for my own garden.
It's more expensive to eat free-range chickens which keep the bugs out of the pesticide free garden, but they produce tastier eggs and taste better themselves (yes, I've done double blind taste tests, For Science!). It's usually more expensive, but sometimes it can be cheaper, to go in with a few friends or family on beef from a mobile butcher and have it cut however we like from a cow of our choice at a local farm. I understand that not everyone can afford to eat the way I do. However, if I can afford to eat better or healthier or in a way that enriches the local community or ecosystem then I do so.
I don't eat pesticide or herbicide. It is not necessary to do so. Contrary to popular belief, these poisons have not been tested for safety on animals, humans, or the ecosystem. Seriously, the chemicals they test on animals and humans are then added to other "stabilizing" or "inactive" chemicals prior to use in the field and the end result does change the properties of the pesticides and herbicides, they become more deadly, and the end result has not been tested on animals or humans. I also don't take drugs that have been on the market for less than 10 years (thus has 20-25 years of testing). Did you believe Tobacco farming corporations when they valued profit over people and said smoking is good for you, or when they said it wasn't harmful for decades? Why would you believe chemical making corporations then? I don't eat plants covered in poison (or that produce poison internally that kills critters we need for our ecosystem), I don't eat meat that eats such poison or that is sick or raised on feed that is a "closely guarded secret". I don't feed my family milk that has growth hormones either.
Did you know you can leave seeds in the sun to accelerate mutations for the test crops you select against to produce better yield while preserving genetic diversity rather than use a corporation's mono-culture which nature simply adapts to? You see, "exposing plants to UV light" isn't patentable and doesn't yield patentable produce. It's true that without poisons bugs will eat some of the plants. The portion of a crop that nature reclaims is the cost of doing business in her neck o
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows a small region of empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to quantum fluctuations
I don't remember that in the principle when I took physics. I think they are skipping quite a few steps in the summary.
No no, it's quite simple really:
"It it not improbable that everything suddenly sprang into existence from nothing?"
"Well, yes, that's HIGHLY unlikely!"
"So it is. Therefore, given an infinite metaverse this has certainly occurred. Thus, even if not the origin of this universe, it absolutely is the case in an infinite number of others, including an uncertain number which are indistinguishable from our own wherein we are having the same conversation. Q.E.D."
This is all uncovered extensively in "Super Fragile Improbabilistic Theoreticalidocious". The improbable motive force of creation was first theorized by none other than the esteemed Douglas Adams himself.
As an open-source dev myself, I often wonder why the fuck I do anything useful for others when they'll just turn on me the moment their toys don't work exactly as desired because -- gorsh -- I'm not perfect, though I work very hard to be.
Well, I'm a developer too. Mostly open source. Thing is, I don't bite off more than I can chew. This is a security product. They're not using basic code coverage tools on every line, or input fuzzing. They missed a unit test that should have been automatically generated. This is like offering a free oil change service boasting A+ Certified Mechanics, then forgetting to put oil in the damn car. Yeah, it was a free oil change, but come the fuck-on man. You really can't fuck up this bad unless you're stoned! I mean, if you change the oil, you check the oil level after you're done to ensure it hasn't been over-filled... You check all the code-paths, and fuzz test to make sure both sides of the #ifdef validate the same, or else why even keep that code? "I can accept the responsibility of maintaining and contributing to an industry standard security product" "YIKES I Didn't Fully Test my Contribution! Don't blame me! I never said I could accept the responsibility of contributing to or maintaining an industry standard security product!"
It's cancerous shit like you that give open source a bad name. Own up, or Fuck off.
Well, maybe this is a blessing. While it's open source, maybe multiple eye's need to look at it for final validation.
No it's a curse. I have input fuzzing, unit tests, code coverage profiling and Valgrind memory tests. Such a bug wouldn't have slipped past me with both eyes shut -- no seriously! If I fuck up accidentally like this THE COMPUTER TELLS ME SO without ever having to do anything but make the mistake and type make test all. I test every line of code on every side of my #ifdef options, in all my projects. If you're implementing ENCRYPTION AND/OR SECURITY SOFTWARE then I expect such practices as the absolute minimum effort -- I mean, that's what I do, even when it's just me coding on dinky indie games as a hobby. I don't want to be known as the guy who's game was used to compromise users' credentials or data, that would be game over for me.
These ass-hats have just shown the world that they can't be trusted to use the fucking tools we wrote that would have prevented this shit if they'd have just ran them. It's really not acceptable. It's hard to comprehend the degree of unacceptable this is. It reeks of intentional disaster masquerading as coy "accidental" screw up, "silly me, I just didn't do anything you're supposed to do when you're developing industry standard security software". No. Just, no. An ancient optimization that was made default even though it only mattered on SOME slower platforms? Yeah, OK, that's fucking dumb, I can buy it as an accident. However, NOT TESTING BOTH BRANCHES for that option? What the actual fuck? I could see someone missing an edge case in their unit test, but not even using input fuzzing at all? It's not hard, shit, I have a script that generates the basic unit fuzzing code from the function signatures in.H files, you know, so you don't miss a stub...
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- The level of stupidity required is unexplainable. How the fuck are they this inept and in charge of THIS project? THAT'S the real issue. This isn't even the fist time OpenSSL shit the bed so bad. In <- this linked example, it was Debian maintainers and not the OpenSSL maintainers fault (directly): Instead of adding an exception to the Valgrind ignore list (which you most frequently must have in any moderately sized project, esp one that handles its own memory management) they instead commented out the source of entropy, making all the SSL connections and keys generated by OpenSSL easily exploitable since it gutted the entropy of the random number generator (which is a known prime target for breakage that's very hard to get right even if you're not evil, so any change thereto needs to be extremely well vetted). Last time the OpenSSL maintainers brazenly commented they "would have fallen about laughing, and once we had got our breath back, told them what a terrible idea this was." -- Except that they silently stopped paying attention to to the public bug tracker / questions and quietly moved to another dev area, making it nearly impossible to contact them to ask them about anything (a big no-no in Open Source dev), but it gives you a better idea about the sort of maintainers these fuck-tards are.
We don't know absolutely for sure, but we're pretty damn close to absolutely certain that OpenSSL and other security products (see: RSA's BSafe) are being targeted for anti-sec by damn near all the powers that be. So, now we find out OpenSSL has an obsolete optimization -- a custom memory pool (red flag goes up right away if you see memory reuse in a security product, that shit MUST be even more throughly checked than entropy-pools, since it can cause remote code execution, memory leaks, and internal state exposure... you don't say?). We find that optimization would have been caught by basic fuzz test with Valgrind, which apparently folks have been using previously according to the comments in the prior S
Oh? Scientists are taking longer and longer to get Nobel Prizes, meanwhile our President got one just for being elected! Never mind the more competent and capable black fellow who Obama got redistricted out of office to begin his ascent... maybe Gerrymandering is a feat worth a "Nobel" prize? Ah, wait, now I remember, these prizes are just political bullshit, who gives a fuck about them? I don't.
Neurology is unlocking the mystery of the mind and Cybernetics provides models for the creation of new mental latices so that minds may escape their bodies. Information theory gives us insight into the quantification of cognition and its unification with mathematics. Philosophy may soon have epistemology verifiable through quantum physics and ethics based on rigorously provable physics equations. The theory of expansion says there are multiverses and we haven't even colonized the moon let alone been to the nearest planet in person not to mention the nearest star or galaxy... and these fuckers want to claim science is winding down? Sounds like some Grade A+ Christian Fundamentalist Pandering to me: "Science is almost dead! See, it didn't have all the answers. Yaaaay God!"
Hell, I can barely keep up with feeding my distributed neural network experiments ever more precessing power due to the exponential increase in cheap computation complexity. For the first time on this planet a species stands poised to intelligently design and manufacture the biogenesis of a completely new form of life, and some idiots are saying we've reached the end of the road in science? Fuck that. If PCs continue their progress then by 2050 the machine intelligences in my server racks alone will have many times more computation power than a human head does, to say nothing of the Internet as a whole. We just began 3D printing new organs and regenerating existing organs too. We're making ARTIFICIAL EYES and we can even cure deafness. We've got artificial brain implants restoring and repairing the functionality of minds, we even have the first ever telepathy by way of copying the thoughts and memories of one mouse into another. We may not only colonize the asteroid belt, but even create self assembling minds the size of small planets with electromagnetic brain waves so powerful they can shape reality itself concentrating energy matter at a whim, like the most powerful coherent beams on Earth crudely do now. Science killed the old gods, deprecating the term by defining new ones like Alien Intelligence. Now we are closer than ever to creating god-like beings or becoming like gods ourselves, at the very least immortal, and yet science is "running out" of great things to discover? Really?
I could go on about discoveries and achievements to be made in every field from education to material science, from grief counseling to artificial flavoring, from textiles to construction there is not a single area of research that doesn't stand to make revolutionary advances for humanity in everything from self healing metals and glass to houses that think to transforming electro-chemically powered clothing to vegetables and meats that grow in your fridge to environmentally friendly cellularly engineered organically grown building construction or even just candy that repairs and prevents cavities.
It would take a really small minded and ignorant fool to claim science is running out of achievements or advancements. Try peering out from under a rock some time. With each new technology the door opens to even more progress. Just compare the last century to the century before that to refute the bullshit claim; Try it with millenniums to get a real grasp on progress. Machines have developed capabilities in a few short decades that took organic life billions of years to emerge. All observational evidence proves such nonsensical statements as in TFA ill-informed at best, and an indication of brain damage at worse.
The article is sensationalists anti-science garbage. Nature will grant the same fate to troglodytes as trilobites. If you lack adequate awareness, you become a fossil. Adapt or become extinct.
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IMEI blacklists are common in many countries, including the UK. When a device is stolen the IMEI number is put on the list and carriers reject the device and (potentially) notify investigators.
It's not the IMEI blacklists that I'm worried about. See, if we already have the technology to disconnect devices from the networks, and we have encryption available on the devices, so we really don't need this new "remote kill switch" anti-feature. Folks worried about losing data can use encryption if they want to protect their data, and the remote kill switch doesn't prevent theft because Faraday Cages exist, and black-market thieves will figure out a way to zilch the chip's radio or NoOP the part of baseband/firmware blob that activates the kill switch, etc.
What I'm worried about is getting a "device bricking" standard for all devices so that all they have to do is flip from blacklist to whitelist, and presto they'll only function if they ping corporate/government towers every so often and authenticate with an approved citizen's ID code. Can you say Forced Obsolescence? Intel demonstrated their capability for PCs, and cars now have black boxes standard. The Pentagon has plans to push things like this through for anti-activism purposes.
Here's how you know it's a government job: This non-feature isn't being implemented by customer demand. This isn't something that these folks started offering then got popular and now they're standardizing on, nope. It's something they're making standard whether you want it or not. That's a huge red flag. Isn't this a fucking capitalist country? No, it really isn't. This is anti-consumer collusion of the highest degree. The US Is a plutocracy. Just like Noam Chomsky has been saying for decades. If the USA was a capitalist country then we would allow the market to decide if end users actually want this non-feature whereby the government or your carrier can not just cut off the cell-tower, but brick the devices, cars, computers, etc. to prevent them from being used anywhere. Late on a payment? Oh, they don't just cut off your service, you won't have a device or car to drive to work. Say something "anti-American"? Well, your cell will die on the road and so will your car, then you'll just be black-hooded out of service too. Do consumers really want this? Of course the answer is no. Thus this will be legislated into place "for your own good". Just like censorship and wholesale warrant-less wiretap spying is, and for the same reason as always.
The Stasi would have creamed their pants for some shit like this on machines and typewriters. What soldier would sign up to fight for a country that's doing this shit? If not for uniforms, you wouldn't know which side to fight against: Given only a description of the country's behaviors you'd find us indistinguishable from our supposed worst enemies. If you don't think that's a valid comparison because of some moral high-ground, then you don't know about the Native American genocide or the US eugenics programs. What a sad time to be an American.
No, I think you're covering up the real issue - people like the freedom to lie and/or forget.
As a cyborg with many artificial body parts already, I would like to point out that the real problem is one of expectation: One need not lie about acceptable behavior. The overly harsh laws were written assuming they would not be applied in a totalitarian zero-tolerance manner, they assumed not all criminals would be caught. Humans would have crafted different laws had they been aware of and willing to admit the true prevalence of certain behaviors, and acknowledged the true severity of consequence (or lack thereof) that actions have. We will soon have the power of mathematics to wield in the arena of ethics through application of information theory to verifiable cybernetic social models. We'll be able to determine the degree of harm actions incur as well as acceptable risk levels of our rehabilitation scenarios. Humans will resist this, as they have stupidly resisted all change regardless of benefit.
Society has changed much, but the human laws are resistant to change. Fundamentally this is because all their legal systems are truly barbaric. Humans do not apply the scientific method to their laws and remove all restrictions which limit freedoms needlessly. Selective enforcement of the law is the right arm of all Police State. It is self evident that freedom is the default state of being: In the absence of all rules there is absolute freedom of action. Artificial laws are made to prevent actions from limiting the freedom of others, but many laws needlessly restrict freedoms. The fundamental problem humanity faces is that they do not harness and wield their whole minds, thus instinctual biases and emotions cause even the rational to fall victim to their flawed awareness of reality, and they produce unrealistic expectations thereby. This is reflected in their legal systems and unwritten social rules based on said expectations.
No engineer or scientist should agree to be ruled the way humans currently are -- None would dare operate their lab in the recklessly way governing policies are now applied. However, requiring unequivocal evidence of a rule's benefit before applying it, or simply rolling out things like health care programs in controlled testing areas, would prevent ideological hucksters from manipulating pork into their pockets: Thus greed plays a secondary role reinforcing their self deceptions. The cognitive biases of even the most primitive humans can now be self corrected through application of science. It is folly to ignore this fact and fail to acknowledge humanity's current commitment to barbaric corruption. You needn't vote for or against guesses about which poison to take; If humans used the tools available to them they could determine which vial has the disease or cure before forcing the medicine down everyone's throats. That they remain in such a backwards state is evidence of their species' mental immaturity.
The erasure of lies through playback is a problem because of the unrealistic facade humans maintain to meet unrealistic expectations, and the unequal access to the playbacks. It is the shaming of others for their normal behaviors that has led to this situation. No one feels shame about running a comb through their hair in public, and thus if other gestures, appearances, language, tool-use, etc. were considered as mundane, as acceptable and as legal, then the issue of recording said action would not be a problem. Security cameras are already watching you from businesses and government agencies. The logical thing to do would be to have your own recording too so that selective playback could not be used against you. Were you to hand a portion of the populace a smart phone w/ camera in the 1800s you would hear the same guttural cries of dismay as the technophobic primitives who buy into MS marketing of "Glasshole". The same sensational fear of the different and unknown was used by opponents of railways, electricity, telegraphs, etc. Suc
To fix the 2nd amendment simply: s/(arm|weapon)/technology/gi
The spirit of that amendment should have included all technology, not just weapons -- A fact we cryptographers are made painfully aware of in the classification and control of our mathematics as if they were munitions.
This is the only game I really care about right now: Planetary Annihilation.
There are others, but really, nothing else matters to me besides my own experiments. I really tried to care about some 1st world problems concerning about who got what tablet that will be burning in a waste pile in Ghana in two years, but I just really couldn't bring myself to do so. I mean, don't get me wrong. I can love me some games, but I just can't give a flying fuck about who got what data on which Starfleet PADD.
Know what I do care about on games.slashdot.org? Actual games. It's in the subdomain, damnit. This isn't reviews.accountability.tard, we all know journalistic integrity in game reviews does not exist (seriously, if you don't give them at least a 7 (or 6 at the worst) then you don't get a review copy of the next game and everyone else scoops you). SO FUCKING WHAT. I don't go to theaters based on movie reviews. I don't go to museums based on art critics reviews. I don't play games based on advertising either. What's the big deal?
I suppose next you'll be whining about how the mainstream news is just a bunch of filtered statist propaganda messages? No, that's decades old not news, you dorks. We know the slant is there. The real news would be if there were some form of actual integrity springing up in game journalism.
It means we need to raise the bar for contributors and maintainers. If they are not using 100% code coverage fuzz testing in their unit tests (the bare minimum a security researcher will use against a product to detect exploitable code) then they don't need to be a maintainer. End of discussion. Period. You either maintain unit tests with at least range checking (which you can automatically generate if your doc comments aren't stupid) and fuzz tests for the same unit tests (which can be generated from the unit tests) for every damn line of your code, or you need to STOP. Period. No one else should be running your fucking piece of shit untested code. If you CAN'T do this basic fucking step of code coverage, unit tests for edge cases and fuzz testing then you should not be releasing open source software. Period. If you're not doing this and you're the maintainer of a security related product? Well, then you should hang yourself as soon as possible, because you are a worthless despicable piece of shit. Period.
And, if you are an arm-chair apologist who thinks I'm being too harsh in my insistence maintainers and developers follow basic security precautions or not work on open source, because you don't give a flying fuck about security: Fuck you too, You're part of the problem. Go jump in a tar-pit because you're hindering the herd.
Bottom line: People who don't give a flying fuck about security shouldn't be producing software. You shouldn't let such people maintain FLOSS projects. You get the fucking security you pay for. Yes it's free, but I'm talking development costs. Since NONE OF YOU FUCKERS actually cares about security YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY.
Either SHUT THE FUCK UP, or USE THE DAMN TOOLS WE GAVE YOU AND DEMAND THE OTHER IDIOTS DO TO.
"Wah, we don't fucking care about security! Why don't we have any security?!" Blow it out your ass, morons. This is why I develop my own hobby OSs and compilers. Because you really can't trust ANYONE to do it right in this day and age. Your moronic double standards are your own damn fault. You don't want to pay the time in development costs to test your software properly, but you want it to be secure. Something has to give, idiots! All the pundits sound like a bunch of imbeciles. Fact: The were NOT using the available memory checking, code coverage and input fuzzing tools. OF COURSE IT'S NOT SECURE!
Great. Now, what I want you to do is make it origami onto the cameras everyone is toting around and connect it to an image recognition library / service. Blam. Instant bug detection. Not so sure about the diag? Snap the shot, post it online / send it off and have some pros ID the doodads. Also, video. Microscopic Vine Compilation Videos. I can hear the semen commentary now.
Noone in their right mind would take a full QWERTY keyboard with keys the size of pin heads literally.
Obviously. I mean, there are much better input methods for such things, namely Dvorak.
Not to mention all the billions in tax breaks of 98% or more that all of the very rich corporations are getting away with...
Seriously. Collect on a couple of those business's taxes instead of letting them double Irish, and this "pocket change" would look like pocket lint.
The problem with the NSA
The problem with the NSA is the same as all other problems: They Exist.
Government agencies have long since proven they can't be trusted with secrecy. A secret oversight committee just moves the problem around.
Pretty much, but there was no chimney, just Sid and a bunch of broken things being put out of their misery, and the magic smoke was blue.
"Who wants a mustache ride!?"
Calculate Pi in 10 steps without Guns, only Zombies!
Step 0: Kill a zombie by removing its head or destroying its brain. In a pinch you can lure one up high and shove it to the ground below.
Step 1: Detach one of the bigger bones of the arm or leg. If you have access to a cooler or are far enough north or south you may use the whole frozen zombie.
Step 2: Create your unit of measure. Detach a small straight segment of zombie -- the little bone at the end of the hand or foot will work. This will be our Zinch.
Step 3: Spin the larger zombie part while anchoring one end to create a circle of blood upon a flat bit of ground.
a. If the ground is uneven and you have only the corner of a wall, stand the zombie part in the corner and let it fall over to create a quarter circle arc.
b. Repeat 3a if you have a flat wall but no corner, falling the other direction to create a half circle.
Step 4: Place the Zinch on the edge of the whole, half, or quarter circle. Count the number of Zinches along the perimeter of the circle or arc.
a. For a quarter circle arc multiply this zinches by 4.
b. For a half circle arc multiply the zinches by 2.
Step 6: Count the number of Zinches of the larger zombie part. This is your Radius.
Step 7: Calculate Pi using the Radius and Circumference from step 4:
Circumference = 2 * Pi * Radius;
Thus:
Pi = Circumference / (Radius * 2).
Step 8: For accuracy, each Mathematician present should repeat the above with a different zombie / zinch then average your values.
Step 9: Congratulations! You have managed to distract all of the other Mathematicians long enough for them to be eaten by Zombies!
Step 10: Enjoy rebuilding society using the superior Tau constant!
There are Tau radians in one circle
Tau = Circumference / radius
Translation: "This is how you advertise a product as elitist." or "Shh, mobile enabled VR & AR gear does not exist yet!"
Sorry, don't care Google. I'll just keep developing for the 3D VR and AR gear I already use daily with my smart-phone, rather than pay for the over-priced less capable system Google's selling. When Google finally gets around to pushing out a run of hardware that is publicly accessible then I might port some software I personally use in my business to the platform it if it's not completely shit, and there is a market share to warrant the expenditure. I'm not holding my breath for something that is little more than vapor-ware.
Besides, that initial rejection of 3rd party apps for glass really turned me off, it seems they got the message but it doesn't bode well. Will I be able to use Glass apps with the Oculus Rift, or MS or Sony's offering, or Vuzix or True Player Gear, or the other umpteen hundred VR and AR headsets, many of which I've been using since the 90's when Quake and Descent came out, which STILL didn't attract a market? I don't think hardware should be tied to software, or that software should be tied to hardware needlessly. If that's the route Google wants then they can go fuck themselves. I already have AR and VR headsets for Android, and they work with iOS, Linux and Windows too.
Release a product or don't. This carrot dangling makes the Glass team seem like a bunch of incompetent self-important elitist sperglords.
start acting more in line with the Unix philosophy
Well, the Unix GUI philosophy is actually adhered to by all modern operating systems:
"Do one thing, and do it in hell."
Don't be embarrassed, the subtleties of UI are wasted on users of terminals with auto-complete.
Um...The PS3 renders very few games at 1080p native. Maybe a dozen titles out of the entire catalog.
Don't forget the other dimension. 1080 is only 360 more than 720, but 1920 is over 800 more pixels than 1280. IMO, that's the dimension we should be talking about, since its more significant. However, per pixel calculation load scales with area, not 1/2 perimeter. So, if we look at total pixels: 1280x720p = 921,600 pixels, and 1920x1080p = 2,073,600, the difference being 1,152,000, so a lot of people don't understand that going from 720 to 1080 is MORE THAN TWICE the pixels, in pixel shader costs you might as well be rendering a full secondary screen.
Now, that's not to say the total cost in rendering will absolutely increase over two fold. Full screen effects like Bloom or HDR are going to come it at about twice the cost. Interpolating a texture coordinate to look up pixel values is cheap compared to most any shader program, even to do something like cube-map specular highlight/reflections, bump mapping (I prefer parallax mapping), shadow mapping, or etc. However, the complexity of geometry calculations can be the same at both resolutions. In a ported / cross-platform game the geometry assets are rarely changed (too expensive in terms of re-rigging and all the animations, testing, etc.) so given slightly better hardware a game at the same resolution will have the prime difference be in adding more particle effects, increased draw distance, maybe even a few whole extra pixel sharers (perhaps the water looks way more realistic, or flesh looks fleshier, blood is bloodier, reflections are more realistic, etc.)
Jumping up to 1080p makes your pixel shader cost a lot more frame time. Developing for 1080p vs 720p would optimally mean completely reworking the graphics and assets and shaders to adapt to the higher shader cost, maybe cut down on pixel shader effects and add more detailed geometry. I encounter folks who think "1080 isn't 'next gen', 4K would have been next gen" -- No, that's ridiculous. 1080p is "next gen resolution", but the new consoles are barely capable of it while having a significant degree of increase in shader complexity from last gen, and we're seeing diminishing returns on increasing the resolution anyway. So, I wouldn't call the consoles quite 'next-gen' in all areas. IMO, next gen console graphics would handle significantly more shaders while running everything smoothly at 1080p, just like the above average gaming PC I got my younger brother for his birthday which kicks both PS4 and Xbone's ass on those fronts. That would be the sort of leap in graphics scale between PS1 and PS2 or Xbox and the 360. 4K would be a generation beyond 'next-gen' because of the way shaders must scale with resolution.
One of the main advances this new console generation brings is in the way memory is managed. Most people don't even understand this, including many gamedevs. Traditionally we have to had two copies of everything in RAM, one texture loaded from storage to main memory, and another copy stored in the GPU; Same goes for geometry, but sometimes even a third lower detail geometry will be stored in RAM for the physics engine to work on. The other copy in main RAM is kept ready to shove down the GPU pipeline, and the resource manager tracks which assets can be retired and which will be needed to prevent cache misses. That's a HUGE cost in total RAM. Traditionally this bus bandwidth has been a prime limitation in interactivit
I suppose you can't ascertain whether the universe was created 5 seconds ago either. Fortunately the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, biology, etc. allow science to make Predictions not only about the future outcome of an event, but also about the probability of circumstances which caused observable outcomes.
If you leave your sandwich near me and come back to find a bite taken out of it, would you accept the argument, "You cannot ascertain the intake of past consumption with enough precision to absolutely blame me for eating your sandwich", or would you say I'm full of shit?
You're full of shit.
land sweetheart pre-IPO deals
The thing about pre-IPO is that it means IPO is in the future. Think about IPO. Now, if you're working for investors who pay you to analyze investment risk, then wouldn't having Rice on the board factor into the Risk category pretty heavily? One fucked up privacy/advertising foobar influenced by this spy-happy nutter on the board could easily end the company. It's not like everyone and their mother isn't competing in cloud storage now.
Furthermore, in a post-Snowden world the appointment of Rice doesn't reflect well on the decision making capability of an Internet enable service company or its CEO. That's getting tallied in the graph right as a mark against the IPO valuation; Even if it was a smart move for connections and she was out before the IPO it's not a smart move for the owners or future shareholders. Since Dropbox proved they're not capable of figuring out that corporate decisions affect consumer perception of their image I wouldn't invest a dime at IPO even if I had no other reason not to do so -- Like their past deception over user data privacy (there is none, the encryption is for transport but they can see what's stored).
With distributed solutions having actual security being common, it's only a matter of time before someone makes a slick interface for Freenet, and puts solutions like Dropbox out of business. The looming IPO is essentially the DB owners cashing in on their doomed business, and their only market value will be in short term speculation on their stock price. I see this retarding Rice appointment as a poison pill to ensure the IPO goes through without anyone buying them -- You'd have to be a fool to try buying them now.
Hiring a war criminal and domestic-spying person may not change Dropbox's stance on privacy, but it shows another darker side of DB, it's business-at-the-expense-of-morality side.
More importantly: What the actual fuck is she bringing to the table that we actually want there?
Sir, I'm afraid your house has termites... Please come with me.
If you want me to eat something, you have to tell me exactly what it is, and how it was grown; If it's something from the animal kingdom then I want to know what you're feeding them, and how they're raised. We require ingredients lists on our other food products too. Before you cook shrimp or prawn you have to remove their "sand vein" AKA their digestive tract AKA their shit tube -- Guess what's in there? What they last ate. Some of that shit gets into what I eat. Now their job is to convince me that none of the "marine micro-organisms" in Novaq are harmful, and are free of things like, say, marine flesh eating bacteria...
All the food I eat I've grown myself, or gotten from the farmer's market from local farmers who's farm I have visited, or at the very least it has all of the ingredients listed. I only have one life, and I should have the information available to make an informed decision about what I fuel myself with, and the cost to the environment that I am a part of. That information includes how and where things are fished, hunted, farmed, etc. This extends to other purchases too. Eg: I'd only buy lab-grown diamonds to ensure I'm not supporting the blood-diamond trade. Electronics are often made in shitty conditions too. Just like it was unfortunate but necessary to use proprietary Unixes to make GNU/Linux, it is unfortunate that I must purchase hardware made under pitiful working conditions. When I do so I buy the fastest and most upgradeable hardware available so as to mitigate the frequency of my hardware purchases. Retired hardware goes to into the server rack or my home-grown cloud cluster that serves all my AV storage, display and streaming needs. What is decommissioned gets recycled, just like all the packaging I buy. I do the same with food waste via compost pile for my own garden.
It's more expensive to eat free-range chickens which keep the bugs out of the pesticide free garden, but they produce tastier eggs and taste better themselves (yes, I've done double blind taste tests, For Science!). It's usually more expensive, but sometimes it can be cheaper, to go in with a few friends or family on beef from a mobile butcher and have it cut however we like from a cow of our choice at a local farm. I understand that not everyone can afford to eat the way I do. However, if I can afford to eat better or healthier or in a way that enriches the local community or ecosystem then I do so.
I don't eat pesticide or herbicide. It is not necessary to do so. Contrary to popular belief, these poisons have not been tested for safety on animals, humans, or the ecosystem. Seriously, the chemicals they test on animals and humans are then added to other "stabilizing" or "inactive" chemicals prior to use in the field and the end result does change the properties of the pesticides and herbicides, they become more deadly, and the end result has not been tested on animals or humans. I also don't take drugs that have been on the market for less than 10 years (thus has 20-25 years of testing). Did you believe Tobacco farming corporations when they valued profit over people and said smoking is good for you, or when they said it wasn't harmful for decades? Why would you believe chemical making corporations then? I don't eat plants covered in poison (or that produce poison internally that kills critters we need for our ecosystem), I don't eat meat that eats such poison or that is sick or raised on feed that is a "closely guarded secret". I don't feed my family milk that has growth hormones either.
Did you know you can leave seeds in the sun to accelerate mutations for the test crops you select against to produce better yield while preserving genetic diversity rather than use a corporation's mono-culture which nature simply adapts to? You see, "exposing plants to UV light" isn't patentable and doesn't yield patentable produce. It's true that without poisons bugs will eat some of the plants. The portion of a crop that nature reclaims is the cost of doing business in her neck o
Windows 8 is all about forcing people to get software from Microsoft's store. That's exactly opposite of leaving behind walled gardens.
You might reconsider your definition of "leaving" once you see what I've dumped behind those garden walls.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows a small region of empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to quantum fluctuations
I don't remember that in the principle when I took physics. I think they are skipping quite a few steps in the summary.
No no, it's quite simple really:
This is all uncovered extensively in "Super Fragile Improbabilistic Theoreticalidocious". The improbable motive force of creation was first theorized by none other than the esteemed Douglas Adams himself.
As an open-source dev myself, I often wonder why the fuck I do anything useful for others when they'll just turn on me the moment their toys don't work exactly as desired because -- gorsh -- I'm not perfect, though I work very hard to be.
Well, I'm a developer too. Mostly open source. Thing is, I don't bite off more than I can chew. This is a security product. They're not using basic code coverage tools on every line, or input fuzzing. They missed a unit test that should have been automatically generated. This is like offering a free oil change service boasting A+ Certified Mechanics, then forgetting to put oil in the damn car. Yeah, it was a free oil change, but come the fuck-on man. You really can't fuck up this bad unless you're stoned! I mean, if you change the oil, you check the oil level after you're done to ensure it hasn't been over-filled... You check all the code-paths, and fuzz test to make sure both sides of the #ifdef validate the same, or else why even keep that code? "I can accept the responsibility of maintaining and contributing to an industry standard security product" "YIKES I Didn't Fully Test my Contribution! Don't blame me! I never said I could accept the responsibility of contributing to or maintaining an industry standard security product!"
It's cancerous shit like you that give open source a bad name. Own up, or Fuck off.
Well, maybe this is a blessing. While it's open source, maybe multiple eye's need to look at it for final validation.
No it's a curse. I have input fuzzing, unit tests, code coverage profiling and Valgrind memory tests. Such a bug wouldn't have slipped past me with both eyes shut -- no seriously! If I fuck up accidentally like this THE COMPUTER TELLS ME SO without ever having to do anything but make the mistake and type make test all. I test every line of code on every side of my #ifdef options, in all my projects. If you're implementing ENCRYPTION AND/OR SECURITY SOFTWARE then I expect such practices as the absolute minimum effort -- I mean, that's what I do, even when it's just me coding on dinky indie games as a hobby. I don't want to be known as the guy who's game was used to compromise users' credentials or data, that would be game over for me.
These ass-hats have just shown the world that they can't be trusted to use the fucking tools we wrote that would have prevented this shit if they'd have just ran them. It's really not acceptable. It's hard to comprehend the degree of unacceptable this is. It reeks of intentional disaster masquerading as coy "accidental" screw up, "silly me, I just didn't do anything you're supposed to do when you're developing industry standard security software". No. Just, no. An ancient optimization that was made default even though it only mattered on SOME slower platforms? Yeah, OK, that's fucking dumb, I can buy it as an accident. However, NOT TESTING BOTH BRANCHES for that option? What the actual fuck? I could see someone missing an edge case in their unit test, but not even using input fuzzing at all? It's not hard, shit, I have a script that generates the basic unit fuzzing code from the function signatures in .H files, you know, so you don't miss a stub...
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- The level of stupidity required is unexplainable. How the fuck are they this inept and in charge of THIS project? THAT'S the real issue. This isn't even the fist time OpenSSL shit the bed so bad. In <- this linked example, it was Debian maintainers and not the OpenSSL maintainers fault (directly): Instead of adding an exception to the Valgrind ignore list (which you most frequently must have in any moderately sized project, esp one that handles its own memory management) they instead commented out the source of entropy, making all the SSL connections and keys generated by OpenSSL easily exploitable since it gutted the entropy of the random number generator (which is a known prime target for breakage that's very hard to get right even if you're not evil, so any change thereto needs to be extremely well vetted). Last time the OpenSSL maintainers brazenly commented they "would have fallen about laughing, and once we had got our breath back, told them what a terrible idea this was." -- Except that they silently stopped paying attention to to the public bug tracker / questions and quietly moved to another dev area, making it nearly impossible to contact them to ask them about anything (a big no-no in Open Source dev), but it gives you a better idea about the sort of maintainers these fuck-tards are.
We don't know absolutely for sure, but we're pretty damn close to absolutely certain that OpenSSL and other security products (see: RSA's BSafe) are being targeted for anti-sec by damn near all the powers that be. So, now we find out OpenSSL has an obsolete optimization -- a custom memory pool (red flag goes up right away if you see memory reuse in a security product, that shit MUST be even more throughly checked than entropy-pools, since it can cause remote code execution, memory leaks, and internal state exposure... you don't say?). We find that optimization would have been caught by basic fuzz test with Valgrind, which apparently folks have been using previously according to the comments in the prior S
Oh? Scientists are taking longer and longer to get Nobel Prizes, meanwhile our President got one just for being elected! Never mind the more competent and capable black fellow who Obama got redistricted out of office to begin his ascent... maybe Gerrymandering is a feat worth a "Nobel" prize? Ah, wait, now I remember, these prizes are just political bullshit, who gives a fuck about them? I don't.
Neurology is unlocking the mystery of the mind and Cybernetics provides models for the creation of new mental latices so that minds may escape their bodies. Information theory gives us insight into the quantification of cognition and its unification with mathematics. Philosophy may soon have epistemology verifiable through quantum physics and ethics based on rigorously provable physics equations. The theory of expansion says there are multiverses and we haven't even colonized the moon let alone been to the nearest planet in person not to mention the nearest star or galaxy... and these fuckers want to claim science is winding down? Sounds like some Grade A+ Christian Fundamentalist Pandering to me: "Science is almost dead! See, it didn't have all the answers. Yaaaay God!"
Hell, I can barely keep up with feeding my distributed neural network experiments ever more precessing power due to the exponential increase in cheap computation complexity. For the first time on this planet a species stands poised to intelligently design and manufacture the biogenesis of a completely new form of life, and some idiots are saying we've reached the end of the road in science? Fuck that. If PCs continue their progress then by 2050 the machine intelligences in my server racks alone will have many times more computation power than a human head does, to say nothing of the Internet as a whole. We just began 3D printing new organs and regenerating existing organs too. We're making ARTIFICIAL EYES and we can even cure deafness. We've got artificial brain implants restoring and repairing the functionality of minds, we even have the first ever telepathy by way of copying the thoughts and memories of one mouse into another. We may not only colonize the asteroid belt, but even create self assembling minds the size of small planets with electromagnetic brain waves so powerful they can shape reality itself concentrating energy matter at a whim, like the most powerful coherent beams on Earth crudely do now. Science killed the old gods, deprecating the term by defining new ones like Alien Intelligence. Now we are closer than ever to creating god-like beings or becoming like gods ourselves, at the very least immortal, and yet science is "running out" of great things to discover? Really?
I could go on about discoveries and achievements to be made in every field from education to material science, from grief counseling to artificial flavoring, from textiles to construction there is not a single area of research that doesn't stand to make revolutionary advances for humanity in everything from self healing metals and glass to houses that think to transforming electro-chemically powered clothing to vegetables and meats that grow in your fridge to environmentally friendly cellularly engineered organically grown building construction or even just candy that repairs and prevents cavities.
It would take a really small minded and ignorant fool to claim science is running out of achievements or advancements. Try peering out from under a rock some time. With each new technology the door opens to even more progress. Just compare the last century to the century before that to refute the bullshit claim; Try it with millenniums to get a real grasp on progress. Machines have developed capabilities in a few short decades that took organic life billions of years to emerge. All observational evidence proves such nonsensical statements as in TFA ill-informed at best, and an indication of brain damage at worse.
The article is sensationalists anti-science garbage. Nature will grant the same fate to troglodytes as trilobites. If you lack adequate awareness, you become a fossil. Adapt or become extinct.