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User: colfer

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Comments · 409

  1. Re:Audit trails, dammit? on Allegation: Lottery Official Hacked RNG To Score Winning Ticket · · Score: 1

    RTFA, he was "obsessed" with self-erasing rootkits, so could defeat an audit log I'd assume.

  2. Re:Ambiguous on Allegation: Lottery Official Hacked RNG To Score Winning Ticket · · Score: 1

    Probably takes two keys to get in.

  3. Re:This happened back in the day... on Allegation: Lottery Official Hacked RNG To Score Winning Ticket · · Score: 2

    Didn't need to. Somebody had root, probably him. He at least had privileges to change the time!

  4. Re:Free advertising on Legislation Would Force Radio Stations To Pay Royalties · · Score: 1

    And on NPR the talk format is wiping out the music format in many markets.

  5. Re:disable flash! on Flash-Based Vulnerability Lingers On Many Websites, Three Years Later · · Score: 1

    More accurately, disable the Java plugin if you have Java installed for other purposes.

  6. Re:What's the exploit vector here? on Flash-Based Vulnerability Lingers On Many Websites, Three Years Later · · Score: 1

    Mod parent up.

  7. Re:disable flash! on Flash-Based Vulnerability Lingers On Many Websites, Three Years Later · · Score: 1

    On Win8, Chrome and IE have Flash built-in. Flash updates have become an issue only on Firefox, and even there you can make Flash "ask to activate," and Mozilla central blocks outdated versions. On Win7 you still have to update Flash for IE as well as Firefox.

    I guess everyone using a browser knows this, but hasn't deemed it worthwhile to respond to these comments apparently from some archived library of ranting. Or you're on Linux or Apple! I don't know how it works there.

  8. Yahoo Small Business on Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles · · Score: 1

    I'm guessing Yahoo Small Business is how they'd like to make money, but it's a bit of a legacy monster. Certainly very hard to get a customer out of and onto a different platform. Comcast Small Biz is similar confusing mess of intersecting control panels (maybe the same software?). A few other companies run the same game, getting business clients locked in complex setups, but I'm not sure it's even intentional with these players on the bottom end of the business hosting market.

    On a similar note I called Network Solutions today to get a better domain renewal price, and the customer rep told me domain reg was no longer its main business and we should consider switching to another company if we did not want any other services. It's now Network Solutions,a "web-dot-com" company. They do still offer a $10 panic price though if you click for your transfer authorization code.

  9. Re:Ebola vs HIV on How Nigeria Stopped Ebola · · Score: 1

    As well, millions (literally I'm afraid) of Americans are terrified by hospitals because just going there will almost certainly result in involuntary bankruptcy. The CDC and political leaders are saying nothing about who pays if you follow public health guidelines and go for treatment or observation. They seem unaware of how people make these decisions, and even well-versed journalists have no idea how hospitals respond when patients cannot pay. For example, in http://washpost.bloomberg.com/... Bloomberg quotes a JHU professor saying "If they recognize that [Thomas Eric Duncan] has no money they will clearly just write it off as charity care." That is simply not true. Non-profit hospitals are by far the #1 parties putting people into involuntary bankruptcy.

    The care for Thomas Eric Duncan, "patient zero" in Texas, in estimated in the same article as over $500,000 even before he died. Presumably, due to the publicity, that bill was never sent. But who knows.

  10. Re:Attention Kmart shoppers on 2014 Nobel Prize In Physics Awarded To the Inventors of the Blue LED · · Score: 2

    Mod up!

    Solar cells are also diodes, they just work in reverse from LED's. Applying light creates a current, as opposed to a current creating light. All based on getting an electron state to jump from a semiconductor to another semiconductor that differs by one valence. The semiconductors in solar cells are two big discs, one on top of the other. (Experts please correct any of the preceding.)

    Just like K-mart and Sears.

  11. Re:No suprise... on An Open Source Pitfall? Mozilla Labs Closed, Quietly · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mozilla's resources are going to mobile. They don't want to be caught dead if the dominant platform really does changes from desktop to mobile. So it's all about the Firefox browser for phone, and FirefoxOS.

    All this groaning about them spending resources on UI misses the point. You're just complaining about what you see! The real $ is not going to UI it's going to mobile, and to technical parity with Chrome.

    Wonder if they feel the same way about Email - that it's dated technology! Some of the technical issues they left hanging when they took away all the paid developers are significant.

  12. Report fine vs. secrecy on U.S. Threatened Massive Fine To Force Yahoo To Release Data · · Score: 1

    As a public company, Y! would have needed to report the fine eventually. How would that go?

  13. Re:only 16 shades of grey? on Out of the Warehouse: Climate Researchers Rescue Long-Lost Satellite Images · · Score: 1

    coders go to 128

  14. Re:An improvement on Raspberry Pi Gets a Brand New Browser · · Score: 2

    Seems WebKit will have a place after Chrome and Opera's split to Blink. (This new Pi browser is Webkit)

  15. "the more items Amazon sells to Prime members..." on Amazon's Ambitious Bets Pile Up, and Its Losses Swell · · Score: 1

    "The more items Amazon sells to Prime members, the more money it loses." What bookshops have been saying for a decade is that Amazon is selling books at a loss, which used to be illegal as anti-competitive monopoly activity.

    Much better than the opaque NYT article linked is this December article from IBT: "Amazon: Nearly 20 Years In Business And It Still Doesn't Make Money, But Investors Don't Seem To Care" http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-... It has the quote above, and the historic profit/loss graph I was looking for. Revenues have risen at a 45 degree angle, but profit/loss hovers around zero.

  16. Good for Netflix on Verizon Boosts FiOS Uploads To Match Downloads · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now all Netflix needs to do is get a FiOS account at their house.

  17. Re:A good idea, but... on European Commission Spokesman: Google Removing Link Was "not a Good Judgement" · · Score: 1

    No results found for "will brooker" +scam.

  18. Re:They screwed up the website on Protesters Launch a 135-Foot Blimp Over the NSA's Utah Data Center · · Score: 1

    Click "Full Scorecard." It's an interesting mix of D's and R's.

  19. Re:so how is this different from Microsoft? on Mozilla Introduces Browser-Based WebIDE · · Score: 1

    Read the article, they are targeting Firefox, Chrome and Safari as platforms. This is a development tool for some reason put into core.

    And the "app" does have to be a web app because this is all about mobile. They will probably integrate submitting the app to the various vendor-approved marketplaces, starting with this one: https://marketplace.firefox.co...

    I question all this, because Mozilla has limited resources, mainly from Google searches. But sticking with Desktop only would be risky.

  20. Re:RIP firefox, lean and fast on Mozilla Introduces Browser-Based WebIDE · · Score: 2

    That's long gone. The download (29MB for win32) is now larger than Seamonkey (20MB). At least half the development is focused on mobile and other projects. Thunderbird and Seamonkey have no paid developers. I assume the mobile products do have to be lean and fast though. That's been the big turnaround in browsers, back to small screens, low memory and slow chips!

    As for desktop. Still a good browser, needs one process per tab. Still good to have a compliant rendering engine besides Chrome. Still good to have privacy and security policies competing with Chrome.

  21. Re:Antitrust...? on Mozilla Introduces Browser-Based WebIDE · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not that.

    Right now this protocol is useful for Firefox Desktop, Firefox Android, and Firefox OS. But we aren’t stopping there. We’re working on a protocol adapter that will allow clients using the Firefox Remote Debugging Protocol – including the Developer Tools and WebIDE – talk to all mobile browsers, regardless of rendering engine or runtime. Our first targets are Chrome for Android and Safari on iOS.

  22. Re:Why so much stupid shit, Mozilla? on Mozilla Is Working On a Firefox OS-powered Streaming Stick · · Score: 2

    TB has some architectural problems and the withdrawal of paid developers by Mozilla makes it unlikely they will be fixed. The problem I ran into is that attachments cannot easily be stored separately from messages. That column showing the attachment count is actually just a guess. The db does not have real info on the MIME situation in messages. All that work is done on the fly whenever you open the message. You can detach the attachments from messages and store them separately, but only by clicking on messages one-by-one. There is an extension that attempts to automate detachment through filters, but it will crash if it encounters too many messages with attachments at one time, since the task is asynch. I confirmed all this with the extension developer - not the crashes, but the architecture and the fact that the db only guesses at the attachment count when you view the message list. Of the 12,000 current extensions, I found two or three that attempted to deal with detachment.

  23. Re:Choice is NOT ALWAYS good on Google Forks OpenSSL, Announces BoringSSL · · Score: 4, Insightful

    BoringSSL is a great name and directly addresses what got OpenSSL into trouble most recently, implementing a new protocol parameter based on a student's idea for a degree thesis. Innovation for innovation's sake, that was. Hurriedly applied for some reason.

    And it's not something a website would "use," if you mean a high level protocol akin to "https." It's a library to implement common standards.

  24. Re:How will they address the attitude problem? on Google Forks OpenSSL, Announces BoringSSL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe by assigning people to the project who have not chosen security as a career field. On the Mozilla commits I used to follow, the personalities in the security arena were a different kettle of fish from the other developers. They had to maintain FIPS compliance, so were conservative about changes, but it was more than that. Not to mention, there's a possibility of workers with ulterior motives. All the more reason to develop a wider community than just self-selected specialists.

    The billion dollar companies can afford it, and should have a long time ago.

  25. Re:what about... on Google Fiber Is Officially Making Its Way To Portland · · Score: 1

    They made a whole movie about this one, on the Alabama border. But the franchise was for... sin! The Phenix City Story