Then just log out for Pete sake? How hard is that?
Doesn't every OS since Windows XP auto-lock around the 15 minute mark as soon as the screensaver kicks in? The real issue is that laymen who live alone sometimes force windows to have password-less accounts on the first-use setup. If so, locking or logging out has no net effect on their security.
I'm stuck with FF 22 until they reserve this decision.
Better make sure to disable upgrading via the GUI then, or you might auto-lose inadvertently in a week or so;) And for the rest of us, let's hope we don't get such option removed in FF 24, 25 or whatever, the way Chrome behaves.
I think it will be the end of "social networks" and return to the Internet, which based on open source technologies.... Why, for instance, to have one Skype when we can have several competing clients talking via open protocols.
I know you're aware of the obvious power of network effects on trying to leave facebook. Ignoring its pull, lets think about these two deterrents: "us versus them" and "the devil you know"
Remember how when the original Wikileaks cables came out, some supposed wikileaks alternative came out, and nobody trusted it? Figuring out if that itself is an NSA honeypot is not easy, even if the service claims immunity because it's hosted outside the US.
Another angle is that something legitimately comes out of a known anti-US country with a president publicly confirming that the service is free from US domain... think Venezuela, Cuba or others... you have to think what its interests are first, and second, whether it will gain enough pull to be worth our slow collective migration if #1 isn't enough of a problem.
Now, think of a larger candidate (world superpower) offering options: China, Russia. The same guys who offered some assistance to Snowden. Would the USA just stand by and do nothing while we took our metadata right to its "enemies?" We're not even talking about AlQaida and others, but they are a possibility too, though political connotation would exacerbate the network effect there.
The moral of the story here is that American citizens put all the eggs in one basket in the mid nineties by always trusting American services. It was the natural thing to do. Foreign systems don't monetize well across international waters, so I don't see startups growing in this world economy that will want to start doing that now. That's why governments themselves will want to be the ones stepping in
It gets worse. I'm starting to see people who started out using webclients like yahoo, but are increasingly failing to grasp the www itself. When their cheap smartphone breaks Facebook (which has PM-esque emails)*, they have no idea how to pick up their ball on the webbrowser, and that they can just enter their credentials there. The level of lock-in is ridiculous, because people cannot tell the difference between the App and the web version of anything, other than "ooh, I like it on my phone better..." Similar gripe about people who take out their 3MP phone camera to futilely grab monitor stills because they just can't handle using email attachments.
Yeah, I know the feeling. It would be one more tool under my belt. For instance, most non-financial people hear of unemployment numbers and a few know where to view the official data. For some bizarre reason the government offers no graphs at dol.gov alongside their statistics, even though they let you download years worth of raw data. Enter us geeks, who easily put together a spreadsheet to make sense of official unemployment trends and zoom into the data all we want and run our won analysis.
One day knowing Opencl might let me to do similar processing that would otherwise be out of my reach. The potential alone has merit. Executing basic parallel programming without fear will yield a better accomplishment than the last multi-day experiment I ran on my GPU: mining up to one bit cent.
Another performance-related point: download size Being on mobile with horrible battery performance and connection speeds, I would routinely force the phone to 2G to save power and load VERY quickly. A few months ago m.slashdot.org was optional and in beta. It allowed viewing without JS. That is no longer the case: suddenly,/. forces JS and loading is extremely slow. I have to wait about 30 seconds, and like 10 on wifi per page. The same content loaded in about 3 in the past.
If I put it on paper in some useful way and stick in a secure location, I don't have to worry about it again until the day I need the data.
A parallel was subconsciously nagging at me for hours and that sentence finally triggered what it was: I've seen this hard copy eagerness in the topic of Bitcoin wallet backups a few months back. While you have more data at hand than a standard wallet file, you can learn from such the paranoid mining community. Much motivation is behind their protecting digital money by un-digitizing into paper form, and even into artsy representation that can be mailed to others.
I cannot recall what bitcoin forum link showed a python script taking the wallet.dat file and just printing it in large print, for a cycle to be completed by OCR'ing that back into digital form post-disaster. Something like that has already been suggested, and is a more general case involving OCR fonts.
Still, there's probably good results in seeing how serious miners keep their bits safe. For the common case of small rolled up bitcoin hard copies, https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/#security suggests Krylon preservation, waterproof paper, ziploc bags and so forth.
QR codes. You can encrypt these. If you print them e.g. on plastic foil, they'll last close to forever. Of course, you will need to keep a piece of hardware that can read QR codes.
Has anyone open sourced a SOFTWARE reader yet? I tried to find a reader months ago and was disappointed that they were all app store links. To many of us this requires * supporting app stores instead of just downloading an easy desktop binary * upgrading phone hardware to include autofocus lens, potentially locked into new 2 year contract; my $200 phone didn't cut it * data plan usage and middlemen tracking. Apps demand web access before forking over the decoded QR info * the weirdness of seeing software that outputs QR codes but cannot read any
We should be able to use our existing point and shoot cams to scan from JPEG, like we do with OCR. Instead, it feels like a market that strong-arms us into mobile.
Wikipedia says that Yahoo Imap forbids desktop clients. Verizon doesn't provide Imap support. Bit the bullet and tested OK over gmail. I might add a sig pointing to the same tutorial to help spread the word with tech friends
Thunderbird has removed the checkbox that silences subject-line-free mail under the "Sending" tab.* I didn't find a about:config pref and saw that people resort to some TB extension to fix it. Along with the Tabs-on-top, menus-are-hidden-by-default-for-no-reason, there are subtle signs of Mozilla's controversial Firefox GUI decisions creeping into this sister project. Oh well, I doubt Eudora mail and Windows Live Mail support this Enigmail tutorial out of the box.
I made a tutorial designed to help non tech-savvy people set up usable email encryption and even with the best narrator and script it's still terrible.
Thanks. I found the tutorial useful. Webmail operators don't offer IMAP or even pop3 support easily. Most of slashdot has webmail accounts with the major us providers ousted in the leak, even if they use something else for work or main personal email. The issue is with securing those accounts for maximum impact. Incoming mail from online subscriptions and pw resets and non-tech friends will still remain mostly unencrypted. Most slashdotters serious about this will end up segregating security by creating even MORE free (bugged) accounts for their tech-savvy friends.
Someone else here said that encrypted data can put you on TLA watchlists. We're just trying to be safer and protect our friends, but doing all this within the USA is counterproductive even if they can't decrypt our random stuff --metadata is bad enough. I don't use personal email enough to keep me encouraged for long, but will probably play around.
Yeah, I loved win2k's stability. For XP, one of the first signs of a bad stability design was that normal explorer Windows go into "(Not responding)" mode quite easily (no spyware connotations here). I think reading bad floppies / CD's would trigger that. I added killing "explorer.exe" to my toolbelt with that release... silly that the whole shell should die just because of bad I/O.
Actually, I think this kinda affects our other non-Windows OS's too. Sad state of affairs.
Windows 2000 really was the solution, but Microsoft did the big mistake of not marketing it towards consumers. Then XP came, which basically was a dumbed down 2000 with updated graphics, and it took the world with storm.
Unlike today's version madness, Windows 2000 came in only one edition: Professional It was never intended to be marketed for home use. That was XP's job.
I never saw it in home computers except for people pirating a copy. For those who bought some business-tier machine with 2000 and dedicated it to home use, there were tons of problems with "home" hardware. I got a Win2k second-hand, and "lost" my webcam. I also lost some Soundblaster MIDI features that would return as soon as I dual-booted to Win98. Win2k also broke my Windows 98 Rhide IDE support.
Later on moving to XP brought its share of problems with some games. I also learned that laptop hardware has horrible driver availability if you want to wipe-and-install-older-windows. I just don't upgrade anymore, and keep the pain limited to when some PC dies and I must migrate files to whatever new Windows is out there. I'm sure non-technical people are just as annoyed
DECT 6.0 phones work on the 1900MHz band and more or less act like short-range cell phones.
Seconded. I have a DECT 6.0 implementation that lets me bind up to 2 BT smartphones so that incoming calls ring at home. It's still pretty poor tech with an unacceptable lag and adds VOIP-like quality loss, but in theory would mitigate issues for those who leave the phone on Vibrate when it's misplaced.
I'd love it if DECT 7.0 could replace the chiptune ringing. I mean, POTS's bell-less "Ring-Ring" tones are soooo 1990's... add smartphone ringtone cloning to my home base phones, and it will give the industry a feature to hype our stagnant cordless phone industry and sell more units
I didn't make it clear that the cluttered resume conversions I'm talking about here were to actual PDF files. Also, that in #3 I'd have to keep track of child files in read-only format (PDF) and re-create them for each edit.
If we're going to tout switching to something else (OpenOffice), it is advisable to be aware that we as geeks can more easily endure the PDF steps. non-technical office people currently using office won't stand all these required intermediate steps to their workflow if you offer switching them away from what works perfectly well for them now.
And to answer the GP's original question more directly: I wasn't aware of those problems until they happened. Even WITH PDF despite all my objections, it is a pain to use in practice.
Nothing personal, but it is saddening to see so many replies reiterate the same point when it is a band-aid solution. Here are my why's
1) resume upload sites accept plain txt (garbage), rtf (useless) and doc (native, but no resume site or recruiter takes ODF). Open office formats won't work here without lossy conversion, which proves my point. 2) not everything is a resume, and the problem is how disturbing problems can be for your livelihood* in an important context. The real point is that the PDF route removes the ability to freely share. Here that means having the recipient edit it, feed it back to me in an office setting or SHARE it with others+++. And sharing is the whole point of using Office productivity software, is it not? 3) It should be clear that pdf then becomes a cumbersome intermediate step. I already have multiple read-write revisions (binary, so cvs won't quite cut it). Adding multiple resumes implies keeping track of multiple read-only revisions of my document.
* Conversion engines are not perfect. No conversion process is. My cluttered resumes occasionally got broken into two pages because of the last line of text. Re-formatting to blindly guess what the engine wants requires the same QA we're trying to defeat. +++ (pdf aint freely editable or viewable without plugins and non-native programs as of Windows 7)
I have written simple documents in libreoffice, saved them in docx format, and then loaded them in office 2010. The result was readable and even usable, but look completely alien to what I had on typed up under librewrite [...] it would have been rejected for poor formating.
Cannot stress this enough. We're savvy people, but not immune to conversion issues between the two. When are they the worst? When sending out a resume that we cannot preview in the real Office. Why? Office requires Windows, or a Windows-only viewer*. You definitely won't lose your current job over a misformatted word file, but when looking for one, some interviews will not happen due to the glitches that were invisible to us.
Some slashdotters on principle DO NOT touch Windows. Others have only a Mac* and/or do not pirate software. You'd need Wine and a copy of office ANYWAY. What would then be the point of using Libreoffice if you're cross-editing on the same PC?
The littlest cross-edit can trigger that hidden "alien" look in real Office, and when I used to be out of a job, my weekly revisions would have become someone's pain to preview, especially with several flavors of the resume I maintained.
* MS lacks Mac viewers and shows just a lowsy link to a 3rd party utility site for those who can't pay for the real thing.
And they finally dropped the strange 8-tab maximum on Mobile Safari!
You just had to remind me of my annoying 4-tab max in the stock Android browser for Froyo. The Phone is only two years old, and I doubt it's a max based on free ram. Dolphin and Opera certainly don't stop at 4. Browsing weather + slashdot + wikipedia eats 3 tabs and ensures I must go closing tabs pretty quickly when I want to actually visit a site.
Pressing the hardware "escape" button on the phone triggers back-to-previous-page OR exit-tab-AND-return-to-shell depending on your browsing session. Actual deterministic closing happens through a preview-tab picker GUI of abysmal design. It's meant to switch windows rather than closing, and you must hit the lilliputian x on the top right. 80% of the time you inadvertently return to the wrong tab and have to start over. Why couldn't they add a "Close" option via long-press? That's Froyo, btw, so it's ~1/5 android phones still out there, AND there are no over the air upgrades away from that. I don't like apple's hold on your hardware, but IOS will cascade to everyone and the 8-tab limit, though it's not as painful as Froyo's 4 tab one.
About the past: the ~30 minute interview window is gone and the interviewers have moved on to other candidates. They have no personal interest and don't care what proof can be submitted. Nothing OP can do will fix this short of time-travelling to prevent the name removal from cascading to the code that later ended at the recruiter's hands.
About future interviews (as hard as they are in this economy): Wayback machine proof won't fly as defense in the middle of an interview*. You'd have to stop the flow completely and pull up devices. Unfortunately interviewees are assumed to be lying in their resumes anyway, to "get even" with an already unfair pool of other interviewees. As soon as recruiters find a blotch that requires much explaining, defenses mostly look like further lies because it is hard to prove things that aren't tangible, and lots of pressure drive candidates in today's job market.
* think about it. The interviewer already did the "exposing" research at their leisure and drew conclusions against the candidate, like a cop who already has DNA evidence that will put a rapist behind bars. They know code is fluid, and also know a candidate might be the one trying to steal the credit... How can the "truth" be determined if code isn't signed in blood or DNA-traced? Offering evidence to counter the employer's research without the same advante of time means convincing them on-the-fly during the interview, and without some kind of code DNA / paternity test, they could posit that the wayback machine could have code expressly poisoned by this candidate years in advance for this very purpose. I'm more concerned with how on earth the employer so freely grabbed the code, given that you don't normally leave code online unless it's in an open source repo... and then, you're usually not paid for it like the OP.
It is very irresponsible to link to a dev branch of firefox without even including instructions on how to set up a separate profile for it. There is a good chance that it will mangle your profile in ways that will be incompatible with the final release or the current release should you choose to go back.
I assume most of us know about Nightly being one of the dev branches. I am a nightly user (despite various posts more or less swearing off firefox since 2010). This UI version of nightly is news to me: It's so bleeding edge that the DL still had version #24 in the filename when I went to check. What intrigued me is why that is compiled to only EXE (installer has bigger chance of overwriting your current live EXE, unless they now use C:\Program Files\...\Nightly) and no zip file.
Every time I go on a new computer, I just download a ZIP file and expand. Before running that EXE, I make sure to back up my profile and it and the current FF nightly with version numbers, should I want to go back.
About allowing both sides to exist, I understand there is a need for diversity but it is generally only appreciated by the geek community... and even here, people always secretly play favorites. Given that anything that can go wrong will do so, we end up with garbage decisions being incorporated by both sides little by little. Being broad here: think loss of 4:3 screens/resolution, crappy A/V software now coming to mobile OSs, App stores now unavoidable on windows and mac desktops, mobile GUIs taking over PCs to the point your old program is suddenly cryptic and useless (think MSN Messenger shoving us to the Metro only Skype on Windows 8 a month ago), and fans not going away... let me add bufferbloat delays now at your cable box and TV, and annoying LED lights from everything in your bedroom at 4am. So I dont mean killing PCs or tablets is warranted, but pollution potential is there. Did I mention the idea of freemium Apps could not exist without the former learning exp of shareware and nagware of old? It is mainstream now and will not go away, creating a world where free desktop applications will grow smaller each year
Annoyingly, it's PAINFULLY similar with web searches that lead you to the android app store...
I manage several android devices but only one has my google account. To download additional copies of free App X through my PC, they won't link me to the file to redistribute at my leisure. Naaah! the site asks for my google ID. This gives concrete knowledge to google to examine my ID's* and devices as a cluster. Success here means that they push the App UP thru the cloud rather than down to me. I must root the phone to extract the APK app from the invisible/system/ folder for my other devices AFAIK. After a few more hoops are jumped to side-load the file into other phones.
Contrast that to how easy it is to download.deb or.rpm packages from official AND hobbyist repositories for stuff like mp3 encoding / decoding... even when a distro fears pressures from US lawyers. In comparison, Android market feels oppressive when google chooses where you can use their downloads. I failed to mention earlier that google can reject your download for whatever reason** after they know your google ID.
* Your other google identities AND those of relatives who never connected to your Wifi thanks to separate 3G/4G plans ** For instance, those of us with ancient [version N] phones when your App is only available for [N+1]. Google won't let us bear the "risks" . Their browser hides devices for which the app is officially unsupported. Today's publishers and distributors inspect us, refuse our rights, and pull downloads after the fact.
Even for the home power user, it's a pain if you are forced to buy brick and mortar and on a deadline because the family needs a new machine. Old-style PCI has become a pain to find on cheap towers.
I had to shelf a bunch of cards when our old ~2003 machine died 2 years ago:
an old $120 PCI video card (the cheapest replacement costs ~$60 these days)
a Soundblaster card (I miss when they used to have MIDI and joypad ports)
a potentially secondary NIC that would have helped me play around with work multi-nic setups and software firewalls
an adapter card for 3 Firewire inputs.
a modem card (didn't get more than a couple uses after we went to DSL, but can save you a dollar and a trip to the Western Union when your potential new boss requires documents faxed before you're hired)
An old system I used to maintain had 2 native USB port and about 4 more via a PCI card I added. I think my switch from the hand-me down ISA to my self-bought PCI setup had only 1 card that got dumped. We just have so many more gadgets today.
BT already gives all customers a home hub (router) as part of the deal, this is pretty standard in the uk. They upgrade them every couple of years for you, so going to an IPv6-enabled one is not difficult.
A few cents or dollars per NEW module kills timely standard adoption. We're talking about ISPs, so let's use a well-known evolutionary example with WIFI routers available to users even outside the ISP chain:
First, no wifi at all, then default / empty passwords all neighbors could steal, then WEP only because WPA wasn't supported, then no WPA2... then (or mixed in with the above): no support for G, then no support for N finally, "support" for N on just 130mbps, but not multiples of it. The unwritten word is also SINGLE band (2.4Ghz)
That is what I remember from a ton of different routers I either got from ISPs, owned, gave away or just troubleshooted. The great fragmentation tells you that it won't be an easy problem to solve. I mean, just check your Wifi now and see how many of the ancient no-nos you can still see from neighbors around you who PAID for their routers --I don't even want to know what they have to settle for at the Modem level.
Providing an upgraded router may not be the same as just "going" up to an IPv6-enabled router. Supply chains take forever (5 years) to provide today's optional features.
If you need more proof that a 2 year cycle for upgrades means nothing, just look at how few top of the line smartphones *refreshed yearly* support 5Ghz bands. Even if you paid through the nose to correct that, you still must leave the 2.4 Ghz band open because your pricy game console [refreshed every 5 years] isn't that lucky or your visitors' gadgets are behind. It's not a pretty picture. Give it 10 or 15 more years
Slashdot Mirror
Then just log out for Pete sake?
How hard is that?
Doesn't every OS since Windows XP auto-lock around the 15 minute mark as soon as the screensaver kicks in?
The real issue is that laymen who live alone sometimes force windows to have password-less accounts on the first-use setup. If so, locking or logging out has no net effect on their security.
I'm stuck with FF 22 until they reserve this decision.
Better make sure to disable upgrading via the GUI then, or you might auto-lose inadvertently in a week or so ;)
And for the rest of us, let's hope we don't get such option removed in FF 24, 25 or whatever, the way Chrome behaves.
I think it will be the end of "social networks" and return to the Internet, which based on open source technologies. ...
Why, for instance, to have one Skype when we can have several competing clients talking via open protocols.
I know you're aware of the obvious power of network effects on trying to leave facebook. Ignoring its pull, lets think about these two deterrents: "us versus them" and "the devil you know"
Remember how when the original Wikileaks cables came out, some supposed wikileaks alternative came out, and nobody trusted it? Figuring out if that itself is an NSA honeypot is not easy, even if the service claims immunity because it's hosted outside the US.
Another angle is that something legitimately comes out of a known anti-US country with a president publicly confirming that the service is free from US domain... think Venezuela, Cuba or others... you have to think what its interests are first, and second, whether it will gain enough pull to be worth our slow collective migration if #1 isn't enough of a problem.
Now, think of a larger candidate (world superpower) offering options: China, Russia. The same guys who offered some assistance to Snowden. Would the USA just stand by and do nothing while we took our metadata right to its "enemies?" We're not even talking about AlQaida and others, but they are a possibility too, though political connotation would exacerbate the network effect there.
The moral of the story here is that American citizens put all the eggs in one basket in the mid nineties by always trusting American services. It was the natural thing to do. Foreign systems don't monetize well across international waters, so I don't see startups growing in this world economy that will want to start doing that now. That's why governments themselves will want to be the ones stepping in
It gets worse. I'm starting to see people who started out using webclients like yahoo, but are increasingly failing to grasp the www itself. When their cheap smartphone breaks Facebook (which has PM-esque emails)*, they have no idea how to pick up their ball on the webbrowser, and that they can just enter their credentials there. The level of lock-in is ridiculous, because people cannot tell the difference between the App and the web version of anything, other than "ooh, I like it on my phone better..." Similar gripe about people who take out their 3MP phone camera to futilely grab monitor stills because they just can't handle using email attachments.
Yeah, I know the feeling.
It would be one more tool under my belt. For instance, most non-financial people hear of unemployment numbers and a few know where to view the official data. For some bizarre reason the government offers no graphs at dol.gov alongside their statistics, even though they let you download years worth of raw data. Enter us geeks, who easily put together a spreadsheet to make sense of official unemployment trends and zoom into the data all we want and run our won analysis.
One day knowing Opencl might let me to do similar processing that would otherwise be out of my reach. The potential alone has merit. Executing basic parallel programming without fear will yield a better accomplishment than the last multi-day experiment I ran on my GPU: mining up to one bit cent.
Another performance-related point: download size /. forces JS and loading is extremely slow. I have to wait about 30 seconds, and like 10 on wifi per page. The same content loaded in about 3 in the past.
Being on mobile with horrible battery performance and connection speeds, I would routinely force the phone to 2G to save power and load VERY quickly.
A few months ago m.slashdot.org was optional and in beta. It allowed viewing without JS.
That is no longer the case: suddenly,
If I put it on paper in some useful way and stick in a secure location, I don't have to worry about it again until the day I need the data.
A parallel was subconsciously nagging at me for hours and that sentence finally triggered what it was: I've seen this hard copy eagerness in the topic of Bitcoin wallet backups a few months back.
While you have more data at hand than a standard wallet file, you can learn from such the paranoid mining community. Much motivation is behind their protecting digital money by un-digitizing into paper form, and even into artsy representation that can be mailed to others.
I cannot recall what bitcoin forum link showed a python script taking the wallet.dat file and just printing it in large print, for a cycle to be completed by OCR'ing that back into digital form post-disaster. Something like that has already been suggested, and is a more general case involving OCR fonts.
Still, there's probably good results in seeing how serious miners keep their bits safe. For the common case of small rolled up bitcoin hard copies, https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/#security suggests Krylon preservation, waterproof paper, ziploc bags and so forth.
>> Has anyone open sourced a SOFTWARE reader yet?
Yep :)
sudo apt-get install zbar-tools.
And, use zbarimg.
mint@mint ~/Desktop $ zbarimg code.jpg
QR-Code:http://m.http://gizmodo.com/5969312/how-qr-codes-work-and-why-they-suck-so-hard
scanned 1 barcode symbols from 1 images in 0.07 seconds
From http://gizmodo.com/5969312/how-qr-codes-work-and-why-they-suck-so-hard. The url glitch is probably courtesy of the gizmodo reporter ; )
Now that you gave me a name, just found that it reads normal barcodes and a Win32 release and other notes for later:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zbar/
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/zbar/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Compile_with_MinGW_in_Windows
Thanks!
QR codes. You can encrypt these. If you print them e.g. on plastic foil, they'll last close to forever. Of course, you will need to keep a piece of hardware that can read QR codes.
Has anyone open sourced a SOFTWARE reader yet?
I tried to find a reader months ago and was disappointed that they were all app store links. To many of us this requires
* supporting app stores instead of just downloading an easy desktop binary
* upgrading phone hardware to include autofocus lens, potentially locked into new 2 year contract; my $200 phone didn't cut it
* data plan usage and middlemen tracking. Apps demand web access before forking over the decoded QR info
* the weirdness of seeing software that outputs QR codes but cannot read any
We should be able to use our existing point and shoot cams to scan from JPEG, like we do with OCR. Instead, it feels like a market that strong-arms us into mobile.
Test results went OK
Wikipedia says that Yahoo Imap forbids desktop clients. Verizon doesn't provide Imap support. Bit the bullet and tested OK over gmail. I might add a sig pointing to the same tutorial to help spread the word with tech friends
Thunderbird has removed the checkbox that silences subject-line-free mail under the "Sending" tab.* I didn't find a about:config pref and saw that people resort to some TB extension to fix it. Along with the Tabs-on-top, menus-are-hidden-by-default-for-no-reason, there are subtle signs of Mozilla's controversial Firefox GUI decisions creeping into this sister project. Oh well, I doubt Eudora mail and Windows Live Mail support this Enigmail tutorial out of the box.
I made a tutorial designed to help non tech-savvy people set up usable email encryption and even with the best narrator and script it's still terrible.
Thanks. I found the tutorial useful.
Webmail operators don't offer IMAP or even pop3 support easily. Most of slashdot has webmail accounts with the major us providers ousted in the leak, even if they use something else for work or main personal email. The issue is with securing those accounts for maximum impact. Incoming mail from online subscriptions and pw resets and non-tech friends will still remain mostly unencrypted. Most slashdotters serious about this will end up segregating security by creating even MORE free (bugged) accounts for their tech-savvy friends.
Someone else here said that encrypted data can put you on TLA watchlists. We're just trying to be safer and protect our friends, but doing all this within the USA is counterproductive even if they can't decrypt our random stuff --metadata is bad enough. I don't use personal email enough to keep me encouraged for long, but will probably play around.
Yeah, I loved win2k's stability.
For XP, one of the first signs of a bad stability design was that normal explorer Windows go into "(Not responding)" mode quite easily (no spyware connotations here). I think reading bad floppies / CD's would trigger that. I added killing "explorer.exe" to my toolbelt with that release... silly that the whole shell should die just because of bad I/O.
Actually, I think this kinda affects our other non-Windows OS's too. Sad state of affairs.
Windows 2000 really was the solution, but Microsoft did the big mistake of not marketing it towards consumers. Then XP came, which basically was a dumbed down 2000 with updated graphics, and it took the world with storm.
Unlike today's version madness, Windows 2000 came in only one edition: Professional
It was never intended to be marketed for home use. That was XP's job.
I never saw it in home computers except for people pirating a copy. For those who bought some business-tier machine with 2000 and dedicated it to home use, there were tons of problems with "home" hardware. I got a Win2k second-hand, and "lost" my webcam. I also lost some Soundblaster MIDI features that would return as soon as I dual-booted to Win98. Win2k also broke my Windows 98 Rhide IDE support.
Later on moving to XP brought its share of problems with some games. I also learned that laptop hardware has horrible driver availability if you want to wipe-and-install-older-windows. I just don't upgrade anymore, and keep the pain limited to when some PC dies and I must migrate files to whatever new Windows is out there. I'm sure non-technical people are just as annoyed
DECT 6.0 phones work on the 1900MHz band and more or less act like short-range cell phones.
Seconded. I have a DECT 6.0 implementation that lets me bind up to 2 BT smartphones so that incoming calls ring at home. It's still pretty poor tech with an unacceptable lag and adds VOIP-like quality loss, but in theory would mitigate issues for those who leave the phone on Vibrate when it's misplaced.
I'd love it if DECT 7.0 could replace the chiptune ringing. I mean, POTS's bell-less "Ring-Ring" tones are soooo 1990's... add smartphone ringtone cloning to my home base phones, and it will give the industry a feature to hype our stagnant cordless phone industry and sell more units
I didn't make it clear that the cluttered resume conversions I'm talking about here were to actual PDF files.
Also, that in #3 I'd have to keep track of child files in read-only format (PDF) and re-create them for each edit.
If we're going to tout switching to something else (OpenOffice), it is advisable to be aware that we as geeks can more easily endure the PDF steps. non-technical office people currently using office won't stand all these required intermediate steps to their workflow if you offer switching them away from what works perfectly well for them now.
And to answer the GP's original question more directly: I wasn't aware of those problems until they happened. Even WITH PDF despite all my objections, it is a pain to use in practice.
Nothing personal, but it is saddening to see so many replies reiterate the same point when it is a band-aid solution. Here are my why's
1) resume upload sites accept plain txt (garbage), rtf (useless) and doc (native, but no resume site or recruiter takes ODF). Open office formats won't work here without lossy conversion, which proves my point.
2) not everything is a resume, and the problem is how disturbing problems can be for your livelihood* in an important context. The real point is that the PDF route removes the ability to freely share. Here that means having the recipient edit it, feed it back to me in an office setting or SHARE it with others+++. And sharing is the whole point of using Office productivity software, is it not?
3) It should be clear that pdf then becomes a cumbersome intermediate step. I already have multiple read-write revisions (binary, so cvs won't quite cut it). Adding multiple resumes implies keeping track of multiple read-only revisions of my document.
* Conversion engines are not perfect. No conversion process is. My cluttered resumes occasionally got broken into two pages because of the last line of text. Re-formatting to blindly guess what the engine wants requires the same QA we're trying to defeat.
+++ (pdf aint freely editable or viewable without plugins and non-native programs as of Windows 7)
Windows XP End of Life in 10.033424102237653 months.
Courtesy of this bookmarklet seen on slashdot years ago:
javascript:var%20eol=new%20Date(0);eol.setDate(8);eol.setMonth(3);eol.setYear(2014);var%20now=new%20Date();var%20diff=eol.getTime()-now.getTime();alert("Windows%20XP%20End%20of%20Life%20in%20%20"+(diff/1000/60/60/24/30)+"%20months.");
I have written simple documents in libreoffice, saved them in docx format, and then loaded them in office 2010. The result was readable and even usable, but look completely alien to what I had on typed up under librewrite [...] it would have been rejected for poor formating.
Cannot stress this enough. We're savvy people, but not immune to conversion issues between the two. When are they the worst? When sending out a resume that we cannot preview in the real Office. Why? Office requires Windows, or a Windows-only viewer*. You definitely won't lose your current job over a misformatted word file, but when looking for one, some interviews will not happen due to the glitches that were invisible to us.
Some slashdotters on principle DO NOT touch Windows. Others have only a Mac* and/or do not pirate software. You'd need Wine and a copy of office ANYWAY. What would then be the point of using Libreoffice if you're cross-editing on the same PC?
The littlest cross-edit can trigger that hidden "alien" look in real Office, and when I used to be out of a job, my weekly revisions would have become someone's pain to preview, especially with several flavors of the resume I maintained.
* MS lacks Mac viewers and shows just a lowsy link to a 3rd party utility site for those who can't pay for the real thing.
And they finally dropped the strange 8-tab maximum on Mobile Safari!
You just had to remind me of my annoying 4-tab max in the stock Android browser for Froyo. The Phone is only two years old, and I doubt it's a max based on free ram. Dolphin and Opera certainly don't stop at 4. Browsing weather + slashdot + wikipedia eats 3 tabs and ensures I must go closing tabs pretty quickly when I want to actually visit a site.
Pressing the hardware "escape" button on the phone triggers back-to-previous-page OR exit-tab-AND-return-to-shell depending on your browsing session. Actual deterministic closing happens through a preview-tab picker GUI of abysmal design. It's meant to switch windows rather than closing, and you must hit the lilliputian x on the top right. 80% of the time you inadvertently return to the wrong tab and have to start over. Why couldn't they add a "Close" option via long-press? That's Froyo, btw, so it's ~1/5 android phones still out there, AND there are no over the air upgrades away from that. I don't like apple's hold on your hardware, but IOS will cascade to everyone and the 8-tab limit, though it's not as painful as Froyo's 4 tab one.
About the past: the ~30 minute interview window is gone and the interviewers have moved on to other candidates. They have no personal interest and don't care what proof can be submitted. Nothing OP can do will fix this short of time-travelling to prevent the name removal from cascading to the code that later ended at the recruiter's hands.
About future interviews (as hard as they are in this economy): Wayback machine proof won't fly as defense in the middle of an interview*. You'd have to stop the flow completely and pull up devices. Unfortunately interviewees are assumed to be lying in their resumes anyway, to "get even" with an already unfair pool of other interviewees. As soon as recruiters find a blotch that requires much explaining, defenses mostly look like further lies because it is hard to prove things that aren't tangible, and lots of pressure drive candidates in today's job market.
* think about it. The interviewer already did the "exposing" research at their leisure and drew conclusions against the candidate, like a cop who already has DNA evidence that will put a rapist behind bars. They know code is fluid, and also know a candidate might be the one trying to steal the credit... How can the "truth" be determined if code isn't signed in blood or DNA-traced? Offering evidence to counter the employer's research without the same advante of time means convincing them on-the-fly during the interview, and without some kind of code DNA / paternity test, they could posit that the wayback machine could have code expressly poisoned by this candidate years in advance for this very purpose. I'm more concerned with how on earth the employer so freely grabbed the code, given that you don't normally leave code online unless it's in an open source repo... and then, you're usually not paid for it like the OP.
It is very irresponsible to link to a dev branch of firefox without even including instructions on how to set up a separate profile for it. There is a good chance that it will mangle your profile in ways that will be incompatible with the final release or the current release should you choose to go back.
I assume most of us know about Nightly being one of the dev branches. I am a nightly user (despite various posts more or less swearing off firefox since 2010).
This UI version of nightly is news to me: It's so bleeding edge that the DL still had version #24 in the filename when I went to check. What intrigued me is why that is compiled to only EXE (installer has bigger chance of overwriting your current live EXE, unless they now use C:\Program Files\...\Nightly) and no zip file.
Every time I go on a new computer, I just download a ZIP file and expand. Before running that EXE, I make sure to back up my profile and it and the current FF nightly with version numbers, should I want to go back.
About allowing both sides to exist, I understand there is a need for diversity but it is generally only appreciated by the geek community... and even here, people always secretly play favorites. Given that anything that can go wrong will do so, we end up with garbage decisions being incorporated by both sides little by little. Being broad here: think loss of 4:3 screens/resolution, crappy A/V software now coming to mobile OSs, App stores now unavoidable on windows and mac desktops, mobile GUIs taking over PCs to the point your old program is suddenly cryptic and useless (think MSN Messenger shoving us to the Metro only Skype on Windows 8 a month ago), and fans not going away... let me add bufferbloat delays now at your cable box and TV, and annoying LED lights from everything in your bedroom at 4am. So I dont mean killing PCs or tablets is warranted, but pollution potential is there. Did I mention the idea of freemium Apps could not exist without the former learning exp of shareware and nagware of old? It is mainstream now and will not go away, creating a world where free desktop applications will grow smaller each year
Annoyingly, it's PAINFULLY similar with web searches that lead you to the android app store...
I manage several android devices but only one has my google account. To download additional copies of free App X through my PC, they won't link me to the file to redistribute at my leisure. Naaah! the site asks for my google ID. This gives concrete knowledge to google to examine my ID's* and devices as a cluster. Success here means that they push the App UP thru the cloud rather than down to me. I must root the phone to extract the APK app from the invisible /system/ folder for my other devices AFAIK. After a few more hoops are jumped to side-load the file into other phones.
Contrast that to how easy it is to download .deb or .rpm packages from official AND hobbyist repositories for stuff like mp3 encoding / decoding... even when a distro fears pressures from US lawyers. In comparison, Android market feels oppressive when google chooses where you can use their downloads. I failed to mention earlier that google can reject your download for whatever reason** after they know your google ID.
* Your other google identities AND those of relatives who never connected to your Wifi thanks to separate 3G/4G plans
** For instance, those of us with ancient [version N] phones when your App is only available for [N+1]. Google won't let us bear the "risks" . Their browser hides devices for which the app is officially unsupported. Today's publishers and distributors inspect us, refuse our rights, and pull downloads after the fact.
Even for the home power user, it's a pain if you are forced to buy brick and mortar and on a deadline because the family needs a new machine. Old-style PCI has become a pain to find on cheap towers.
I had to shelf a bunch of cards when our old ~2003 machine died 2 years ago:
An old system I used to maintain had 2 native USB port and about 4 more via a PCI card I added. I think my switch from the hand-me down ISA to my self-bought PCI setup had only 1 card that got dumped. We just have so many more gadgets today.
BT already gives all customers a home hub (router) as part of the deal, this is pretty standard in the uk. They upgrade them every couple of years for you, so going to an IPv6-enabled one is not difficult.
A few cents or dollars per NEW module kills timely standard adoption. We're talking about ISPs, so let's use a well-known evolutionary example with WIFI routers available to users even outside the ISP chain:
First, no wifi at all,
then default / empty passwords all neighbors could steal,
then WEP only because WPA wasn't supported,
then no WPA2...
then (or mixed in with the above):
no support for G,
then no support for N
finally, "support" for N on just 130mbps, but not multiples of it. The unwritten word is also SINGLE band (2.4Ghz)
That is what I remember from a ton of different routers I either got from ISPs, owned, gave away or just troubleshooted. The great fragmentation tells you that it won't be an easy problem to solve. I mean, just check your Wifi now and see how many of the ancient no-nos you can still see from neighbors around you who PAID for their routers --I don't even want to know what they have to settle for at the Modem level.
Providing an upgraded router may not be the same as just "going" up to an IPv6-enabled router. Supply chains take forever (5 years) to provide today's optional features.
If you need more proof that a 2 year cycle for upgrades means nothing, just look at how few top of the line smartphones *refreshed yearly* support 5Ghz bands. Even if you paid through the nose to correct that, you still must leave the 2.4 Ghz band open because your pricy game console [refreshed every 5 years] isn't that lucky or your visitors' gadgets are behind. It's not a pretty picture. Give it 10 or 15 more years