Well even if you do care, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Email is inherently insecure because it was never designed for security. You can try to encrypt your email, but that isn't much good (outside of your organization which requires it and sets it up) because no one actually uses encryption or is set up for it. You can't send an encrypted email to some random person and expect it to work.
Um, those people you refer to in the articles are all employees (along with some people in outside organizations, like the gay guy who had some apps for Firefox). Employees, by definition, do not run an organization or decide who gets to be the CEO. That's the job of the Board of Directors.
Also, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data": this is a press piece which found a few angry employees and reported about them.
Leaving inputs floating on a digital device is usually a bad thing to do. It used to be that CMOS inputs left floating would cause huge current draws as they switched back and forth between 1 and 0
You're thinking of stuff from the 80s or before, like 4000-series CMOS chips. The OP is talking about microcontrollers with A/D input pins (which, by definition, is NOT digital, it's analog). If you leave these floating, which you normally do if you're not using them, the voltage will float, and then you can do an A/D conversion and see the value, which of course will be random.
I'm Ok with ads in Thunderbird. It's better than not having it at all I suppose, since they're talking about dropping it altogether, so unless some other group decides to pick it up and maintain it, it'll go away or at least get stuck with no maintenance.
The problem here is that I'll bet that regular tabletop gamers like you're talking about don't sweat exactly how perfect or fair their dice are. The concern about this is likely from serious competitors who play in tournaments or the like, and are willing to pay a big premium for ultra-high-quality dice. So that's why I point out: why not just do it digitally (using your random.org link is a great idea actually)? It'll be far more random than any human-made dice could ever be.
My business and I are 100% dependant on Thunderbird for mail and calendar and 0% dependent on Firefox since Chrome's got some advantages. Perhaps this is a thing that Mozilla folks don't see since they're so browser focused.
Exactly how much money do you or your business pay Mozilla to maintain Thunderbird?
There's a bunch of companies paying them $$$$ for Firefox (like making their search engine the default, etc.). There's probably no one paying them anything for Thunderbird.
They're "not seeing" it because no one's paying them for it.
Worrying about your e-mail client's security seems a bit pointless when it sends everything in the clear across the internet anyhow.
Oh please, it's not like anyone can just snoop your email transmissions. The internet isn't like radio; the only people who can "listen in" are people who have access to the routers between the email source and destination, and there aren't very many entities there.
Then there was the whole Eich incident. It's absurd to see somebody lose his job just because of his views on marriage, of all things.
He didn't lose his job. He quit. He voluntarily stepped down because of all the controversy going on about the incident. This controversy was all from outside the company. Basically he didn't want to be a lightning rod for the company and didn't feel he'd be able to be an effective CEO with all this controversy surrounding him, so he "took one for the team" and removed himself from the situation to keep the company from further damage.
You can complain about that all you like, but it's not like the company fired him; they didn't. Your beef is with all the outsiders on internet message boards, not with the company's leadership.
Oh please, something like this can be done as an open-source project. It wouldn't exactly take many lines of code, so it'd be easy to audit by any competent programmer with an hour to spare (and that's being generous).
I've had a few cases where I tried that, and it still didn't work. I tried disabling uBlock Origin as well, and it still didn't work. So I had to switch to Chromium.
There was also probably something of a monopoly mindset where foreign brands by and large were a lot less available and not desirable by American standards (small, slow, etc).
That was the case before 1975, sure. After that, the Japanese brands became the ones everyone wanted; they were faster, nicer, had better fuel economy, lasted far far far longer, kept their resale better, were better looking, etc. The American brands finally started catching up in the late 90s or so.
The American companies have had literally decades to get their act together.
It's funny, but I've heard horror stories about Mercedes reliability and few positive things about Audi. BMW I hear mixed bag stories -- expensive to maintain, but not completely unreliable, either. My wife and I owned a VW Jetta 20 years ago that was junk.
High-end German cars are indeed infamous for outrageous repair costs. They're really just status symbols. If you want serious reliability, you want a Japanese-made car. It's been this way for a long time. Even VWs are known to have problems, especially the Mexican-made ones.
We've had excellent luck with Honda, but my understanding is they've had their own problems -- "a quart of oil a month is normal"
How old? The Hondas of the 90s were some of the most bulletproof cars ever made. I think they've lost some of their luster since then, but that's probably more because other brands have caught up a lot. I had two 90s-era Hondas and those things never burned oil.
If you allow everything by default, you're not going to get any benefit from it whatsoever. You might as well just use uBlock Origin so you avoid all the ads, but it also allows a lot of other BS (tracking scripts and such) which NoScript blocks.
It'd be nice to see something more like uBlock, or maybe have uBlock extended to do this, where it also blocks all the tracking crap, autoplaying videos, etc., using a curated blacklist. There are some things out there like Ghostery, but they're not trustworthy since they're run or funded by the ad companies.
Since the randomness or "fairness" of dice is completely dependent on how accurately they're made and balanced, which is pretty hard to do for a manufactured product (there's always a slight bit of variation), wouldn't it make more sense to just dump dice altogether, and use a computer? You could even have an Arduino or other microcontroller-powered handheld device, using a random number generator to "roll" a number when a button is pressed.
And yeah, there's NoScript... but that tends to limit the web's basic functionality.
NoScript is a HUGE improvement, in my experience. However, it's also a big pain in the ass to use, so I wouldn't foist it on my wife's computer for instance. What works well is to set the selection to whitelist scripts coming from the site's own domain, but after that you have to get good at manually enabling other domains, usually ones with "cdn" in them since most big sites deliver videos and such from affiliated CDN domains. If that doesn't work, however, then you're resorting to guessing; there's been a few times I've just started up an alternate browser that doesn't have NoScript installed just to look at one site, but this is rare. For the most part, NoScript is really helpful and speeds things up a lot, but it's really not that easy to use because the situation with JavaScript is such an utter mess, with dozens of scripts on every page it seems.
Everything costs a lot more in the US though. One US dollar spent by the US government at some US contractor is not going to go nearly as far as the same amount (in Rubles of course) spent by the Russian government.
Just look at how ridiculously inflated defense costs have gotten in the US. An aircraft carrier cost about 2.5B 20 years ago, now they cost 15B. Inflation isn't that high in this country.
How about Mars? Or what about a hyopthetical Moon-sized object with an Earth-like rotational period? Is there any situation where a space elevator actually makes sense?
Ok, then to be fair, you need to go back throughout time (let's cut it off at the last 10k years) and find everyone that, when asked casually, agrees with genociding some group of people, and go back in time and kill them when they're a baby.
Fast-forward back to the present after you're all done with that, and humans will be extinct. You probably wouldn't even need to go back 10k years; just go back 2k years, to a single point in time, and ask everyone then. I doubt you'll find many people alive then who don't want to commit genocide against someone.
Yeah, the stories are written down after being passed around by humans. But where did the more fantastical of these stories come from originally?
Probably drugs.
Some guy is high on something from some ancient plant, tells his buddies that he saw some giant spinning wheel with fire-breathing horses or whatever, they tell all their friends and anyone who'll listen, and next thing you know it's written down as the "word of God".
But since IoT vendors will never sell device that let me run my own software stack, I won't be buying the devices. But hey, you all have fun!
I'm sure they're really going to miss a handful of sales from some nerds. Meanwhile, they'll be raking in money from millions of laypeople who have no idea that ROT13 isn't a secure algorithm. You think a typical roofer or grocery store clerk can tell the difference?
Slashdot Mirror
If Jesus came back today, no one in America would recognize him because he wouldn't look Norwegian like all the paintings of him do.
Well even if you do care, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Email is inherently insecure because it was never designed for security. You can try to encrypt your email, but that isn't much good (outside of your organization which requires it and sets it up) because no one actually uses encryption or is set up for it. You can't send an encrypted email to some random person and expect it to work.
Um, those people you refer to in the articles are all employees (along with some people in outside organizations, like the gay guy who had some apps for Firefox). Employees, by definition, do not run an organization or decide who gets to be the CEO. That's the job of the Board of Directors.
Also, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data": this is a press piece which found a few angry employees and reported about them.
Leaving inputs floating on a digital device is usually a bad thing to do. It used to be that CMOS inputs left floating would cause huge current draws as they switched back and forth between 1 and 0
You're thinking of stuff from the 80s or before, like 4000-series CMOS chips. The OP is talking about microcontrollers with A/D input pins (which, by definition, is NOT digital, it's analog). If you leave these floating, which you normally do if you're not using them, the voltage will float, and then you can do an A/D conversion and see the value, which of course will be random.
I'm Ok with ads in Thunderbird. It's better than not having it at all I suppose, since they're talking about dropping it altogether, so unless some other group decides to pick it up and maintain it, it'll go away or at least get stuck with no maintenance.
The problem here is that I'll bet that regular tabletop gamers like you're talking about don't sweat exactly how perfect or fair their dice are. The concern about this is likely from serious competitors who play in tournaments or the like, and are willing to pay a big premium for ultra-high-quality dice. So that's why I point out: why not just do it digitally (using your random.org link is a great idea actually)? It'll be far more random than any human-made dice could ever be.
My business and I are 100% dependant on Thunderbird for mail and calendar and 0% dependent on Firefox since Chrome's got some advantages. Perhaps this is a thing that Mozilla folks don't see since they're so browser focused.
Exactly how much money do you or your business pay Mozilla to maintain Thunderbird?
There's a bunch of companies paying them $$$$ for Firefox (like making their search engine the default, etc.). There's probably no one paying them anything for Thunderbird.
They're "not seeing" it because no one's paying them for it.
Worrying about your e-mail client's security seems a bit pointless when it sends everything in the clear across the internet anyhow.
Oh please, it's not like anyone can just snoop your email transmissions. The internet isn't like radio; the only people who can "listen in" are people who have access to the routers between the email source and destination, and there aren't very many entities there.
Then there was the whole Eich incident. It's absurd to see somebody lose his job just because of his views on marriage, of all things.
He didn't lose his job. He quit. He voluntarily stepped down because of all the controversy going on about the incident. This controversy was all from outside the company. Basically he didn't want to be a lightning rod for the company and didn't feel he'd be able to be an effective CEO with all this controversy surrounding him, so he "took one for the team" and removed himself from the situation to keep the company from further damage.
You can complain about that all you like, but it's not like the company fired him; they didn't. Your beef is with all the outsiders on internet message boards, not with the company's leadership.
Oh please, something like this can be done as an open-source project. It wouldn't exactly take many lines of code, so it'd be easy to audit by any competent programmer with an hour to spare (and that's being generous).
I've had a few cases where I tried that, and it still didn't work. I tried disabling uBlock Origin as well, and it still didn't work. So I had to switch to Chromium.
There was also probably something of a monopoly mindset where foreign brands by and large were a lot less available and not desirable by American standards (small, slow, etc).
That was the case before 1975, sure. After that, the Japanese brands became the ones everyone wanted; they were faster, nicer, had better fuel economy, lasted far far far longer, kept their resale better, were better looking, etc. The American brands finally started catching up in the late 90s or so.
The American companies have had literally decades to get their act together.
It's funny, but I've heard horror stories about Mercedes reliability and few positive things about Audi. BMW I hear mixed bag stories -- expensive to maintain, but not completely unreliable, either. My wife and I owned a VW Jetta 20 years ago that was junk.
High-end German cars are indeed infamous for outrageous repair costs. They're really just status symbols. If you want serious reliability, you want a Japanese-made car. It's been this way for a long time. Even VWs are known to have problems, especially the Mexican-made ones.
We've had excellent luck with Honda, but my understanding is they've had their own problems -- "a quart of oil a month is normal"
How old? The Hondas of the 90s were some of the most bulletproof cars ever made. I think they've lost some of their luster since then, but that's probably more because other brands have caught up a lot. I had two 90s-era Hondas and those things never burned oil.
American cars are shit in comparison. That's not hyperbole, it's truth. Americans cannot make decent cars.
Bullshit. Teslas are nice cars.
And there's a bunch of BMW and Japanese manufacturer factories across America that produce very decent cars.
If you allow everything by default, you're not going to get any benefit from it whatsoever. You might as well just use uBlock Origin so you avoid all the ads, but it also allows a lot of other BS (tracking scripts and such) which NoScript blocks.
It'd be nice to see something more like uBlock, or maybe have uBlock extended to do this, where it also blocks all the tracking crap, autoplaying videos, etc., using a curated blacklist. There are some things out there like Ghostery, but they're not trustworthy since they're run or funded by the ad companies.
Since the randomness or "fairness" of dice is completely dependent on how accurately they're made and balanced, which is pretty hard to do for a manufactured product (there's always a slight bit of variation), wouldn't it make more sense to just dump dice altogether, and use a computer? You could even have an Arduino or other microcontroller-powered handheld device, using a random number generator to "roll" a number when a button is pressed.
And yeah, there's NoScript... but that tends to limit the web's basic functionality.
NoScript is a HUGE improvement, in my experience. However, it's also a big pain in the ass to use, so I wouldn't foist it on my wife's computer for instance. What works well is to set the selection to whitelist scripts coming from the site's own domain, but after that you have to get good at manually enabling other domains, usually ones with "cdn" in them since most big sites deliver videos and such from affiliated CDN domains. If that doesn't work, however, then you're resorting to guessing; there's been a few times I've just started up an alternate browser that doesn't have NoScript installed just to look at one site, but this is rare. For the most part, NoScript is really helpful and speeds things up a lot, but it's really not that easy to use because the situation with JavaScript is such an utter mess, with dozens of scripts on every page it seems.
What, so suddenly the OS doesn't need them?
Everything costs a lot more in the US though. One US dollar spent by the US government at some US contractor is not going to go nearly as far as the same amount (in Rubles of course) spent by the Russian government.
Just look at how ridiculously inflated defense costs have gotten in the US. An aircraft carrier cost about 2.5B 20 years ago, now they cost 15B. Inflation isn't that high in this country.
I see, thanks for the detailed explanation.
How about Mars? Or what about a hyopthetical Moon-sized object with an Earth-like rotational period? Is there any situation where a space elevator actually makes sense?
Ok, then to be fair, you need to go back throughout time (let's cut it off at the last 10k years) and find everyone that, when asked casually, agrees with genociding some group of people, and go back in time and kill them when they're a baby.
Fast-forward back to the present after you're all done with that, and humans will be extinct. You probably wouldn't even need to go back 10k years; just go back 2k years, to a single point in time, and ask everyone then. I doubt you'll find many people alive then who don't want to commit genocide against someone.
Yeah, the stories are written down after being passed around by humans. But where did the more fantastical of these stories come from originally?
Probably drugs.
Some guy is high on something from some ancient plant, tells his buddies that he saw some giant spinning wheel with fire-breathing horses or whatever, they tell all their friends and anyone who'll listen, and next thing you know it's written down as the "word of God".
No, it's more like having a window on your house with a big red button on the outside that says "press to open".
...before consumers pull their head out of their a...ah, what the hell am I thinking? Consumers have never given a shit about security or privacy.
Exactly. Just look at how popular Facebook is.
But since IoT vendors will never sell device that let me run my own software stack, I won't be buying the devices. But hey, you all have fun!
I'm sure they're really going to miss a handful of sales from some nerds. Meanwhile, they'll be raking in money from millions of laypeople who have no idea that ROT13 isn't a secure algorithm. You think a typical roofer or grocery store clerk can tell the difference?
I see a market here, for selling tools to burglars to hack these crappy alarm systems.