Actually I meant "plug-in" in the all-encompassing generic sense that includes extensions, NPAPI plugins, and even in-built code modules for third parties (e.g. Pocket) that I assume at least some people must want and use. I suspect that most people who would prefer to switch but remain with Firefox are probably doing so because of some specific Firefox Extensions that are not as well developed for their alternative browser of choice - if they exist at all.
Don't forget what new bloatware monstrosity they've added and how many hoops you'll need to jump through to switch it off. Were it not for the excellent work of the plug-in community that is helping keeping people tied to Firefox I think they'd be firmly be in the "Other browsers" part of the market by now, but even that's not going to last for ever as Chrome's plugin options are catching up fast and more people are discovering forks like Waterfox and Palemoon. If Mozilla wants to add in this stuff of the off chance that enough people might actually use it, then fine, but can we please have it implemented as optional and easily disabled modules - ideally with the ability to not even install them?
It could easily be both, in which case the differentiating factor should be which came first - the made-up word domain registration or the well known name (which could also be a made up word - "googl" and "Google", for instance). Who has the most expensive lawyers aside, the responsibility for checking for pre-existing typosquatting domains ought to lie with the company, the same way it's their responsibility to make sure their intended name doesn't infringe on any existing trademarks and servicemarks. Back in 2001 I doubt too many people were even thinking about such things though.
Take a closer look at the list of software vendors mentioned in the GCHQ article. There are three notable ones missing from the list; McAfee (US based), Symantec (US based), and Sophos (UK based) - all the others are based outside the so called Five-Eyes countries. Now, do you suppose they are not mentioned because their code is so crap that GCHQ and the NSA had no problems in compromising their software, because they installed a backdoor on demand, or for some other reason?
Now that's still no guarantee that any of the other vendors have not backdoored their software on behalf of their respective security service overlords, but it *is* another good reason for avoiding US/UK manufactured security products, or at the very least taking into account which government you'd least mind if they were able to eavesdrop on your data. Bearing in mind that your local security services may also be passing data to your local law enforcement, copyright cartels, and who knows who else, the safest post-Snowden option is probably to assume they are all listening and choose overseas vendors that won't give a crap about any local "criminal activity", however minor it might be.
Not just that, but using zero as a default error value for X/0 also fails to take into account the possibility of 0/X for which zero is the correct (and desirable) answer. X/0 != 0/X, so they *need* to return different values.
Maybe, but unlikely. There are some pretty dumb copper thieves out there (the really dumb ones mostly get electrocuted when they try and steal live power cables) and it used to be quite common when fibre wasn't quite so common when they'd mistake fibre for copper - especially if was secured to containment and they couldn't judge the weight without cutting it first - but most of them now seem to have figured out how to tell the difference visually.
Ah! My bad - apparently the scammers now have the.ch domain too and have locked out the original site operators completely so the original EZTV operators have decided to call it quits. Still, they are currently only pushing torrents to.avi and.mp4 files (ocassionally with ASCII.txt and.nfo files) which are generally pretty safe and the site works fine with NoScript etc. so I suppose with a suitable degree of caution until they either blow it or establish a good reputation it might be safe to use.
Of course, it could all just be a ruse to add an extra layer of obfuscation to the operators IRL identities of course; "Not us, your honour, we packed it all in back in May '15. Look at all this web coverage!"
And yet, despite all those flawed arguments, you still failed to answer the OP's question. No one is saying DNS is perfect, but sometimes you need a different tool to solve a problem, and unless you can provide some hack/workaround to allow an arbitrary list of subdomains/hosts using nothing more than a hosts file, this is one of those times.
No - you can't use wildcards in hosts. It is however pretty trivial to sinkhole entire domains using DNS if you have your own server - best of all you should only need a single zone file, and you can then point multiple domains, or even TLDs, at it. Tie that into your anti-spam solution (if sender domain resolves to 127.0.0.1, reject mail) and and you have a pretty compact solution for wholesale filtering of junk that still allows for fine control over whitelisting if need be.
Mint is a fairly popular and stable distro, so they've got a great opportunity to get some hard data on the whole systemd thing. Hopefully the choice of default and how the choice is presented to users is done in an even handed manner (maybe randomized like MS did with the EU browser selection ballot in Windows) and they are gathering some stats. Even though there's no chance of it ending the dispute, I'd be really curious to see the the answers to these:
How many users choose Upstart?
How many users choose systemd?
How many users choose Upstart when it's not the default option?
How many users choose systemd when it's not the default option?
How many more downloads does this release get than a typical release (potentially indicating people switching from other systemd-only distros), if any?
You landed at Chek Lap Kok, the new airport on the artificial island, which is in a pretty open space with a nice conventional approach. The previous HK airport, Kowloon City or Kai Tak Airport, was the one with the sharp turns, low level flights over the city and had it rated at one of the most difficult in the world with pilots requiring specific training before being able to operate there. Read the descriptions for R13 approach and R31 departure at the link above, and you'll see why this is nothing like La Guardia in terms of justifiation.
It's no contest on immigration being dicks though as the US is definitely the uncontested number one there; even though plenty of other countries are more stringent they're generally at least courteous about it.
Hong Kong is slightly different though. They can justify the expense of building an aritificial island to solve the hazardous approach issues with the former airport on the grounds that there simply was no other viable alternative as there was simply no way to suitably adapt the existing airport to make it safer or any preexisting alternative location. La Guardia has similar problems, but has far more alternative options than the "artificial island" approach, although its convenience to central NYC does make it a good location that makes simply closing it unattractive.
Still, the "all or nothing" solutions being proposed (close it or spending $4b renovating it) do seem a little restrictive though. Perhaps a better option would be to turn it into more of a City Airport for those actually travelling to NYC, while moving as much of the through "hub" and international traffic out to J.F.K and Newark where rapid access to NYC is much less important. You'd still need to overhaul the La Guardia terminal, but potentially on a much smaller scale, even allowing for potential future growth.
Well, that's the reason being claimed by the proponents of the bill anyway. It does kind of make sense why it would need to be a secret of you accept that as fact; if the US has agreed to pay an import duty rate of 10% to one country, and another is only getting 8%, then the latter might want 10% too. In international trade, that could be worth billions of dollars per annum, so it's in the US' best interests not to disclose that until the deal is done and documents have been signed.
However.
We have no assurances that is *all* that is being protected by this cloak of secrecy. There could easily be all sorts of other things squirrelled away in there that people will jump all over if it's made public - legal provisions for extending the US idea of justice to other nations; extradition arrangements, tweaks to copyright / trademark / patent legislation, and so on. Sure, some of that might also come under the same kind of preferential setup as in the example above, but without even a redacted version of the proposed legislation available how are people to have any confidence that at all is the case and there is little to worry about? Not disclosing the precise percentages are is one thing, but not even disclosing what the high level details are is something else entirely and just furthers the joke that the "most transparent administration ever" claim has now become.
No need. What the summary doesn't cover (it's in the the actual article) is that that this was always the plan. The UK Cabinet Office arranged a blanket agreement for the extended support coverage that applied to all departments that needed it for a lower overall cost, making it quite clear right from the start that this contract would not be renewed, and it hasn't been. It's now up to the individual departments to decide whether or not they wish to expend some of their own budget on further extending their specific support with Microsoft on a per-department basis. If there's a story here, it's the number of PCs still running XP that are now outside support and which departments those PCs are in, but that's something the article doesn't cover.
I suspect this is more a case of "follow the money" as well. Enabling the FM radio provides owners of the phone with a potential free source of music included in the price of admission. Disabling the FM radio provides the vendors of the phone with more potential customers for their music store offerings/partnerships and increases the overpriced use of data to get it. I really can't imagine why companies with a track record of doing everything they can to screw over their customers for a little more money *wouldn't* go with the latter option...
I'm not. FINALLY we have a phone suitable for tapping into the vast amounts of money that audiophiles appear willing to spend in the endless hunt for the delusion of a little more on-paper improvement in quality. This has nothing to do with practicalities, the vendors know full well that there are plenty of people out there who will spend whatever it takes to have the best, regardless of whether they actually get any benefit from it or not. If they can create the products with enough margin to turn a profit, of course they are going to do just that.
I'm just wondering how long it's going to be before we get a similarly ludicrously over specced range of accessories, because one the market is established you just know it's coming...
Why couldn't they have done this when those Downfall parodies were all the range, this one could have been awesome. Hitler, Developers, Developers, Developers, Linux is a Cancer, the Secret Flying Chairs of the Luftwaffe. It practically writes itself...
It's a reference to the "religious freedom" legislation those two states passed recently that allow for discrimination based on religious beliefs that prompted several tech companies including Apple to curtail their business there, which was covered on Slashdot here and here. Essentially if a resident of those states has a personal prejudice against some group and can find a relevant passage in their religious book of choice (generally not too hard, given how open to interpretation the texts are), then they can quite legally tell them to take a hike. It doesn't mean that they're not going to face a backlash from the rest of society or the media, of course, as several people/groups have already found out.
Given the previous clueless comments on tech matters that have been made by the UK government I'm inclined to discount this being a case of "yes, we know it's stupid, but it'll win us some votes (from those equally clueless) and we'll forget about it after the election". Nope, the real motivation here seems to be in the bit Slashdot skipped over, despite it being right there on the byline of TFA: "ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content via an independent regulator with power to compel ISPs to block sites". Oh yes, it's the old "let's censor the Internet" meme again, only this time it appears they've at least learnt from their previous mistakes and placed all the financial burden of doing the impossible and somehow blocking the vast number of sites that won't comply with this legislation firmly on the ISPs with fines if they don't co-operate.
That's the big question, isn't it? Like CNNIC, the Turkish DigiNotar got the boot also, yet the US-based TrustWave was let off. It's probably worth pointing out that TrustWave's problems occurred pre-Snowden so people were a little more complacent even before you consider the "local US company" vs. "country with poor reputation for civil rights" issues. I'd like to hope that in today's climate TrustWave would meet a similar fate to DigiNotar and CNNIC/MCS, but without a clear no-exceptions policy from the application and OS vendors there's no real way to be sure. Even if there were such a policy, I doubt anyone would be willing to unilaterally revoke a compromised root certificate from one of the *really* major players in the CA game without a mutually agreed grace period to migrate users to replacement certificates.
Microsoft have decided that the buck stops with MCS Holdings and will be revoking all of their certificates, but letting CNNIC and their other customers off the hook. I suspect the update will go out as part of the regular patch batch on April 14th.
It's not quite that simple. CNNIC is the Chinese national equivalent of a LIR - they are responsible for all the IP assignments in China, so they can hardly "disappear" like that. Shutting down their CA division and re-opening it as a new shell company might be an option however.
The main thing here is that this also invalidates all of the certificates issued by CNNIC's intermediaries like MCS that are decended from the soon to be invalidated root certificates, and so on all the way down the chain of trust. That's a *lot* of customers and customers of customers that are going to be looking to push at least some of the costs of sorting this out upstream. Ultimately the buck stops at CNNIC, so they are going to have to make a decision about how much of that costs they are going to bear - get it wrong and there are plenty of other root CAs that intermediate level CAs can go to instead of CNNIC.
That sends a pretty strong message to other CAs that might be considering something similar, or to governments looking to strong arm a CA into doing it on their behalf. Break the chain of trust (whether through imcompetence, negligence or deliberate intent being immaterial), and you can expect to face very public, and potentially very expensive, consequences. Given that this also has implications for everyone's privacy, absolutely Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla et. al ought to follow suit and take at least some form of punitive action. Following on from DigiNotar I'm actually expecting to see them publishing some form of formalised policies about this in the near future, and hopefully no more exceptions (like TrustWave) are going to be made.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I meant "plug-in" in the all-encompassing generic sense that includes extensions, NPAPI plugins, and even in-built code modules for third parties (e.g. Pocket) that I assume at least some people must want and use. I suspect that most people who would prefer to switch but remain with Firefox are probably doing so because of some specific Firefox Extensions that are not as well developed for their alternative browser of choice - if they exist at all.
Don't forget what new bloatware monstrosity they've added and how many hoops you'll need to jump through to switch it off. Were it not for the excellent work of the plug-in community that is helping keeping people tied to Firefox I think they'd be firmly be in the "Other browsers" part of the market by now, but even that's not going to last for ever as Chrome's plugin options are catching up fast and more people are discovering forks like Waterfox and Palemoon. If Mozilla wants to add in this stuff of the off chance that enough people might actually use it, then fine, but can we please have it implemented as optional and easily disabled modules - ideally with the ability to not even install them?
It could easily be both, in which case the differentiating factor should be which came first - the made-up word domain registration or the well known name (which could also be a made up word - "googl" and "Google", for instance). Who has the most expensive lawyers aside, the responsibility for checking for pre-existing typosquatting domains ought to lie with the company, the same way it's their responsibility to make sure their intended name doesn't infringe on any existing trademarks and servicemarks. Back in 2001 I doubt too many people were even thinking about such things though.
Take a closer look at the list of software vendors mentioned in the GCHQ article. There are three notable ones missing from the list; McAfee (US based), Symantec (US based), and Sophos (UK based) - all the others are based outside the so called Five-Eyes countries. Now, do you suppose they are not mentioned because their code is so crap that GCHQ and the NSA had no problems in compromising their software, because they installed a backdoor on demand, or for some other reason?
Now that's still no guarantee that any of the other vendors have not backdoored their software on behalf of their respective security service overlords, but it *is* another good reason for avoiding US/UK manufactured security products, or at the very least taking into account which government you'd least mind if they were able to eavesdrop on your data. Bearing in mind that your local security services may also be passing data to your local law enforcement, copyright cartels, and who knows who else, the safest post-Snowden option is probably to assume they are all listening and choose overseas vendors that won't give a crap about any local "criminal activity", however minor it might be.
Not just that, but using zero as a default error value for X/0 also fails to take into account the possibility of 0/X for which zero is the correct (and desirable) answer. X/0 != 0/X, so they *need* to return different values.
Maybe, but unlikely. There are some pretty dumb copper thieves out there (the really dumb ones mostly get electrocuted when they try and steal live power cables) and it used to be quite common when fibre wasn't quite so common when they'd mistake fibre for copper - especially if was secured to containment and they couldn't judge the weight without cutting it first - but most of them now seem to have figured out how to tell the difference visually.
Reply to undo bad mod.
Ah! My bad - apparently the scammers now have the .ch domain too and have locked out the original site operators completely so the original EZTV operators have decided to call it quits. Still, they are currently only pushing torrents to .avi and .mp4 files (ocassionally with ASCII .txt and .nfo files) which are generally pretty safe and the site works fine with NoScript etc. so I suppose with a suitable degree of caution until they either blow it or establish a good reputation it might be safe to use.
Of course, it could all just be a ruse to add an extra layer of obfuscation to the operators IRL identities of course; "Not us, your honour, we packed it all in back in May '15. Look at all this web coverage!"
EZTV is back up under the .ch domain.
And yet, despite all those flawed arguments, you still failed to answer the OP's question. No one is saying DNS is perfect, but sometimes you need a different tool to solve a problem, and unless you can provide some hack/workaround to allow an arbitrary list of subdomains/hosts using nothing more than a hosts file, this is one of those times.
No - you can't use wildcards in hosts. It is however pretty trivial to sinkhole entire domains using DNS if you have your own server - best of all you should only need a single zone file, and you can then point multiple domains, or even TLDs, at it. Tie that into your anti-spam solution (if sender domain resolves to 127.0.0.1, reject mail) and and you have a pretty compact solution for wholesale filtering of junk that still allows for fine control over whitelisting if need be.
Mint is a fairly popular and stable distro, so they've got a great opportunity to get some hard data on the whole systemd thing. Hopefully the choice of default and how the choice is presented to users is done in an even handed manner (maybe randomized like MS did with the EU browser selection ballot in Windows) and they are gathering some stats. Even though there's no chance of it ending the dispute, I'd be really curious to see the the answers to these:
How many users choose Upstart?
How many users choose systemd?
How many users choose Upstart when it's not the default option?
How many users choose systemd when it's not the default option?
How many more downloads does this release get than a typical release (potentially indicating people switching from other systemd-only distros), if any?
You landed at Chek Lap Kok, the new airport on the artificial island, which is in a pretty open space with a nice conventional approach. The previous HK airport, Kowloon City or Kai Tak Airport, was the one with the sharp turns, low level flights over the city and had it rated at one of the most difficult in the world with pilots requiring specific training before being able to operate there. Read the descriptions for R13 approach and R31 departure at the link above, and you'll see why this is nothing like La Guardia in terms of justifiation.
It's no contest on immigration being dicks though as the US is definitely the uncontested number one there; even though plenty of other countries are more stringent they're generally at least courteous about it.
Hong Kong is slightly different though. They can justify the expense of building an aritificial island to solve the hazardous approach issues with the former airport on the grounds that there simply was no other viable alternative as there was simply no way to suitably adapt the existing airport to make it safer or any preexisting alternative location. La Guardia has similar problems, but has far more alternative options than the "artificial island" approach, although its convenience to central NYC does make it a good location that makes simply closing it unattractive.
Still, the "all or nothing" solutions being proposed (close it or spending $4b renovating it) do seem a little restrictive though. Perhaps a better option would be to turn it into more of a City Airport for those actually travelling to NYC, while moving as much of the through "hub" and international traffic out to J.F.K and Newark where rapid access to NYC is much less important. You'd still need to overhaul the La Guardia terminal, but potentially on a much smaller scale, even allowing for potential future growth.
Well, that's the reason being claimed by the proponents of the bill anyway. It does kind of make sense why it would need to be a secret of you accept that as fact; if the US has agreed to pay an import duty rate of 10% to one country, and another is only getting 8%, then the latter might want 10% too. In international trade, that could be worth billions of dollars per annum, so it's in the US' best interests not to disclose that until the deal is done and documents have been signed.
However.
We have no assurances that is *all* that is being protected by this cloak of secrecy. There could easily be all sorts of other things squirrelled away in there that people will jump all over if it's made public - legal provisions for extending the US idea of justice to other nations; extradition arrangements, tweaks to copyright / trademark / patent legislation, and so on. Sure, some of that might also come under the same kind of preferential setup as in the example above, but without even a redacted version of the proposed legislation available how are people to have any confidence that at all is the case and there is little to worry about? Not disclosing the precise percentages are is one thing, but not even disclosing what the high level details are is something else entirely and just furthers the joke that the "most transparent administration ever" claim has now become.
No need. What the summary doesn't cover (it's in the the actual article) is that that this was always the plan. The UK Cabinet Office arranged a blanket agreement for the extended support coverage that applied to all departments that needed it for a lower overall cost, making it quite clear right from the start that this contract would not be renewed, and it hasn't been. It's now up to the individual departments to decide whether or not they wish to expend some of their own budget on further extending their specific support with Microsoft on a per-department basis. If there's a story here, it's the number of PCs still running XP that are now outside support and which departments those PCs are in, but that's something the article doesn't cover.
I suspect this is more a case of "follow the money" as well. Enabling the FM radio provides owners of the phone with a potential free source of music included in the price of admission. Disabling the FM radio provides the vendors of the phone with more potential customers for their music store offerings/partnerships and increases the overpriced use of data to get it. I really can't imagine why companies with a track record of doing everything they can to screw over their customers for a little more money *wouldn't* go with the latter option...
I'm not. FINALLY we have a phone suitable for tapping into the vast amounts of money that audiophiles appear willing to spend in the endless hunt for the delusion of a little more on-paper improvement in quality. This has nothing to do with practicalities, the vendors know full well that there are plenty of people out there who will spend whatever it takes to have the best, regardless of whether they actually get any benefit from it or not. If they can create the products with enough margin to turn a profit, of course they are going to do just that.
I'm just wondering how long it's going to be before we get a similarly ludicrously over specced range of accessories, because one the market is established you just know it's coming...
Why couldn't they have done this when those Downfall parodies were all the range, this one could have been awesome. Hitler, Developers, Developers, Developers, Linux is a Cancer, the Secret Flying Chairs of the Luftwaffe. It practically writes itself...
No, Mr. Monkey. We were expecting everyone to install Linux and don't really care what MS does.
Maybe next year...
It's a reference to the "religious freedom" legislation those two states passed recently that allow for discrimination based on religious beliefs that prompted several tech companies including Apple to curtail their business there, which was covered on Slashdot here and here. Essentially if a resident of those states has a personal prejudice against some group and can find a relevant passage in their religious book of choice (generally not too hard, given how open to interpretation the texts are), then they can quite legally tell them to take a hike. It doesn't mean that they're not going to face a backlash from the rest of society or the media, of course, as several people/groups have already found out.
Given the previous clueless comments on tech matters that have been made by the UK government I'm inclined to discount this being a case of "yes, we know it's stupid, but it'll win us some votes (from those equally clueless) and we'll forget about it after the election". Nope, the real motivation here seems to be in the bit Slashdot skipped over, despite it being right there on the byline of TFA: "ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content via an independent regulator with power to compel ISPs to block sites". Oh yes, it's the old "let's censor the Internet" meme again, only this time it appears they've at least learnt from their previous mistakes and placed all the financial burden of doing the impossible and somehow blocking the vast number of sites that won't comply with this legislation firmly on the ISPs with fines if they don't co-operate.
That's the big question, isn't it? Like CNNIC, the Turkish DigiNotar got the boot also, yet the US-based TrustWave was let off. It's probably worth pointing out that TrustWave's problems occurred pre-Snowden so people were a little more complacent even before you consider the "local US company" vs. "country with poor reputation for civil rights" issues. I'd like to hope that in today's climate TrustWave would meet a similar fate to DigiNotar and CNNIC/MCS, but without a clear no-exceptions policy from the application and OS vendors there's no real way to be sure. Even if there were such a policy, I doubt anyone would be willing to unilaterally revoke a compromised root certificate from one of the *really* major players in the CA game without a mutually agreed grace period to migrate users to replacement certificates.
Microsoft have decided that the buck stops with MCS Holdings and will be revoking all of their certificates, but letting CNNIC and their other customers off the hook. I suspect the update will go out as part of the regular patch batch on April 14th.
It's not quite that simple. CNNIC is the Chinese national equivalent of a LIR - they are responsible for all the IP assignments in China, so they can hardly "disappear" like that. Shutting down their CA division and re-opening it as a new shell company might be an option however.
The main thing here is that this also invalidates all of the certificates issued by CNNIC's intermediaries like MCS that are decended from the soon to be invalidated root certificates, and so on all the way down the chain of trust. That's a *lot* of customers and customers of customers that are going to be looking to push at least some of the costs of sorting this out upstream. Ultimately the buck stops at CNNIC, so they are going to have to make a decision about how much of that costs they are going to bear - get it wrong and there are plenty of other root CAs that intermediate level CAs can go to instead of CNNIC.
That sends a pretty strong message to other CAs that might be considering something similar, or to governments looking to strong arm a CA into doing it on their behalf. Break the chain of trust (whether through imcompetence, negligence or deliberate intent being immaterial), and you can expect to face very public, and potentially very expensive, consequences. Given that this also has implications for everyone's privacy, absolutely Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla et. al ought to follow suit and take at least some form of punitive action. Following on from DigiNotar I'm actually expecting to see them publishing some form of formalised policies about this in the near future, and hopefully no more exceptions (like TrustWave) are going to be made.