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User: Harik

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  1. Re:"And." The word is "and." on Crypto Gurus Diffie, Hellman Win 2015 Turing Award (networkworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Headline. On physical newspaper, or in the sidebar with related links. Extremely limited in terms of space, so it's an art form to eliminate extraneous words.

    God knows writers are happy to more than make up for it in the articles themselves.

  2. Re:What's the process? on Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers · · Score: 1

    One of the most intrusive DRM schemes I've ever seen was in the 90s with one of the 3d modeling programs. I don't think autocad but I the name isn't popping to mind. Anyway, it had a dongle protection and there were innumerable 'propers' of the crack because of how interwoven into the code the protection was, in the most devious possible way: subtle errors in math. For 3d modeling, that meant it would look fine at first but after enough time you'd start to notice vertex drift, and it slowly cascaded into complete model corruption.

  3. Re:If you ask me.... on Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers · · Score: 1

    MMOs are a terrible example for "DRM-free", they don't have traditional DRM, but they're loaded with the worst in abusive "anti-cheat" software that cripples any advanced input devices you have.

  4. Re:Makes you wonder... on Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers · · Score: 1

    Not really. In fact, most DRM-enabled games are cracked before their official release date - meaning you can pirate and play before it's possible to buy. It's only when a brand new scheme is devised (like this, apparently) that you get any sort of gap between release and piracy. It's an economically unviable situation - as soon as you've released your DRM into the wild it's going to be cracked, and the second time you use it it will be cracked faster. So you have to spend more time developing and testing a DRM scheme than it takes the pirates to break it, and that's money that (should) be going into development of the title you want to protect.

  5. Re:Is it really scam? on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Stop a Debt Collection Scam From Targeting You? · · Score: 1

    Since when is it cheap to live in america? Yes, you're in a third-world shithole, but it's sure not cheap.

  6. Re:landline? on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Stop a Debt Collection Scam From Targeting You? · · Score: 1

    Bug in their autodialer code and his number sorts early in their loop?

    Either way, while CLID is worthless garbage, the call setup IS recorded and tracked, and if you're getting harassing calls from a spoofed number you can call your phone company to get them to trace the real number.

    The other possibility is that they're not buying or spoofing, but that they're hacking VoIP systems. All the VoIP systems I run see continual attempts at password guessing (until fail2ban says 'fuck you' to the IP, untill it hops to another host... the forever war).

  7. Re:fwd ur number on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Stop a Debt Collection Scam From Targeting You? · · Score: 5, Informative

    As hilarious as the forwarding suggestions are, if you forward to the FTC it will show up as your number originating, and if you forward to a 900 service you will get the bill.

  8. Nobody mentioned the exploit? on Half of Tor Sites Compromised, Including TORMail · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's a pretty good unwrapping of the payload here, and it's a pretty creative exploit of the javascript interpreter to execute shellcode. Just from a glance at the shellcode, I see a hand-crafted HTTP header so at minimum they're using the OS network stack directly to give the tor-level UUID a public IP coorelation. Beyond that, they could be doing anything since they're already through the sandbox.

  9. Re:California Is Wrong on California Sends a Cease and Desist Order To the Bitcoin Foundation · · Score: 1

    If you believe this, remember that if you're ever tried in a court where the flag has gold fringe you can shout FREEMAN ON THE LAND and they have to let you go.

  10. Re:Misses the point on Android Fragmentation Isn't Hurting Its Adoption · · Score: 1

    If they end up doing that it's likely they'll start doing market dependancies - "This app requires fooapi4.5, which will be installed with it."

    The concept of a completely modular OS being updated piecemeal is interesting.

  11. Re:Misses the point on Android Fragmentation Isn't Hurting Its Adoption · · Score: 1

    I disagree with your first statement - it's different to argue ease of compatibility between versions vs the benefits of sticking with ancient releases. I don't think anyone is happy about the continued market share of android 2.3, but from a developer perspective it's not world-ending to use some support libraries instead of natives for it. (It bloats the hell out of your base app size, though).

    The unfortunate reality is that phone manufacturers see software updates as a 'feature' to sell newer phones - I don't think this will change barring a radical relicencing of android from Google. One thing that may give them impetus to move along would be forcing unlocked bootloaders - if they don't supply the upgrade, third parties will, and then all their tie-in bloatware goes away.

  12. Re:Misses the point on Android Fragmentation Isn't Hurting Its Adoption · · Score: 1

    Except most of the new features you get on a new google release come with back-support libraries (Google or third party) that let you target older platforms. Writing an app for 2.3+ with modern features using HoloEverywhere was nearly as trivial as changing imports from com.android to org.holoeverywhere.

    If you're doing CPU intensive work, you're going to target 4.0+ anyway, simply because no device that runs 2.3 stock has a modern processor in it.

  13. Re:So... on Altering Text In eBooks To Track Pirates · · Score: 1

    They could rewrite the entire book, keeping only some of the sections with deliberate watermark errors, and it'd still be tracked down to them.

    You miss out on the fact that they're not looking for errors - they're looking for specific errors in specific places. Think back to old detective novels with a piece of cardboard with little squares cut in it. Put it over the right page of what looks like a love letter and "we bust out of the back exercize yard at midnight" pops out.

    With sufficient redundancy in their data (Come on, people, QR codes, PAR2? ECC? How does a group of computer people not instantly comprehend the idea of redundancy?) you couldn't be sure that random selection of bit flips would be enough to obscure your trail.

  14. Re:So... on Altering Text In eBooks To Track Pirates · · Score: 1

    And finally, _if_ the publisher finds a copy with watermark removed, then I would think the copier has gone straight into criminal territory, so while the risk of getting caught is lower, the possible damage to you is much higher.

    Right, it's finding the watermark removed that's the big red flag, not that they found it on a filesharing service. Do people think about what they type before prognosticating on /.?

  15. Re:Genius judge on Federal Judge Says Interns Should Be Paid · · Score: 1

    Hey, if they didn't try to move everyone down to the minimum wage (or lower, see unpaid internships) then there wouldn't be pressure to make it livable.

    What needs to happen is massive confiscation of the stolen wealth of this country.

  16. Re:i suggest you read the record back on Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions · · Score: 1

    You wrote that you're too stupid to get apache working on your machine, and you expect us to give a fuck that DEVELOPER TESTING software isn't a one-click install for you?

  17. Re:The Manchurian Candidate on Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions · · Score: 1

    You're frankly too stupid to even cater to. Wayland (nor Xorg) get to dictate how the apps you want to use are written. Since basically everything now is doing the rendering themselves and pushing bitmaps, X11 is terrible at remoting. If you have control over your app then make it remote properly yourself.

    Otherwise shut up and stop trying to tell the rest of us that running a text editor from 1992 is the be-all-end-all of remote graphical work.

  18. Re:The Manchurian Candidate on Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions · · Score: 2

    Outside of those types and pathological configurations, remote X11 just works for all apps.

    So running an app over the internet is a pathological configuration?

    X11 is utterly garbage at remoting because it was never designed for it, it was designed for LAN use with near-zero latency. That's why the calls are syncronous.

    Sure, it's possible to forward an X11 connection across 100+ ms of latency, but I wouldn't call the resulting clusterfuck 'usable'. There's a reason that the nX library is used to make it reasonable - and there's no reason that you can't do the same with a different library that's not inherently constrained by a 26 year old design with no concept of high-bandwidth/high-latency connections.

    Per-window RDP is utterly trivial to implement and works better on modern connections than X11 ever has.

  19. Re:Remoting on Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions · · Score: 1

    Drawing stippled lines in the server rather than via a toolkit = exactly like ripping out the command line.

    Thank you for making your worthless comment and taking up my time.

  20. This is the dumbest idea I've heard today. on NHTSA and DOT Want Your Car To Be Able To Disable Your Cellphone Functions · · Score: 1

    How about instead of idiotic rube-goldberg contraptions that depend on people buying specific model years of cars and specific types of phones to go with them and are guaranteed to be jailbroken the day they're released to the public - we just dump that wasted money into self-driving cars? There's no reason that people need to be in control of 3 tons of hurtling death when computers can do the job just as well. When the LIDAR detects a non-automated vehicle in proximity it can mantain a safe distance (and warn surrounding vehicles so cross-streets aren't approached when they might run a stop, etc).

    Or, you know, we could put up with nanny state nonsense and continue to sacrifice huge chunks of our day to the commute god.

  21. Re:Oh brother on PETA Wants To Sue Anonymous HuffPo Commenters · · Score: 1

    I wish they were just tilting against the porn windmill. MADD has morphed into a neo-prohibition movement, and their stances align more closely with moralising than saving lives. Note how silent they are about idiotic movies like 5fast5furious or car commercials for vehicles designed specifically to go much faster than any speed limit. They're also not supporters of any sort of safe-ride program for people drinking - they just want you to not drink at all.

  22. Re:Linux Workaround on The Dark Side of Amazon's New Pilots · · Score: 1

    Why should the government be involved at all in the distribution of media?

    I agree with you 100%, the government should absolutely get out of the distribution business. Naturally, that means repealing all copyright statutes entirely.

  23. Re:bad joke... on Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production · · Score: 1

    File birth time is a fairly difficult concept, and only really useful on say a database file that's edited in-place. Any text file/source code you've written will have btime=ctime, since it was 'created' as a temporary file, then renamed over the original. That's one reason why people think ctime means 'creation' time, since for the types of files people hand-edit it really is.

  24. Re:Happy with XFS on Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production · · Score: 2

    Oh, so true. Indeed, problems like modularity, maintainability and shared functionality stopped existing long ago as we all know.

    It's almost like people have discovered that you can have modularity and shared functionality in a different way than artifically seperating storage layers and throwing away important data at each layer boundry.

  25. Re:Read their website on Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's an issue with any CoW filesystem being full - in order to delete a file, you need to make a new copy of the metadata that has the file removed, then a copy of the entire tree leading up to that node then finally copy the root - and once the root is committed, you can free up the no-longer in-use blocks. At least, as long as they're not still referenced by another snapshot.

    The alternative is to rewrite the metadata in place and just cross your fingers and hope you don't suffer a power loss at the wrong time, in which case you end up with massive data corruption.

    I've filled up large (for home use) BTRFS filesystems before - 6-10tb. The code does a fairly good job about refusing to create new files that would fill the last remaining bit so it leaves room for metadata CoW to delete. The problem may come from having a particularly large tree that requires more nodes to be allocated on a change then were reserved - in which case the reservation can be tuned.

    BTRFS isn't considered 'done' by any means. It was only in the 3.9 kernel that the new raid5/6 code landed, and other major features (such as dedup) are still pending. It's actually very encouraging that a work-in-progress filesystem is as solid as it is already.