What a bunch of horseshit. Most modern intro-to-programming classes are taught in C and/or C++.
Really? I've looked at a *lot* of courses, and I've hardly ever seen either C or C++ taught as first language. When I started doing this, Pascal was the most common with a smattering of Modula-2, ML and LISP. These days, it's almost always Java. If it isn't, it's OCAML, Modula-3 or LISP.
Yes, but it says phones. No way the headline and summary would be referring to just one phone like that. No way at all.
One article clearly is talking about only one phone. The other is quite obviously getting its info from the other, and the expansion from "phone" to "phones" is not justified. I.e. somebody read too much into the first article and is assuming that this is not an isolated occurrence.
Now, admittedly, for the phone that an employee of an antivirus company purchases to be the only one unlucky enough to be infected by a virus seems highly unlikely... but this may well be a local issue.
I've seen these before, and "please e-mail sales" in lieu of a base price usually turns out to be code-word for "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
According to a review in MacUser, it's £199+VAT (=~ $350 US), or at least that was the price for v1.1 (I think there may have been a few updates since then).
The JRE has been cut down to the bare minimum (it never was more than 15 MB, you cannot compare it with the JDK which is way more) and then it loads parts it needs over the net.
The Dogon already knew of the existance of life in Orion centuries ago
Unfortunately (for it is a rather cool story) there is convincing evidence that it was cultural contamination (see Walter E. A. van Beek: "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule." Current Anthropology, 32 (1991): 139-167).
Expect the frameworks that are specially designed to NOT intrude in your model. Just look at most of the POJO frameworks nowadays. No need to implement specific interfaces, no need to derive from base classes.
Some would say this makes them not frameworks. Example: I love Spring and use it extensively. I don't, however, use it as a framework: I use it as a library that handles the job of creating certain objects for me.
Sometimes you can't help but work inside a particular framework (Java Servlets come to mind... you basically have to use the control flow specified by the server architecture, you can't change it around so you control the flow or the initialization, for instance), but Spring is absolutely not like this, and that in my mind means it isn't a framework, no matter what its name tells us it is.
what happened to applets? They are usable now, but everyone still thinks they are in a sorry state of ca 1997.
The problem with applets is you can't rely on anyone to have a recent version of Java, or indeed any version of Java at all. I worked on a site that used applets for user interface purposes back in the early 2000s. In about 2005, the company that owned it sold the site, and the buyer asked us to help redevelop it. They had done some stats-gathering with their existing customers, and found only about 60% of them had a recent enough Java (1.2) to run the applet we had written. About 25% had no Java installation at all, because MS's Java was removed when XP SP2 was released.
Looking at the situation currently, it does seem to be improving (these stats suggest it's now < 20% who don't have it installed), but there's still a significant base that don't have Java, and with it being a ~80MB download, it's more than you can ask people to get if they want to use your site.
Exactly what I was coming here to say. The only people I've heard complaining about this are the Internet archivists who work for the British Library. The law in question doesn't even apply to the Internet Archive as referred to in the summary, as it is a law concerning deposit libraries, which IA ain't.
Are you kidding? ACTA's going to harmonise everything so closely to the US that they'll be able to prosecute anyone.
If you think Vanuatu et al are going to be signing up to ACTA, then I want some of what you're smoking.
Sure, most of the large economies will probably be signing, but there's no reason not to base an Internet business on a little island somewhere nice with friendly laws (and, as a nice side benefit, zero taxation).
What on earth is the DMCA supposed to achieve, in the context of Ad-providers?
Sounds pretty scary to me.
Agreed. I've never heard of this, and a quick scan of the legislation doesn't turn up anything that appears to relate to this; the categories of service it regulates appear to be (a) telecoms providers transmitting data at user request, (b) those hosting temporary copies of content (e.g. caches), (c) those hosting content at the request of third parties, and (d) search engines, directories and other link collections. I see no suggestion in the text of the legislation that it applies to people providing additional content that is aggregated on the same page, or in any other way I can think of that would catch out ad networks.
Also, there are plenty of non-USad networks and affiliate sites, many of whom probably don't give a fuck about DMCA notifications even if they do apply.
Singapore, anyone ?: the country that is trying to abolish cash
[citation needed]
We're talking about the country that prints the largest denominated banknote in the world. A quick examination of the situation suggests that cash is still legal tender in singapore (i.e. if you owe somebody money, they are legally required to accept it in cash), and not only that but most businesses in singapore will apparently accept brunei dollars (which have equal value to singapore dollars) and vice versa.
A file on a USB thumb drive can be trivially read on any PC with a USB port. No digital camera, no webcam, no extra software needed. It's more secure than paper, and much, much more convenient.
Yes, but how sure are you that if you leave it in a filing cabinet for 10 years it'll still work when you come back to it? How about in 20 or 50 years? Data on electronic media has a limited shelf-life, particularly flash which stores data in a retained electronic charge which will gradually decay. Data printed on paper can last for hundreds of years with relative ease.
It doesn't speak of the ISP having rights in this process. Does a High court tribunal give the defendant a voice?
Yes. In proceedings for an injunction at the high court, the proposed recipient off the injunction (i.e. the ISP) can make representations, e.g. if they consider the content legal and the request spurious.
How many of them will actually bother to do this is another matter.
Took a quick look, it seems they have not made any provisions for making the block as specific as possible - if I am correct, this could turn properly silly: The entire of myspace.com blocked because someone claims that so-and-so on myspace.com infringes their copyright.
Not sure. The legislation talks about "online locations". This could be interpreted as either a domain or a single URL. Although, the single URL interpretation is a little dubious because the remainder of the bill seems to consider a single "location" as a container for large quantities of potentially non-homogenous content.
If it is interpreted as a domain, though, the result will emphatically not be what you suggest, as 2 (a) requires the court to consider how high the proportion of offending versus non-offending content is. Result: TPB and Rapidshare get blocked, myspace survives without any restrictions.
It's an interesting reply, but I think it misses the major problem with the idea behind this legislation, which proposes to ban access to any site where some unspecified majority of content is infringing (the required amount presumably to be established later by courts in the case law on the issue). The problem with this is that many of these sites also contain useful non-infringing content that can often be difficult to acquire elsewhere, e.g. I've come across a number of small free/shareware software authors who use rapidshare as their primary distribution point. Killing access to these sites also kills legitimate content, which absolutely should not be permitted.
Sigh, it's another kind of super injunction and of course there's a catch all, meaning it can be used not just against copyright infringment but "any issues of national security" or "any other matters which appear to the Court to be relevant".
You appear to be misreading it. These aren't reasons why an injunction should be granted. They are things that a court must consider before deciding whether or not to grant it. "Any other matters which appear relevant" is actually a way for the court to *avoid* issuing an injunction where there's a good reason not to, e.g. if having the copyrighted document available to the public is in the public interest (e.g. much of the content on wikileaks).
In the end, the court is limited by the description of the power in (1). It can only issue an injunction under the proposals of this bill if it is "for the prevention of online copyright infringement." So I'm pretty sure the national security clause is not an issue, and I'm beyond certain that the "any other matters" clause is fine.
UK courts have a history of interpreting legislation from a much more liberal perspective than the legislators who made it. I don't think there's much to worry about here.
Typed out at 65 characters per line that's less than 11 lines of text. Big deal.
Any halfway-decent OCR program should be able to read that error-free, assuming you don't spill coffee on it first.
Indeed. The advantage of a barcode is redundancy; AIUI the approach taken will still work even if 30% of the paper is rendered entirely unreadable due to damage.
ECC was first published in 1985. AIUI, Certicom would have had 2 years from this date to file for any patents related to that technique. Any patents on the original idea should therefore have expired 2 years or more ago. I believe Certicom has patents on some specific implementations that are improvements over the original implementation, but these can be worked around by simply using the technique as it was originally published.
OpenSSL includes an ECC implementation, and AFAIK Certicom have never threatened any action against them.
I don't think 128 bit has ever been considered unbreakable for asymmetric keys, 1024-2048 has been the standard for asymmetric since I have known about it.
For RSA-style asymmetric. Elliptic curve algorithms have entirely different key lengths; the longest broken to date is (IIRC) 112 bits, and the NSA consider 224 and 256 bits good enough for secret & top secret data respectively (hence equivalent to 3048-bit and 4096-bit RSA).
This makes absolutely no sense. Smart cards have been around for many years now. There, you NEVER give ANYONE or anything access to your private key. Challenge-response, one-time-passwords, tokens, etc, etc. Putting it on paper is LESS SECURE than sticking it on a thunb drive. Then at least it can't be stolen by taking a picture...
Smart card reader/writer hardware is expensive and not widely installed. The cards themselves aren't cheap (about $3 each for cards capable of mutual authentication last time I looked) and have a short lifespan (typically around 5 years, if kept in a rigid case, or 2-3 if kept loose, from what I've read). Mostly, they're limited to 1024- or 2048-bit RSA; I haven't seen one that'll work with 4096-bit keys.
A barcode can be trivially read on any PC with a webcam or connection to a digital camera with the trivial installation of additional software. Yes, it's less secure, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient.
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What a bunch of horseshit. Most modern intro-to-programming classes are taught in C and/or C++.
Really? I've looked at a *lot* of courses, and I've hardly ever seen either C or C++ taught as first language. When I started doing this, Pascal was the most common with a smattering of Modula-2, ML and LISP. These days, it's almost always Java. If it isn't, it's OCAML, Modula-3 or LISP.
What intro-level courses use C or C++?
Depends on the BASIC. I use RealBasic at work as an alternative to LabView.
RTFA. The author is quite clearly talking about non-block structured BASICs of the MS-BASIC kind.
Am I the only person on the Earth who just writes off hysterical, panty-wetting stuff like this?
Again, read for context. Dijkstra was being intentionally hyperbolic in a joke article when he wrote this. He did intend the point behind it, though.
...and I'm wondering: what's with the random sushi pictures?
Yes, but it says phones. No way the headline and summary would be referring to just one phone like that. No way at all.
One article clearly is talking about only one phone. The other is quite obviously getting its info from the other, and the expansion from "phone" to "phones" is not justified. I.e. somebody read too much into the first article and is assuming that this is not an isolated occurrence.
Now, admittedly, for the phone that an employee of an antivirus company purchases to be the only one unlucky enough to be infected by a virus seems highly unlikely... but this may well be a local issue.
I've seen these before, and "please e-mail sales" in lieu of a base price usually turns out to be code-word for "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
According to a review in MacUser, it's £199+VAT (=~ $350 US), or at least that was the price for v1.1 (I think there may have been a few updates since then).
I had to read the article to see it was Windows only . . . whew.
No you didn't. Even before the update, the summary clearly said it was mod_isapi that contains the bug, and mod_isapi is a Windows-only component.
Does anyone else think it ironic that the most severe security error found in Apache for quite a while now is in an IIS compatibility module?
The JRE has been cut down to the bare minimum (it never was more than 15 MB, you cannot compare it with the JDK which is way more)
and then it loads parts it needs over the net.
vengeance:~# apt-cache show sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin
Package: sun-java6-jre
[...]
Depends: java-common (>= 0.24), locales, sun-java6-bin (= 6-12-1) | ia32-sun-java6-bin (= 6-12-1)
[...]
Size: 6380918
[...]
Package: sun-java6-bin
[...]
Size: 28282606
Looks like >35MB to me.
Ah, you read the Wikipedia articles too. Well done.
Also searched for legislation, which is a good basic approach to take in English-speaking countries. :)
The Dogon already knew of the existance of life in Orion centuries ago
Unfortunately (for it is a rather cool story) there is convincing evidence that it was cultural contamination (see Walter E. A. van Beek: "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule." Current Anthropology, 32 (1991): 139-167).
Expect the frameworks that are specially designed to NOT intrude in your model. Just look at most of the POJO frameworks nowadays. No need to implement specific interfaces, no need to derive from base classes.
Some would say this makes them not frameworks. Example: I love Spring and use it extensively. I don't, however, use it as a framework: I use it as a library that handles the job of creating certain objects for me.
Sometimes you can't help but work inside a particular framework (Java Servlets come to mind... you basically have to use the control flow specified by the server architecture, you can't change it around so you control the flow or the initialization, for instance), but Spring is absolutely not like this, and that in my mind means it isn't a framework, no matter what its name tells us it is.
what happened to applets?
They are usable now, but everyone still thinks they are in a sorry state of ca 1997.
The problem with applets is you can't rely on anyone to have a recent version of Java, or indeed any version of Java at all. I worked on a site that used applets for user interface purposes back in the early 2000s. In about 2005, the company that owned it sold the site, and the buyer asked us to help redevelop it. They had done some stats-gathering with their existing customers, and found only about 60% of them had a recent enough Java (1.2) to run the applet we had written. About 25% had no Java installation at all, because MS's Java was removed when XP SP2 was released.
Looking at the situation currently, it does seem to be improving (these stats suggest it's now < 20% who don't have it installed), but there's still a significant base that don't have Java, and with it being a ~80MB download, it's more than you can ask people to get if they want to use your site.
Exactly what I was coming here to say. The only people I've heard complaining about this are the Internet archivists who work for the British Library. The law in question doesn't even apply to the Internet Archive as referred to in the summary, as it is a law concerning deposit libraries, which IA ain't.
Are you kidding? ACTA's going to harmonise everything so closely to the US that they'll be able to prosecute anyone.
If you think Vanuatu et al are going to be signing up to ACTA, then I want some of what you're smoking.
Sure, most of the large economies will probably be signing, but there's no reason not to base an Internet business on a little island somewhere nice with friendly laws (and, as a nice side benefit, zero taxation).
What on earth is the DMCA supposed to achieve, in the context of Ad-providers?
Sounds pretty scary to me.
Agreed. I've never heard of this, and a quick scan of the legislation doesn't turn up anything that appears to relate to this; the categories of service it regulates appear to be (a) telecoms providers transmitting data at user request, (b) those hosting temporary copies of content (e.g. caches), (c) those hosting content at the request of third parties, and (d) search engines, directories and other link collections. I see no suggestion in the text of the legislation that it applies to people providing additional content that is aggregated on the same page, or in any other way I can think of that would catch out ad networks.
Also, there are plenty of non-US ad networks and affiliate sites, many of whom probably don't give a fuck about DMCA notifications even if they do apply.
Singapore, anyone ?: the country that is trying to abolish cash
[citation needed]
We're talking about the country that prints the largest denominated banknote in the world. A quick examination of the situation suggests that cash is still legal tender in singapore (i.e. if you owe somebody money, they are legally required to accept it in cash), and not only that but most businesses in singapore will apparently accept brunei dollars (which have equal value to singapore dollars) and vice versa.
A file on a USB thumb drive can be trivially read on any PC with a USB port. No digital camera, no webcam, no extra software needed. It's more secure than paper, and much, much more convenient.
Yes, but how sure are you that if you leave it in a filing cabinet for 10 years it'll still work when you come back to it? How about in 20 or 50 years? Data on electronic media has a limited shelf-life, particularly flash which stores data in a retained electronic charge which will gradually decay. Data printed on paper can last for hundreds of years with relative ease.
It doesn't speak of the ISP having rights in this process. Does a High court tribunal give the defendant a voice?
Yes. In proceedings for an injunction at the high court, the proposed recipient off the injunction (i.e. the ISP) can make representations, e.g. if they consider the content legal and the request spurious.
How many of them will actually bother to do this is another matter.
Took a quick look, it seems they have not made any provisions for making the block as specific as possible - if I am correct, this could turn properly silly: The entire of myspace.com blocked because someone claims that so-and-so on myspace.com infringes their copyright.
Not sure. The legislation talks about "online locations". This could be interpreted as either a domain or a single URL. Although, the single URL interpretation is a little dubious because the remainder of the bill seems to consider a single "location" as a container for large quantities of potentially non-homogenous content.
If it is interpreted as a domain, though, the result will emphatically not be what you suggest, as 2 (a) requires the court to consider how high the proportion of offending versus non-offending content is. Result: TPB and Rapidshare get blocked, myspace survives without any restrictions.
It's an interesting reply, but I think it misses the major problem with the idea behind this legislation, which proposes to ban access to any site where some unspecified majority of content is infringing (the required amount presumably to be established later by courts in the case law on the issue). The problem with this is that many of these sites also contain useful non-infringing content that can often be difficult to acquire elsewhere, e.g. I've come across a number of small free/shareware software authors who use rapidshare as their primary distribution point. Killing access to these sites also kills legitimate content, which absolutely should not be permitted.
Sigh, it's another kind of super injunction and of course there's a catch all, meaning it can be used not just against copyright infringment but "any issues of national security" or "any other matters which appear to the Court to be relevant".
You appear to be misreading it. These aren't reasons why an injunction should be granted. They are things that a court must consider before deciding whether or not to grant it. "Any other matters which appear relevant" is actually a way for the court to *avoid* issuing an injunction where there's a good reason not to, e.g. if having the copyrighted document available to the public is in the public interest (e.g. much of the content on wikileaks).
In the end, the court is limited by the description of the power in (1). It can only issue an injunction under the proposals of this bill if it is "for the prevention of online copyright infringement." So I'm pretty sure the national security clause is not an issue, and I'm beyond certain that the "any other matters" clause is fine.
UK courts have a history of interpreting legislation from a much more liberal perspective than the legislators who made it. I don't think there's much to worry about here.
Geesh, in base-64 it's only 683 characters.
Typed out at 65 characters per line that's less than 11 lines of text. Big deal.
Any halfway-decent OCR program should be able to read that error-free, assuming you don't spill coffee on it first.
Indeed. The advantage of a barcode is redundancy; AIUI the approach taken will still work even if 30% of the paper is rendered entirely unreadable due to damage.
Certicom has a bunch of patents on ECC, though.
ECC was first published in 1985. AIUI, Certicom would have had 2 years from this date to file for any patents related to that technique. Any patents on the original idea should therefore have expired 2 years or more ago. I believe Certicom has patents on some specific implementations that are improvements over the original implementation, but these can be worked around by simply using the technique as it was originally published.
OpenSSL includes an ECC implementation, and AFAIK Certicom have never threatened any action against them.
I don't think 128 bit has ever been considered unbreakable for asymmetric keys, 1024-2048 has been the standard for asymmetric since I have known about it.
For RSA-style asymmetric. Elliptic curve algorithms have entirely different key lengths; the longest broken to date is (IIRC) 112 bits, and the NSA consider 224 and 256 bits good enough for secret & top secret data respectively (hence equivalent to 3048-bit and 4096-bit RSA).
This makes absolutely no sense. Smart cards have been around for many years now. There, you NEVER give ANYONE or anything access to your private key. Challenge-response, one-time-passwords, tokens, etc, etc. Putting it on paper is LESS SECURE than sticking it on a thunb drive. Then at least it can't be stolen by taking a picture...
Smart card reader/writer hardware is expensive and not widely installed. The cards themselves aren't cheap (about $3 each for cards capable of mutual authentication last time I looked) and have a short lifespan (typically around 5 years, if kept in a rigid case, or 2-3 if kept loose, from what I've read). Mostly, they're limited to 1024- or 2048-bit RSA; I haven't seen one that'll work with 4096-bit keys.
A barcode can be trivially read on any PC with a webcam or connection to a digital camera with the trivial installation of additional software. Yes, it's less secure, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient.