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User: ekhben

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  1. Re:Some Points Are Valid, Others Not on Stephane Rodriguez Dismantles Open XML · · Score: 1

    DTD is obsolete, but replace "DTD" with "XML Schema" or "RelaxNG" and you're spot on. :) (Of course, a DTD is better than no schema at all!)

  2. Re:Thank you very much on Most Laws Attempting Limits of Violent Videogames Fail · · Score: 1

    I don't think I've ever seen any porn that didn't encourage at least disrespectful behaviour. The womens' role is not as a loving partner, nor as a sexually curious or active partner, but instead as a living vagina-in-a-can. They get FUCKED, they don't have sex. Every single porn movie I've ever seen ends with the guy coming in or on the woman's face: this is not typical.

    The sex industry is not a good tool for sexual education, because the sex industry targets sexually active adults who wish to engage in fantasies of dominance and control as much as it does any other market. There are plenty of movies whose primary focus is not sex, but which do contain sex scenes, often quite graphic. Those are not what you'd call "pure, lustful sex videos."

    I sure do enjoy the pure, lustful kind, but I'm well aware that it's not a healthy attitude to sex. If you raise your kids with that as their primary source of information, I really pity their first girlfriend when they pull out and come on her face (or try to, at least).

    Remember, the difference between porn and art is whether you still enjoy it after an orgasm.

  3. Re:As much as I hate to suggest this... on Storm Worm Rising · · Score: 1

    How will the ISP detect a compromised computer? Does this require the ISP to keep up to date on methods of detecting viruses? How far behind can they get before they're held liable? How much more do you think they'll charge you, the conscientious customer, for the sudden jump in resources they need to get by?

  4. Re:NO! on Storm Worm Rising · · Score: 1

    Or, ya know, use a revision control system? Centralised or distributed, both will solve your problem, and probably a large number of other problems you've been living with.

  5. Re:If it's happening near the client.. on Tool Detects "In-Flight" Webpage Alterations · · Score: 1

    Connection establishment time blow-out. With HTTP you send a request, probably in a single network packet. Server received request, sends response, probably in several packets. With HTTPS, you initiate an exchange that will last for several iterations (client hello, server hello, client key, client finish, server verify, server finish) before you send the HTTP request. For a typical web page, this will triple the response time and likely double bandwidth per request, depending on the size of the HTML, images, scripts, and styles requested.

    Keep-Alive can ease the pain of both, but IE, Apache, Keep-Alive and SSL is a mix you must avoid lest you run afoul of a long-standing bug. I can't find anything to confirm or deny that the bug is fixed in IE7, but IE7 is not yet prevalent enough to ignore IE6 bugs. You can turn off Keep-Alive (and SSL clean shutdown, and HTTP/1.1, all problematic) for IE only easily enough in Apache config.

    HTTPS does not work with named virtual hosts. Because the SSL handshake occurs BEFORE the HTTP request has been sent, the only information the server has to go on is the IP address the client connected to. Server certificates include the server's name, else they are invalid. The server must then present a name to the client when it does not have the name the client wishes to connect to. With IPv4 consumption growing continually, using 30 IPs instead of 30 named virtual hosts is not an ideal world. You can use globbed server names in certificates, but support for this is shaky in both browsers and certifying authorities. STARTTLS solves this problem, but has very limited browser support. With no IE support, it's as stillborn as XHTML.

    And you need a certifying authority. If you simply self-sign a certificate, you've done nothing at all. Your malicious ISP can self-sign a certificate themselves, claiming to be the remote server, and simply decrypt the stream from the server and reencrypt it after modification. Certifying authorities will charge you for the service.

    So, we have (1) increased request latency and bandwidth cost, (2) loss of support for named virtual hosts, and (3) cost of purchasing and renewing a valid server certificate. Plus a small amount of (4), increased CPU cost -- but you're right about that, CPU power scales faster than available bandwidth. :)

  6. Re:NoScript on Password Vulnerability In Firefox 2.0.0.5 · · Score: 1

    That said, is there a good Add-on for Firefox that handles password-management more securely? Something that keeps them stored in an encrypted format would be a step in the right direction.

    They look encrypted to me. Base 64 encoded text that decodes to unprintable characters, for both username and password. Of course, I don't have a master password set, so anyone who knows the encryption scheme used by Firefox would be able to decode them in any case. And even if I did use a master password, my browser is happy to supply my slashdot username and password to anything in the "slashdot.org" domain. So the discussed vulnerability would still apply.

    If you're using the same password everywhere, why have FF remember it for you? If not, who gives a shit if some lame duck web site lets any old user put HTML and Javascript carelessly on their domain name, you're only losing your password to a web site you probably should avoid anyway (hint: any old user putting any old JS on a site means every possible browser vulnerability will be attacked and exploited sooner or later, NoScript the site or don't visit).

  7. Re:Security == knowledge and other stuff on Flawed Survey Suggests XP More Secure Than Vista · · Score: 2, Funny

    No problem, as long as I can have my funny points back! :)

  8. Re:Security == knowledge and other stuff on Flawed Survey Suggests XP More Secure Than Vista · · Score: 1

    I think the word you seek is "imaging."

  9. Re:Security == knowledge and other stuff on Flawed Survey Suggests XP More Secure Than Vista · · Score: 2, Funny

    (like VPNs, IDSs, AVs, proxies, backup, imagining etc.)

    I like to imagine that my XP install isn't riddled with viruses, too.

  10. My TomTom GO910 does this on Improving GPS Systems with Traffic Flow Data · · Score: 1

    The GO910 isn't exactly a new model, yet it supports traffic rerouting. It's a subscription service, but it's there, it (apparently, I'm too cheap to try it) works, it's old hat.

    Also, if you don't have a GPS nav in your car yet, get one. Srsly. <3.

  11. Re:From TFA: free pr0n! on IPv4 Unallocated Addresses Exhausted by 2010 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?

    It's not unappealing, it's totally irrelevant to end-users. There's no market out there asking for IPv6 network access. ISPs and their upstream providers thus have no increase in revenue if they deploy IPv6, but that deployment will cost them real money -- v6 capable routers need much more storage and processing, for instance -- and so there's real financial incentive to avoid IPv6. Offering free pr0n might be a way to make the difference relevant to end-users and thus provide demand and revenue, but I kind of doubt that it's enough.

    When end-users are getting IPv6 or private address IPv4 to the door, and a NAT exchange at the ISP, and their VOIP/game/spyware breaks, there will be financial motive at all levels. Being able to offer a full and uncrippled Internet experience will be the value-add.

    But expect a period of chaos as ISPs try to barter IPv4 addresses around, and failing that, try to steal them.

  12. Re:Nice. on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Protections Fully Broken · · Score: 1

    Ah, then you've never had to measure anything in shagpiles.

  13. They can educate me all they like... on First-Person Account of a Social Engineering Attack · · Score: 1

    ... but I don't get danger pay.

    Sure, the person who's in the office pretending to be a copier repair might not have any inclination to violent behaviour, and if uncovered might just make a hasty exit. But they might also turn nasty. If you want someone to police visitors, hire a security guard who's both trained to handle potentially dangerous situations and insured and compensated appropriately for it. I'll just let them do whatever the hell they want, because my health > your company.

  14. Re:game X ruins lives: heard this before on How Warcraft Really Does Wreck Lives · · Score: 1

    Pfffft, what a load of shit.

    If you're in a large enough guild, you're raiding. If you're raiding, the raid stops when you lose critical mass to proceed. Someone says "I'm tired, going to bed after this boss" and that's usually the cue for a bunch of other people to bow out too. Just like in the D&D scenario you painted.

    You forgot, however, to mention the D&D obsessive who spends hours alone going over his character sheet, or reading a rulebook carefully, cover to cover, until it's all memorised. D&D doesn't ever need to stop, either.

    WoW has some pointless timesinks very very few people would be sad to see gone, and those could stand to be removed, granted... but it's not an enabler. If you're an obsessive type, you'll funnel that into something else. Blaming WoW is just ludditism -- it's new, it's scary, OMG things were so much better back then!

  15. Re:What about Airplanes? on Space Elevator vs Wildlife · · Score: 1

    Read Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. The basics of it is a colonisation and terraforming of Mars (Red = as-is, green = plant life starting, blue = atmosphere) and while it features a fair bit of science, it is mostly interesting for its political science commentaries. Good books. But, back on topic, Mars is given a space elevator. War breaks out between Mars and Earth, and the space elevator is blown, near the top, detatching it from its tether point. A space elevator needs a heavy object on the space end to keep it straight -- the force of the heavy object trying to continue on its escape trajectory from Earth would pull on the cable, straightening it out. Without that force, not only would the weight of the cable itself be pulling it back down to earth, but the rotation of the Earth would be causing the top to lag behind the bottom. So the end result is that the cable would wrap around the Earth's equator, leading to a line of destruction, not a radius. :) Kim Stanley Robinson explains it better than I do.

  16. Re:Arrgghhh on Intel's "Terascale" Vision · · Score: 1
    There will be all these reasons to throw everything away and start over. Because this time we'll get it right!
    You said this, and didn't get moderated Funny? Well done, sir, well done.
  17. Re:ummm on Big Tobacco Funded Anti-Global Warming Messages · · Score: 1
    That's not true, but it would have no relevance anyway. Who are you to tell someone they can't slip out the back door and relax with a cigarette?

    I'm the guy working just inside the building who's copping lungfulls of their foul smoke. I'm the guy who has to run the gauntlet of the half dozen smokers outside every public building. I'm the guy who holds his breath in the lift because a smoker just came back inside. I'm the guy whose meal at the restaurant just lost a lot of its flavour because the smokers at the next table just lit up. I'm the guy who's stuck walking down the street behind a smoker. I'm the guy who's pulled up at the lights beside a car whose passenger has their arm hanging out the window with a cigarette right next to my face.

    I can tell someone they can't slip out the back door and relax with a cigarette because we've gone decades with smokers being the most inconsiderate jerks on the face of the planet, and that includes cyclists. Fuck them all, it's time the law stepped in to force consideration on them.

  18. I fought blog spammers, and I won on Will Solve Captcha for Money? · · Score: 1

    I had my blog harvested by spammers, long ago. I implemented a series of measures to protect my blog:

    1) I generate a token, combining the remote IP, the current time, and the blog entry in question, and produce an md5 of that token. I put the token and the time used to create the token into the form page for adding a comment to the blog entry.
    2) On comment submission, I check the token: I have the time of the page generation (from the token), and the blog entry, and my secret, and I produce a new token. If they don't match, it's a spammer, and I ignore the comment.
    3) If more than one hour has elapsed since token generation, I discard the comment.

    This serves to block 95% of spam comments, without any visible change to real users. There was one spammer, however, who went to so much trouble that they fixed their script to work with my specific code. I added one final measure:

    4) All comments must be approved before they appear.

    No more spam, and very few spam comments to moderate to "fuckoff". But, in the end, I just disabled the comment system entirely, because I got no real comments anyway. :)

    Seriously now, don't use Captchas, they suck. They don't stop spammers, and they annoy the FUCK out of real users. If bots signing up is a problem, require an email address and do email validation. That's annoying too (my default email address is behind a graylist, so I get a lovely 3 to 6 hour wait for unknown sites) but, IMO, far less annoying than squinting at some bullshit little box.

    Lucky I'm not vision impaired...

  19. Re:Steve Irwin dead at 44 on Steve Irwin Dead · · Score: 1

    RTFM. He was killed in the water by a sting ray... unless he had a sting ray in his waterbed??

    What sort of 'documentary' was he producing, exactly? I thought it was Rex Hunt who had that sort of reputation!?

  20. RIP, Steve on Steve Irwin Dead · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Like him or think he's a tool, he's entertained millions for years, and he's done his bit to help the environment, both through education and monetary contributions. Take a moment to reflect on that, THEN post yer jokes. ;)

  21. Re:FP? on Pluto Making a Comeback · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, the trouble is that there is no old definition at all, save perhaps "there are nine of them, these nine." It's a planet because it's been called a planet in the past. That definition doesn't work when you start trying to classify the bodies in another solar system, of course. The reason Pluto has been left out of the formal definition is that it's too small. Way too small. And irregular. Any definition that included pluto would also be including three other bodies... and schools would have to teach TWELVE planets, not eight or nine. The trouble started way back when Pluto was discovered. It was discovered by an American, and as you know, Americans are a proud lot. So a few years later when it was discovered to be far smaller than first suspected, noone wanted to back down and admit it wasn't really a planet at all. In other words, they had to invent a defintion of a planet, and no definition that they could come up with included Pluto, but excluded the three other Pluto-like bodies.

  22. History, failures, doomed to repeat on Independent Data and Formatting with Microformats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a kind of neat idea, except, of course, if I have CSS that does something with, oh, say, a class of "dtstart". Sure, it's easy to recognise that ".vevent > .url > .dtstart" is a microformat data item for an hCalendar, but if I'm already using "dtstart" or "url" regularly in my markup so I can apply styles to those kinds of things, I'm pretty much SOL. Rewrite all your markup and CSS to stop using those names.

    There's no namespacing. There's not even an ATTEMPT at namespacing. This will fast become an unmanageable hodge-podge of insanity, with common words used willy-nilly in class attributes.

    The class attribute is defined as CDATA. That's it. You can use pretty much ANY character in it. There's a lot of characters that can't be used in a CSS selector, though, such as ":". See where I'm going with this? &lt;div class="mf:vevent"&gt; for a start. Better yet, &lt;div class="hidden mf:vevent"&gt; such that you can hide (or format) the block of data separately.

    Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, and, trust me, it IS bad enough, there's also the misuse of the "title" attribute and the "abbr" element. A machine formatted date is not the expanded version of a human formatted date, which is not an abbreviation. A renderer trying to make sense of &lt;abbr class="dtstart" title="10034134134T00"&gt;17th Smarch&lt;/abbr&gt; will think "AHA! This here is an abbreviation, I will provide unto the user some means to see what that '17th Smarch' abbrevation stands for!" Usability disasters follow.

    So, in summary, this is the worst idea I've seen in HTML space since some bright spark said, "let's suggest that people use the 'text/html' content type for their XHTML markup!"

  23. World's most popular toy on The 11 Year Soap Bubble · · Score: 0

    From experience, it's cardboard boxes. The kids that get the most toys are the young ones, and they invariably ditch the contents of the box and play with the packaging.

  24. Re:Say goodnight, AJAX on Zero-Day IE Exploit Takes Control of PCs · · Score: 0

    Microsoft is, or will be, pushing XAML, not AJAX. It will greatly help them if too many people have JS off for AJAX solutions to be practical in the future.

  25. Re:Indeed, this is the free market at work. on DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers · · Score: 0

    "... or are you just going to say "screw it" and charge for the use of your site?"

    And go out of business. Until there are no free sites offering the same thing, or none that are easily accessible, this is a doomed business model.

    Perhaps the day will come when advertising is no longer paying at all. I hardly think it will be the death of the "free Internet." It will be the death of the advertising supported Internet.

    The sites that are largely supported by advertising are generally news sites, or free hosting sites: places that don't create anything themselves, merely host it, such as Slashdot. Other sites tend to have alternate revenue: online comics have merchandising, for instance.

    So let's look at a hypothetical in which Slashdot had to shut down. Where would I get my gold bricking fix?

    The answer there, I feel, lies in better tools for filtering content from a wide array of sources. More metadata in blogs, aggregator software that can use that metadata to sensibly filter, and so on. It can only get better!

    And doubleclick can die the death those evil rat bastards so richly deserve. Noone should make a living by intentionally disrupting someone else's life.