Wait... what? That doesn't even work as a joke. If you were watching a violent show and needed to call 911 why would you do so by repeating, word-for-word, exactly what the TV is saying at that moment at nearly the exact same time?
CALEA compliance does not require the prevention of end-to-end encryption, because it's the carrier that needs to comply with Title-II regulations, not the parties that happen to be using the carrier to deliver a message. Encryption has nothing to do with the carrier at all - it is simply given messages to deliver from one party to another. There is not and has never been anything stopping you from sending encrypted data over a telephone, after all, so why would this suddenly change now?
That's not even necessary. The queries are handled server-side and broadcast sounds happen at the same time, so the server can block queries for which many identical queries arrive from other users in the same 5-second (or whatever) window.
No, 4.9.25 is less than a month old, and will continue to receive updates until January 2019.
4.10 came after 4.9.0, but 4.10 isn't an LTS version, so it's supported only until the next "unstable" version becomes stable (maybe 3 or 4 months). If you're making an OS and don't want to constantly make major kernel upgrades, a recent long-term kernel like 4.9 is arguably the best way to go.
Helium balloons should be illegal, as it wastes a very precious resource. There is a limited supply of Helium on Earth, and once that's gone there will be nothing holding the planet up.
The "presidential impeachment" surge may be boosted somewhat by the vote of no confidence that's happening tomorrow in South Africa in the hopes of finally getting president Zuma impeached.
Witcher 2 had DRM for about 48hrs, and then the developers removed it because it was hurting legitimate customers.
It was an awkward situation. CD Projeckt (a publisher, and the parent company of CD Projekt RED) distributed The Witcher 2 in Poland and internationally through GOG.com. But they needed the help of international publishers to sell retail in other parts of the world, so they signed up with Bandai Namco and Atari to publish the game elsewhere. (Apparently Polish laws make it nearly impossible for them to handle international distribution themselves, which is the main reason they registered their subsidiary, GOG.com, outside Poland)
Anyway, although CD Projekt is firmly anti-DRM, one or both of these other publishers decided to slap DRM onto the files that they distributed, more because of internal policy than any practical reason. The DRM broke the game and made CD Projekt look like hypocrites, so they quickly released a patch to repair all the files broken by the DRM, which inevitably disabled the DRM in the process. I believe the publishers who broke the game sued them for fixing it, but CDP won that case. Unfortunately Bandai Namco won another lawsuit forcing CDP to make the game more expensive for Australians instead of making it the same price everywhere.
If you bought The Witcher 2 from GOG it never had DRM in the first place, and no matter where you bought the game you could go to gog.com/witcher/backup to redeem a complimentary GOG version for yourself.
Agreed. I read the article and it's... basically just trying to stir up panic over nothing.
NPAPI had a good run. It was made in 1995 and was used by Chrome, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Firefox, Opera and many other browsers (obviously not in that order). But it's been showing its age for a long time, and most browsers have dropped support for it years ago - Firefox keeps it alive purely because of Flash. But Flash is also implemented for the Pepper API, so if they can get enough of Pepper implemented to run Flash through that then they can finally ditch NPAPI. The alternative would be to invest a fortune inventing a whole new Mozilla-specific architecture just for Flash on Firefox and hope that Adobe still cares enough about both Flash and Firefox to reimplement the plugin for them - not likely.
Getting PDFium to work was the proof-of-concept for a minimal Pepper implementation on Firefox. Just enough Pepper API to run Flash is the end goal for now. Maybe they'll eventually decide to do a full Pepper implementation, but I don't think that's a concern for now.
This doesn't mean they plan to replace PDF.js with PDFium (which doesn't mean that they won't do so; I hope they don't, because PDF.js has been working very well for me and doesn't require any plugins)
Well, for the subset of Steam users who choose to participate in the survey. In principle, that group is more-or-less representative of all Steam users unless there's some correlation between avoiding the upgrade and not participating in the survey.
I do wish Steam that would add report the sample sizes of their surveys so we can actually draw useful statistical information from them. (If they actually do report the sample sizes then I'd be grateful if somebody were to point out where)
What have they done to the developer tools dark theme? They seem to have changed it to a bright, low-contrast medium-grey-over-pale-blue scheme. I'm all for trying new things, but that's hardly practical.
Yes, it does. You can enable it by right-clicking on the toolbar and ticking the "Menu Bar" option. To make the menu bar a fixture rather than appearing only when you press alt. When the menu bar is enabled in this way you can still toggle its visibility by pressing F10.
Personally I find the menu bar occupying a whole row on its own to be a waste of space, so I install the Personal Titlebar extension, which allows me to use the "Customise" screen to add a page title next to the menu.
iPHONE 9 TO DO AWAY WITH PHONE ITSELF. APPLE States it will be the lightest device they have ever sold!
Box contents: 100% Fresh hipster air
iPHONE 9 - THE BEST iPHONE EVER.
That's nothing! (literally and figuratively) Samsung is already planning to release the Galaxy H2, which is even lighter than fresh hipster air* because it's a sealed container of hydrogen**.
* provided that the ambient air pressure is at least 0.072 atm ** Keep away from fire. Samsung claims no responsibility for hydrogen explosions
Wait... are you saying that AES can't be used in place of 3DES and Blowfish because it's a symmetric-key algorithm, or am I misunderstanding you? Because 3DES and Blowfish are also symmetric-key ciphers.
We'll see what happens, but for now I've taken the precaution of using WSUS Offline to download all updates as of today. If I ever need to install Windows 7 again I have my original disc (and backed up ISO on cloud storage) and I can use the update installer from WSUS Offline to apply the updates I downloaded without ever needing to put the computer on the Internet. (And yes, this tool lets you add specific updates to an exclusion list so that they don't get installed).
I find that the vast majority of sites that ask for Flash when it's set to "ask to activate"/"click-to-play" will work just fine when Flash is set to "never activate" or removed entirely.
Have a look at this fairly typical code to play a video file:
If Flash is installed it uses the embedded Flash applet "player.swf" to play the video, otherwise it simply plays the video directly. However, when Flash is click-to-play, the object element is treated as an opaque placeholder until the user clicks it, whereupon Flash becomes activated.
I don't know the details on how Google is "de-emphasising" Flash, but I'd imagine that they check to see whether the object has child elements other than <param> inside, and replace it with the click-to-play placeholder only if it does not instead of doing so all the time.
I don't find it hypocritical at all. If I want to use addon that isn't signed I can simply send it to Mozilla to be signed. It's quick and easy, and has no cost. I can do this for as many addons as I want, whether the addons are my own creation or somebody else's. Alternatively, I can use the developer edition, or a nightly, or the current ESR version of Firefox where this ceases to be an issue at all. With Windows 10 I have none of those options - getting a driver signed by Microsoft is prohibitive, so there's simply nothing I can do. Being completely different situations with nothing more than a superficial similarity, having a different reaction for each is quite reasonable.
If you're using Firefox 47 or later you can enable e10s yourself. What you read simply means they won't be switching it on for you until FF49.
You can enable e10s by going to about:config and setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. Restart your browser and then visit about:support and look up "Multiprocess Windows" on that page to see if it's enabled. (It might still be disabled if you have one or more add-ons that don't support e10s - if only it would tell you which)
I haven't installed the Firefox 48 update yet, but it may well introduce an option in the Options panel for you to enable multiprocess without having to go through about:config.
Very true. I was just checking old market share stats (via archive.org) and it turns out that ~20% is what Windows 7 reached after 12 months too. Bear in mind that, while they pushed hard for both Windows Vista and 8 adoption, Microsoft was far more relaxed about leaving people to get Windows 7 in their own sweet time (in fact, adoption remained steady for years) and even backported the improvements down to Vista, so Vista users had little impetus to upgrade at all
So despite having some genuine improvements, being free, having a deadline to encourage rapid adoption, and being pushed so hard it was extremely difficult to avoid, Windows 10 usage is no better after a year than Windows 7 got from just early adopters willing to pay money. In context, 21 market share for Windows 10 after a year is quite dreadful.
And while the first year of sales for Windows 7 was just the tip of the iceburg, with the free period and forced upgrades over Windows 10 adoption is likely to drop off steeply. Of course it will still gain ground, but that will in all likelihood be driven almost entirely by new PC purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... what? That doesn't even work as a joke. If you were watching a violent show and needed to call 911 why would you do so by repeating, word-for-word, exactly what the TV is saying at that moment at nearly the exact same time?
CALEA compliance does not require the prevention of end-to-end encryption, because it's the carrier that needs to comply with Title-II regulations, not the parties that happen to be using the carrier to deliver a message. Encryption has nothing to do with the carrier at all - it is simply given messages to deliver from one party to another. There is not and has never been anything stopping you from sending encrypted data over a telephone, after all, so why would this suddenly change now?
That's not even necessary. The queries are handled server-side and broadcast sounds happen at the same time, so the server can block queries for which many identical queries arrive from other users in the same 5-second (or whatever) window.
And during 1995 it was The Information Super-Highway
Thankfully that didn't last long.
No, 4.9.25 is less than a month old, and will continue to receive updates until January 2019.
4.10 came after 4.9.0, but 4.10 isn't an LTS version, so it's supported only until the next "unstable" version becomes stable (maybe 3 or 4 months). If you're making an OS and don't want to constantly make major kernel upgrades, a recent long-term kernel like 4.9 is arguably the best way to go.
Helium balloons should be illegal, as it wastes a very precious resource. There is a limited supply of Helium on Earth, and once that's gone there will be nothing holding the planet up.
The "presidential impeachment" surge may be boosted somewhat by the vote of no confidence that's happening tomorrow in South Africa in the hopes of finally getting president Zuma impeached.
Witcher 2 had DRM for about 48hrs, and then the developers removed it because it was hurting legitimate customers.
It was an awkward situation. CD Projeckt (a publisher, and the parent company of CD Projekt RED) distributed The Witcher 2 in Poland and internationally through GOG.com. But they needed the help of international publishers to sell retail in other parts of the world, so they signed up with Bandai Namco and Atari to publish the game elsewhere. (Apparently Polish laws make it nearly impossible for them to handle international distribution themselves, which is the main reason they registered their subsidiary, GOG.com, outside Poland)
Anyway, although CD Projekt is firmly anti-DRM, one or both of these other publishers decided to slap DRM onto the files that they distributed, more because of internal policy than any practical reason. The DRM broke the game and made CD Projekt look like hypocrites, so they quickly released a patch to repair all the files broken by the DRM, which inevitably disabled the DRM in the process. I believe the publishers who broke the game sued them for fixing it, but CDP won that case. Unfortunately Bandai Namco won another lawsuit forcing CDP to make the game more expensive for Australians instead of making it the same price everywhere.
If you bought The Witcher 2 from GOG it never had DRM in the first place, and no matter where you bought the game you could go to gog.com/witcher/backup to redeem a complimentary GOG version for yourself.
Agreed. I read the article and it's... basically just trying to stir up panic over nothing.
NPAPI had a good run. It was made in 1995 and was used by Chrome, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Firefox, Opera and many other browsers (obviously not in that order). But it's been showing its age for a long time, and most browsers have dropped support for it years ago - Firefox keeps it alive purely because of Flash. But Flash is also implemented for the Pepper API, so if they can get enough of Pepper implemented to run Flash through that then they can finally ditch NPAPI. The alternative would be to invest a fortune inventing a whole new Mozilla-specific architecture just for Flash on Firefox and hope that Adobe still cares enough about both Flash and Firefox to reimplement the plugin for them - not likely.
Getting PDFium to work was the proof-of-concept for a minimal Pepper implementation on Firefox. Just enough Pepper API to run Flash is the end goal for now. Maybe they'll eventually decide to do a full Pepper implementation, but I don't think that's a concern for now.
This doesn't mean they plan to replace PDF.js with PDFium (which doesn't mean that they won't do so; I hope they don't, because PDF.js has been working very well for me and doesn't require any plugins)
I take it you didn't even read the post you're replying to.
Well, for the subset of Steam users who choose to participate in the survey. In principle, that group is more-or-less representative of all Steam users unless there's some correlation between avoiding the upgrade and not participating in the survey.
I do wish Steam that would add report the sample sizes of their surveys so we can actually draw useful statistical information from them. (If they actually do report the sample sizes then I'd be grateful if somebody were to point out where)
What have they done to the developer tools dark theme? They seem to have changed it to a bright, low-contrast medium-grey-over-pale-blue scheme. I'm all for trying new things, but that's hardly practical.
Yes, it does. You can enable it by right-clicking on the toolbar and ticking the "Menu Bar" option. To make the menu bar a fixture rather than appearing only when you press alt. When the menu bar is enabled in this way you can still toggle its visibility by pressing F10.
Personally I find the menu bar occupying a whole row on its own to be a waste of space, so I install the Personal Titlebar extension, which allows me to use the "Customise" screen to add a page title next to the menu.
Here's what my browser looks like at the moment.
Google Doubleplus
I'm a bit surprised that isn't a major meme by now
iPHONE 9 TO DO AWAY WITH PHONE ITSELF. APPLE States it will be the lightest device they have ever sold!
Box contents: 100% Fresh hipster air
iPHONE 9 - THE BEST iPHONE EVER.
That's nothing! (literally and figuratively) Samsung is already planning to release the Galaxy H2, which is even lighter than fresh hipster air* because it's a sealed container of hydrogen**.
* provided that the ambient air pressure is at least 0.072 atm
** Keep away from fire. Samsung claims no responsibility for hydrogen explosions
Wait... are you saying that AES can't be used in place of 3DES and Blowfish because it's a symmetric-key algorithm, or am I misunderstanding you? Because 3DES and Blowfish are also symmetric-key ciphers.
Thanks for sharing your experience, and congratulations on being one of today's lucky ten thousand :)
We'll see what happens, but for now I've taken the precaution of using WSUS Offline to download all updates as of today. If I ever need to install Windows 7 again I have my original disc (and backed up ISO on cloud storage) and I can use the update installer from WSUS Offline to apply the updates I downloaded without ever needing to put the computer on the Internet. (And yes, this tool lets you add specific updates to an exclusion list so that they don't get installed).
By aliens, you say? No wonder he wants Mexico to pay.
Right here. The code is 00000000.
I find that the vast majority of sites that ask for Flash when it's set to "ask to activate"/"click-to-play" will work just fine when Flash is set to "never activate" or removed entirely.
Have a look at this fairly typical code to play a video file:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="player.swf">
<param name="file" value="video.mkv">
<video src="video.mkv">
</object>
If Flash is installed it uses the embedded Flash applet "player.swf" to play the video, otherwise it simply plays the video directly. However, when Flash is click-to-play, the object element is treated as an opaque placeholder until the user clicks it, whereupon Flash becomes activated.
I don't know the details on how Google is "de-emphasising" Flash, but I'd imagine that they check to see whether the object has child elements other than <param> inside, and replace it with the click-to-play placeholder only if it does not instead of doing so all the time.
I'm sure they plan to fix the "drunk uncle" problem with further typing-pattern user fingerprinting and facial recognition from the always-on camera.
I don't find it hypocritical at all. If I want to use addon that isn't signed I can simply send it to Mozilla to be signed. It's quick and easy, and has no cost. I can do this for as many addons as I want, whether the addons are my own creation or somebody else's. Alternatively, I can use the developer edition, or a nightly, or the current ESR version of Firefox where this ceases to be an issue at all. With Windows 10 I have none of those options - getting a driver signed by Microsoft is prohibitive, so there's simply nothing I can do. Being completely different situations with nothing more than a superficial similarity, having a different reaction for each is quite reasonable.
If you're using Firefox 47 or later you can enable e10s yourself. What you read simply means they won't be switching it on for you until FF49.
You can enable e10s by going to about:config and setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. Restart your browser and then visit about:support and look up "Multiprocess Windows" on that page to see if it's enabled. (It might still be disabled if you have one or more add-ons that don't support e10s - if only it would tell you which)
I haven't installed the Firefox 48 update yet, but it may well introduce an option in the Options panel for you to enable multiprocess without having to go through about:config.
Very true. I was just checking old market share stats (via archive.org) and it turns out that ~20% is what Windows 7 reached after 12 months too. Bear in mind that, while they pushed hard for both Windows Vista and 8 adoption, Microsoft was far more relaxed about leaving people to get Windows 7 in their own sweet time (in fact, adoption remained steady for years) and even backported the improvements down to Vista, so Vista users had little impetus to upgrade at all
So despite having some genuine improvements, being free, having a deadline to encourage rapid adoption, and being pushed so hard it was extremely difficult to avoid, Windows 10 usage is no better after a year than Windows 7 got from just early adopters willing to pay money. In context, 21 market share for Windows 10 after a year is quite dreadful.
And while the first year of sales for Windows 7 was just the tip of the iceburg, with the free period and forced upgrades over Windows 10 adoption is likely to drop off steeply. Of course it will still gain ground, but that will in all likelihood be driven almost entirely by new PC purchases.