Nowadays you can get pretty much any niche program you need. In last millennium access to programs was much harder, so sometimes you had to figure things out yourself. That means that people now have less need to dive into the technical details about eg. printer drivers and configuring them. Now you just download the latest driver from the manufacturer, or perhaps it worked out-of-the-box because the driver was included in the OS.
I'm not saying it was better in the good old days. But you did have the need to be a bit technical when computers didn't do everything you wanted. And that gave some people the push to going deeper and making programs.
Car analogy: it is harder today to become a mechanic, because the engine is typically just a big inaccessible block. No more easy access to spark plugs, carburetor, or adjusting the choke. Is that sad? Maybe.
Fair enough. I seem to recall that microsoft was trying to get people to use OLE for embedded objects. For such uses OLE is definitely more appropriate than DDE.
Source please. Perhaps you are thinking of NetDDE?
Plain DDE may have been deprecated for use with the office programs, but it worked just fine for other things. I have made win32 programs that used DDE for (local) communication. Compared to the alternatives (tcp-over-loopback, shared memory+shared-mutexes, named-pipes) it works fine.
If the device private key is distributed in electronic form the the user then a trojan could scour their computer looking for it. I'd prefer a physical mechanism as that prevents remote manipulation. A sticker on the device with the private key would work. A dip switch or similar inside the device would work too.
End-to-end security (public key cryptography) must be used to verify and validate firmware images.
Sounds good to prevent bootloader trojans etc. But it does mean you cannot tinker with the device yourself unless the vendor allows the mechanism to be bypassed. And what happens if the vendor goes out of business - then noone can create new firmware?
Overall, I think it is a reasonable measure to prevent massive botnets running on all kinds of devices, but I do hope there is a physical bypass of the verification.
If your work is outdoors then it makes sense due to the midday and afternoon heat. This custom carried over from farmers to office work. My observation from Madrid and Rome is that if there is no AC in the office and its a hot climate/season then people tend to take a longer lunch break.
Sweden is part of the visa waiver program, so normally he wouldn't need a visa. But he does need an ESTA (travel authorization).
The article mention that it was actually the ESTA that was denied, but it is a bit unclear. Also, the denial happened at the airport which is a bit odd. Last time I went to the USA I applied for the ESTA a few weeks in advance and was accepted. Of course it is possible that his was first granted and then revoked, but it all sounds a bit odd.
1: Launch deep learning/machine learning / AI company. 2: Attribute long response times with "deep and complex problem". 3: Behind the scenes: hire a bunch of Indians to write up plausible results. 4: Profit
2 years ago in one of the banking centers in Denmark 12 new IT-candidate were educated in... COBOL, CICS, mainframes, etc. The older generation were anxious about how the younglings adapt, but it appears it turned out well. They were excited about the robustness and scalability of the mainframes, not so much about COBOL, but could see it didn't make business sense to rewrite old software. New software is being developed in more modern programming languages.
The crux of the matter is the intent of presenting the photo. I don't think an algorithm will be able to tell anytime soon.
Facebook's other problem is their global reach. What is perfectly natural in one region can cause offense in another. So they go for the lowest common denominator so they won't get blocked in conservative countries. But that causes liberals as myself to see it as censorship. I think instead they should filter content based on the viewer so people who get offended can chose to not see it.
Companies would just create shell companies that don't make any money, which are responsible for the take-down notice.
Make it so that the take-down notice must come from the copyright holder or from an entity appointed by the copyright holder with full "regress" ( I don't know the English legal term).
I've read the x.org codebase. Mostly to discover the grey areas in the protocol when I was working on a X/Window server running on ms-windows. The x.org code is not pretty but that is mostly due to being an old code base.
The X protocol has its problems and quirks too, particularly when dealing with long latency between server and client. It was designed when using high-level primitives (eg "draw line to (x,y) in color Z") made sense. When client just use such primitives the speed is impressive. But some 10 years ago clients started doing client rendering and just sending bitmaps to the display server. Mostly that meant higher bandwidth and fewer round-trips. Whether that is good or bad depends on the clients and the environment.
I have followed the progress of wayland a bit, and I have actually seen some of the presentations. It seems to me that wayland initially was infested by the type of developers that think that all they need is direct access to video memory, and for remote applications all you need is VNC-style full-desktop remote. Of course people who use remote X think that that is a myopic and arrogant view. It seems that wayland has gained some developers in the past few years who have more common sense and one of the new goals is to support remote X clients in a root-less fashion. When they have implemented that and also made sure that both clipboard and X-selection work then I'll give wayland a shot.
<plug> We (privavore) are creating a fork for Firefox. (privafox.) By default we change all cookies into session-only. But with twists:
- persistent cookies are allowed for sites that you provide a password to. The assumption is that if you log into a site the you probably want your shopping cart retained, and that by logging in you realize that the site will keep track of you. But we don't allow 3rd-party cookies.
- workarounds for the EU cookie consent (in progress). By disallowing cookies by default you will get the "we use cookies to improve your experience" prompt.
- user-agent is fixed (in-progress). That makes it a lot more difficult to distinguish different users behind the same ip (NAT). </plug> Both firefox' and chrome's private browsing mode leaves something to be desired. But that's ok.Their developers focus on creating the best browser. We just provide "after-market" customizations. Not for you, but for your less tech-savvy parents.
THAT is the simplest way to access X securely, by running remote code??
It's a one-liner by using SSH to localhost.
The "correct way" is a bit more cumbersome: Use 'xauth' to generate an authorization key with the "untrusted" flag, then tell the untrusted program to use that authorization key with the XAUTHORITY environment variable.
"snaps" is a new package format for applications on Ubuntu. It is basically a package with dependencies, bundled together and meant for running in a container (docker or lxc I suppose?) which means that the OS is protected from it.
However, since the application has access to X11 window server it has access to the facilities in it including monitoring keystrokes and mouse gestures sent to other X11 applications. So essentially a "snaps" can be a trojan keylogger.
The article/blog does _not_ explore if X11's "untrusted client" feature would help.
I checked a subset of the leaked list from BBC last year of articles they had to remove. From those samples I could see three categories:
1: victims. Eg sexual assault victims mentioned by name. It seems OK to me that they get their name removed so that in 20 years their granchildren don't get that search result. 2: a small category of criminals wanting to have their names removed. Which mostly seems OK to me as most countries have a limit to how long such information is publicly available. Eg. I think where I live burglaries are removed after 8 years 3: a wtf category. Two examples: One neo-nazi wanted his name removed from an article about a white power demonstration.. His names is pretty unique so I checked - he is still sputing such nonsense on facebook and twitter, so I don't see why he wanted it removed. The other example is a man in an article about how his one testicle suddenly grew and he immediately went to the doctor. It turned out it wasn't testicular cancer but a benign internal boil. I think it is a positive story about cancer awareness, but I can see why he may not want that to be the first result when someone searches his name.
So basically I agree with the right to be forgotten. When information is no longer in the public interest it should be possible to get the names removed.
Do you happen to remember manufacturer/model of the zero-interface thermostat? Because that sounds so unbelievably stupid that there might be something you or the salesman overlooked. It could also be their attempt at lock-in.
I would like the threading system to not encourage people to reply to the top-most thread. Like I'm doing now. The first comment could be inane or completely un-insightful yet people are forced to reply in that thread in order to get a chance to be seen.
Perhaps you could just disallow the first comment to be from an AC? That could solve multiple problems.
At the time when I saw the DUL blacklist problem was when ISDN and plain dail-up was still common for companies (ADSL wasn't widespread yet, and SDSL was generally too expensive). So blocking email because the sender IP was marked as dial-up was pretty stupid.
Good to know that they still have problems. Back when I had the problem it was sporadic and I could never recreate the problem my self. I'm tempted to block emails from hotmail.com but unfortunately there is one person with an address there that I have to talk to occasionally.
I've been running my own mailserver since 2003, and I have seen my share of problems. 1: mailservers blocking mail based on spamhaus DUL. You can delist your IP. But still, blocking exclusively on that? 2: hotmail.com accepting emails and then discarding them silently. No trace of them. No bounce. Recipient did not have it in their spam folder or anything. This was several years ago, so perhaps it's better now. But discarding emails after promising to deliver them without any possibility for the recipient to control it: bad idea. 3: Various greylisting email servers. Not really a problem as my MTA will retry and the email is only delayed for a few minutes. 4: gmail.com rejecting emails sent over IPv6 but happily accepting them over IPv4. It turned out to be a problem with their parsing of SPF records, and apparently fixed now. But I did find out that there is no reasonable way to contact the gmail team. 5: outlook.com rejects emails due to FBLW15, whatever that means. It seems you can get whitelisted, but it appears that a lot of hosts are being hit by it for no reason. 6: office365 bouncing emails due to "protection" with no explanation given, and direction to contact the recipient by other means to get whitelisted. This was for a the official email address listen on a company website. I decided that my email wasn't important enough. Their loss.
Bottom line: If you run your own email server then expect to occasionally do some manual whitelisting etc. And expect some email servers to be uncooperative and/or RFC-clueless.
The content plugin support has always been a mixed blessing. It was sometimes useful as a stop-gap until the browsers supported some new form of content (eg. SVG, MathML,...). With the removal of plugin support and acceleration of the death of plugins it means that new content forms will have to be implemented in all browsers, which seems wasteful to me.
On the other hand, with the current feature set of html5+javascript+canvas+webgl you can make quite good interfaces. In the odd (but not completely rare) cases where it isn't enough you can go for a stand-alone program, like java webstart, stand-alone flash player, etc.
So what we lose is the ability to display new content forms inside a web page which (imho) is not a big loss nowadays.
For the legacy sites (java applets for configuration or secure "VPN" access, flash for ditto) the backward compatibility has never been great: random applets required exactly JVM 1.4.x.x, flash only worked with FF version x, silverlight only worked with IE, etc. so I don't think the impact is worse than what would already happen. I hope that the developers of such solutions go for html5 replacements primarily, and if that doesn't work then downloadable stand-alone binaries (or even better: open source).
Slashdot Mirror
Nowadays you can get pretty much any niche program you need. In last millennium access to programs was much harder, so sometimes you had to figure things out yourself. That means that people now have less need to dive into the technical details about eg. printer drivers and configuring them. Now you just download the latest driver from the manufacturer, or perhaps it worked out-of-the-box because the driver was included in the OS.
I'm not saying it was better in the good old days. But you did have the need to be a bit technical when computers didn't do everything you wanted. And that gave some people the push to going deeper and making programs.
Car analogy: it is harder today to become a mechanic, because the engine is typically just a big inaccessible block. No more easy access to spark plugs, carburetor, or adjusting the choke. Is that sad? Maybe.
Fair enough. I seem to recall that microsoft was trying to get people to use OLE for embedded objects. For such uses OLE is definitely more appropriate than DDE.
DDE was deprecated with win32.
Source please. Perhaps you are thinking of NetDDE?
Plain DDE may have been deprecated for use with the office programs, but it worked just fine for other things. I have made win32 programs that used DDE for (local) communication. Compared to the alternatives (tcp-over-loopback, shared memory+shared-mutexes, named-pipes) it works fine.
If the device private key is distributed in electronic form the the user then a trojan could scour their computer looking for it. I'd prefer a physical mechanism as that prevents remote manipulation. A sticker on the device with the private key would work. A dip switch or similar inside the device would work too.
End-to-end security (public key cryptography) must be used to verify and validate firmware images.
Sounds good to prevent bootloader trojans etc. But it does mean you cannot tinker with the device yourself unless the vendor allows the mechanism to be bypassed. And what happens if the vendor goes out of business - then noone can create new firmware?
Overall, I think it is a reasonable measure to prevent massive botnets running on all kinds of devices, but I do hope there is a physical bypass of the verification.
If your work is outdoors then it makes sense due to the midday and afternoon heat. This custom carried over from farmers to office work. My observation from Madrid and Rome is that if there is no AC in the office and its a hot climate/season then people tend to take a longer lunch break.
Sweden is part of the visa waiver program, so normally he wouldn't need a visa. But he does need an ESTA (travel authorization).
The article mention that it was actually the ESTA that was denied, but it is a bit unclear. Also, the denial happened at the airport which is a bit odd. Last time I went to the USA I applied for the ESTA a few weeks in advance and was accepted. Of course it is possible that his was first granted and then revoked, but it all sounds a bit odd.
[3 spaces]
I seem to recall that the C examples that came with MS QuickC used an indentation 3. It is the only time I have encountered that in C/C++ code.
1: Launch deep learning /machine learning / AI company.
2: Attribute long response times with "deep and complex problem".
3: Behind the scenes: hire a bunch of Indians to write up plausible results.
4: Profit
2 years ago in one of the banking centers in Denmark 12 new IT-candidate were educated in ... COBOL, CICS, mainframes, etc. The older generation were anxious about how the younglings adapt, but it appears it turned out well. They were excited about the robustness and scalability of the mainframes, not so much about COBOL, but could see it didn't make business sense to rewrite old software. New software is being developed in more modern programming languages.
source (Danish only): https://www.version2.dk/artike...
"i-programmer suggests this could just be an artifact of the way TIOBE calculates language popularity (by totaling search engine queries). "
The TIOBE index is not based on the number of queires (see http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-ind...).
It is based on the number of results on the query " programming" in multiple search engines.
So the TIOBE index is "how much has been written online about "
The crux of the matter is the intent of presenting the photo. I don't think an algorithm will be able to tell anytime soon.
Facebook's other problem is their global reach. What is perfectly natural in one region can cause offense in another. So they go for the lowest common denominator so they won't get blocked in conservative countries. But that causes liberals as myself to see it as censorship. I think instead they should filter content based on the viewer so people who get offended can chose to not see it.
It isn't the first time that facebook censored photos of statues, eg. The Little Mermaid http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
Or the famous Vietnam war photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09...
So they clearly need to improve the system, whether that is fine-tuning image recognition algorithm or educating ignorant reviewers.
Companies would just create shell companies that don't make any money, which are responsible for the take-down notice.
Make it so that the take-down notice must come from the copyright holder or from an entity appointed by the copyright holder with full "regress" ( I don't know the English legal term).
I've read the x.org codebase. Mostly to discover the grey areas in the protocol when I was working on a X/Window server running on ms-windows. The x.org code is not pretty but that is mostly due to being an old code base.
The X protocol has its problems and quirks too, particularly when dealing with long latency between server and client. It was designed when using high-level primitives (eg "draw line to (x,y) in color Z") made sense. When client just use such primitives the speed is impressive. But some 10 years ago clients started doing client rendering and just sending bitmaps to the display server. Mostly that meant higher bandwidth and fewer round-trips. Whether that is good or bad depends on the clients and the environment.
I have followed the progress of wayland a bit, and I have actually seen some of the presentations. It seems to me that wayland initially was infested by the type of developers that think that all they need is direct access to video memory, and for remote applications all you need is VNC-style full-desktop remote. Of course people who use remote X think that that is a myopic and arrogant view. It seems that wayland has gained some developers in the past few years who have more common sense and one of the new goals is to support remote X clients in a root-less fashion. When they have implemented that and also made sure that both clipboard and X-selection work then I'll give wayland a shot.
<plug>
We (privavore) are creating a fork for Firefox. (privafox.) By default we change all cookies into session-only. But with twists:
- persistent cookies are allowed for sites that you provide a password to. The assumption is that if you log into a site the you probably want your shopping cart retained, and that by logging in you realize that the site will keep track of you. But we don't allow 3rd-party cookies.
- workarounds for the EU cookie consent (in progress). By disallowing cookies by default you will get the "we use cookies to improve your experience" prompt.
- user-agent is fixed (in-progress). That makes it a lot more difficult to distinguish different users behind the same ip (NAT).
</plug>
Both firefox' and chrome's private browsing mode leaves something to be desired. But that's ok.Their developers focus on creating the best browser. We just provide "after-market" customizations. Not for you, but for your less tech-savvy parents.
THAT is the simplest way to access X securely, by running remote code??
It's a one-liner by using SSH to localhost.
The "correct way" is a bit more cumbersome: Use 'xauth' to generate an authorization key with the "untrusted" flag, then tell the untrusted program to use that authorization key with the XAUTHORITY environment variable.
"snaps" is a new package format for applications on Ubuntu. It is basically a package with dependencies, bundled together and meant for running in a container (docker or lxc I suppose?) which means that the OS is protected from it.
However, since the application has access to X11 window server it has access to the facilities in it including monitoring keystrokes and mouse gestures sent to other X11 applications. So essentially a "snaps" can be a trojan keylogger.
The article/blog does _not_ explore if X11's "untrusted client" feature would help.
I checked a subset of the leaked list from BBC last year of articles they had to remove. From those samples I could see three categories:
1: victims. Eg sexual assault victims mentioned by name. It seems OK to me that they get their name removed so that in 20 years their granchildren don't get that search result.
2: a small category of criminals wanting to have their names removed. Which mostly seems OK to me as most countries have a limit to how long such information is publicly available. Eg. I think where I live burglaries are removed after 8 years
3: a wtf category. Two examples: One neo-nazi wanted his name removed from an article about a white power demonstration.. His names is pretty unique so I checked - he is still sputing such nonsense on facebook and twitter, so I don't see why he wanted it removed. The other example is a man in an article about how his one testicle suddenly grew and he immediately went to the doctor. It turned out it wasn't testicular cancer but a benign internal boil. I think it is a positive story about cancer awareness, but I can see why he may not want that to be the first result when someone searches his name.
So basically I agree with the right to be forgotten. When information is no longer in the public interest it should be possible to get the names removed.
Do you happen to remember manufacturer/model of the zero-interface thermostat? Because that sounds so unbelievably stupid that there might be something you or the salesman overlooked. It could also be their attempt at lock-in.
I would like the threading system to not encourage people to reply to the top-most thread. Like I'm doing now.
The first comment could be inane or completely un-insightful yet people are forced to reply in that thread in order to get a chance to be seen.
Perhaps you could just disallow the first comment to be from an AC? That could solve multiple problems.
At the time when I saw the DUL blacklist problem was when ISDN and plain dail-up was still common for companies (ADSL wasn't widespread yet, and SDSL was generally too expensive). So blocking email because the sender IP was marked as dial-up was pretty stupid.
Good to know that they still have problems.
Back when I had the problem it was sporadic and I could never recreate the problem my self. I'm tempted to block emails from hotmail.com but unfortunately there is one person with an address there that I have to talk to occasionally.
I've been running my own mailserver since 2003, and I have seen my share of problems.
1: mailservers blocking mail based on spamhaus DUL. You can delist your IP. But still, blocking exclusively on that?
2: hotmail.com accepting emails and then discarding them silently. No trace of them. No bounce. Recipient did not have it in their spam folder or anything. This was several years ago, so perhaps it's better now. But discarding emails after promising to deliver them without any possibility for the recipient to control it: bad idea.
3: Various greylisting email servers. Not really a problem as my MTA will retry and the email is only delayed for a few minutes.
4: gmail.com rejecting emails sent over IPv6 but happily accepting them over IPv4. It turned out to be a problem with their parsing of SPF records, and apparently fixed now. But I did find out that there is no reasonable way to contact the gmail team.
5: outlook.com rejects emails due to FBLW15, whatever that means. It seems you can get whitelisted, but it appears that a lot of hosts are being hit by it for no reason.
6: office365 bouncing emails due to "protection" with no explanation given, and direction to contact the recipient by other means to get whitelisted. This was for a the official email address listen on a company website. I decided that my email wasn't important enough. Their loss.
Bottom line: If you run your own email server then expect to occasionally do some manual whitelisting etc. And expect some email servers to be uncooperative and/or RFC-clueless.
The content plugin support has always been a mixed blessing. It was sometimes useful as a stop-gap until the browsers supported some new form of content (eg. SVG, MathML, ...). With the removal of plugin support and acceleration of the death of plugins it means that new content forms will have to be implemented in all browsers, which seems wasteful to me.
On the other hand, with the current feature set of html5+javascript+canvas+webgl you can make quite good interfaces. In the odd (but not completely rare) cases where it isn't enough you can go for a stand-alone program, like java webstart, stand-alone flash player, etc.
So what we lose is the ability to display new content forms inside a web page which (imho) is not a big loss nowadays.
For the legacy sites (java applets for configuration or secure "VPN" access, flash for ditto) the backward compatibility has never been great: random applets required exactly JVM 1.4.x.x, flash only worked with FF version x, silverlight only worked with IE, etc. so I don't think the impact is worse than what would already happen. I hope that the developers of such solutions go for html5 replacements primarily, and if that doesn't work then downloadable stand-alone binaries (or even better: open source).