For anyone who has the same problems (they are all caused by the same add-on): the culprit is
Status-4-Evar
Disable it and Firefox becomes functional, albeit without a status bar. I'm now trying to understand what status bar add ons still work with Firefox 52 (the status bar was removed aeons ago because Firefox developers believe no one needs it).
Nowadays Mozilla devs have a peculiar way of treating new bug reports: first, they offer you to disable all add-ons, then reset all settings, then try a fresh profile. I don't like any of these "options".
Alas, that's what I'm going to do, because Firefox is still the best web browser out there. Too bad, it's headed in the direction of becoming a Chrome clone.
You must have zero add-ons installed, IOW you could use any other web browser. That's the sole reason Firefox was created, right? To allow extreme customizability, no?
I have a shitton of addons installed because it's the only way to make Firefox behave like I want it to.
My bookmarks bar is invisible on start up and in every new private window. The only way to show it is to hide and then unhide it.
The settings button (three horizontal bars) doesn't work. You click it - nothing happens
Firefox doesn't restore saved windows/tabs from the previous session even though it's what my preferences say: Show my windows and tabs from last time.
Firefox has reset my lightweight theme (luckily I have a backup).
The worst update ever. I'm horrified by the prospect of upcoming Firefox 57 which will kill at least the third of my XUL add-ons.
The previous ESR release is no longer supported. Fuck you Mozilla.
I doubt it will ever be possible because ISVs are not interested in that, in fact they actively oppose that. Every modern proprietary OS tries to become a walled garden for its own apps - even Microsoft has felt victim to that with their Store.
Still it's quite possible nowadays if you are ready to sacrifice your CPU/Storage resources: in Windows/Linux/MacOS you can run pretty much every modern OS (except Mac OS X which requires certain hacks) by using a VM.
Why don't software vendors create software which can run on all OSes? That's because different OSes have very different APIs, different users, different use cases, and while ostensibly you can port your application to Qt/C++, there's still a problem with your target audience: users of another OS might not need your software so your money will be spent in vain. Also, while Qt is ostensibly multiplatform, you will still have to maintain and verify compatibility with every target OS, because they all work differently - which is very costly and time consuming.
Computers running artificial intelligence programs will exceed human intelligence within three decades
No. More like in 300 years considering the "progress" in AI. We are good at creating highly specialized algorithms for completing certain tasks. We have nothing generic which can function and solve never seen before tasks completely on its own.
What's more we still have no idea what intelligence and consciousness are. AI is certainly a buzzword today considering the number of recent films dedicated to it. But something tells me we'll soon hit another major winter in AI development unless someone comes up with better ideas about intelligence or its implementation in silicone because we're quickly running of ideas and transistors - Moor's "law" (there has never been any law, except in the imagination of some silly journalists) is barely alive and it'll soon hit the wall of physics and diminishing returns.
Windows since Windows Vista makes your user a non administrator by default, unless you 1) disable UAC completely or 2) specifically enable the Administrator account and log under it.
I guess I'll have to read the article because something feels wrong about it.
I haven't read the article, my bad, my I guess it's not talking about vulnerabilities but about various malware which indeed in most cases requires admin rights to be properly installed.
However a great number of modern viruses live under various hidden directories in the user's profile, e.g. C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming, so Admin Rights or not but you will be successfully infected.
The real problem with Windows is that most users blindly trust whatever.exe/.pdf/.docx/.xlsx files they receive from absolute strangers and they don't associate them with threats. Microsoft is trying hard to solve this problem by migrating to an app model which is used by Android and iOS but it just cannot work with Windows for far too many reasons, the primary two are of course compatibility and UWP limitations. It can be solved by a new OS which won't be called Windows but Microsoft just doesn't have the guts for that.
What's in there for us, mere mortals? The guy got lucky and earned 6800% on his investment, great. Now where are the stories of people losing money by investing in a bad stock?
Also, where would most people get $400K to invest in stock options when they have no spare money at all or even owe lots of money until they hit their late 50s?
Or is it a story about a super successful company which is known to have a cult status, which allows it to sell the same product year after year with minimal changes, yet earn billions? I don't understand.
This whole story makes me think: bumblebees have very primitive, simple brains, with comparatively few neurons (I've heard reports which mention one million) yet they master the task which seems impossible for any "AI" invented to this day. I've got a feeling a modern CPU with 4 billion transistors running at 4GHz (at least 4 million times faster than brains in nature which work at up to 1000Hz a second) and having 128GB of RAM can easily replicate all the processes running in the bumblebee's brain yet no one is doing that to the best of my knowledge.
What's more I've heard that even extremely primitive earthworms show signs of intelligence yet we cannot recreate their AI. That makes me feel true or general AI is still nowhere close and all this talk about "AI", is really a talk about smart algorithms which cannot reason or create (new solutions, new behavioral patterns, new ideas, new concepts) which is the staple of any true intelligent entity.
We've almost reached the limits of physics and there's basically no viable competition because modern technologies require capex in an order of billions of dollars. What's there to marvel at or be happy about when, for instance, we've had a stagnation in the x86 CPU market since the introduction of Sandy Bridge (don't remind me of Ryzen: AMD has just reached IPC parity with two years old Intel CPUs)? Also GPUs don't grow as fast as they used to in the past, and even then in the past GPUs required passive cooling while certain modern GPUs have three slots cooling solutions with over 200 watts of power dissipation and have billions of transistors (NVIDIA Pascal Titan X has 12 billion transistors working at roughly 1500MHz).
However in my opinion it's astonishing what we've reached so far: certain modern computer games are just breathtakingly beautiful while not being too far off from being photo realistic: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, The Division, Quantum Break and others. Recently, I just gave up on playing in The Division for two hours and just roamed NYC and enjoyed the scenery.
True! As for me I usually run downloaded PDFs though virustotal.com and then all scripting features in my Acrobat Reader are completely disabled.
Speaking of ISO's: most Ubuntu mirrors (and their official servers as well) distribute Ubuntu ISO's via... HTTP and FTP. That's so "lovely" considering that any ISP can easily replace your HTTP traffic. Yes, they have PGP signatures but 99% of people out there have no idea how to verify them. And those PGP signatures are distributed from the same... insecure channels.
Perhaps I was completely wrong - skip to the Mysid's comment. My sincere apologies then. But this explanation just doesn't work/compute in my head - even today finding MD5 collisions is extremely computationally expensive, yet the person says SHA1 + MD5 is only slightly more computationally expensive.
Let's put it in layman's terms: let's say your cluster made of a thousand GPUs finds MD5 collisions for given data every second. Now finding an SHA1 collision in Google's case required 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 computations based either on purely random data or data which needed to be fed to the SHA1 algorithm in succession both of which you cannot get using your already found MD5 collisions, because they are not random. I cannot see how your non random MD5 data could be used as a basis for cracking SHA-1 simultaneously. Again, maybe I'm totally wrong about that.
I'd also love to hear someone with a good cryptography background rather than believe a random person on the net or my amateurish logic.
Complex doesn't mean perfect or without flaws. Also, you cannot imagine how many germs coexist with us and we depend our life on them.
Also I'm not a biologist however as far as I understand it's not viruses that kill us, it's our own failing biology due to our DNA: death is programmed deep in our DNA, or otherwise there wouldn't be evolution. I might be totally wrong of course - I'd like to hear what actual biologists would say.
If Google can do that, NSA can surely do that - maybe not right now but quite soon.
Also don't underestimate various botnets - right now they are mostly used for spamming/DDOS'ing/crypto currency mining (which in itself is... hashing) but they can be used for finding collisions in SHA-1 as well.
Also don't forget that "practical" in this case means that an attack can be carried out using currently existing availble computational resources, vs. something purely theoretical which requires billions of CPUs/GPUs or quantum computers.
The human body is the most complex organism in the known universe so there's nothing to be sneezed at or be surprised by. For instance recent studies have shown that for a lot of people placebo works even when people have a perfect knowledge that they are given placebo.
As another confirmation, the brain has the ability to directly change/affect the chemical processes in the body as demonstrated by Wim Hof who can manage his body's temperature at will.
It's almost impossible to eradicate cheaters in CS:GO and similar games for one important reason: CS:GO servers send you full information about all the gamers who're playing the match with you, which means it's quite trivial to intercept this information and modify certain game engine variables to e.g. make other players visible though the walls (wallhack) or to make your bullets always reach the destination (aimbot). Now even if you don't send all the information, the game still has to show other visible nearby players to you, so dealing with aimbots seems like a lost game.
Speaking frankly I've got no idea if this problem can be fixed at all except for controlled LAN matches (but even then we've had reports that certain cheaters made through by bringing their cheat programs inside their mice - the mouse is connected via USB which makes it trivial to extend its internals to include a mass storage device).
To give Valve credit they're now testing an AI to detect cheaters. They do it because it's virtually impossible to detect cheat applications using any sort of matching (like antiviruses do).
Water came to Earth after the Moon formed. Remember it was 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system hadn't yet been formed and stable and it had a lot of dust.
Or maybe there was no collision at all, and Moon and Earth formed independently from the same rocks orbiting the Sun.
To establish new business connections. To discover new trends/solutions/ideas which you might have missed due to being busy. To talk to your purveyors and discuss the things in person which are difficult to discuss over the phone/e-mail.
And then what's in it for my employer, who's paying to send me there?
No one needs singing idiots in the IT industry. Their vocal talents are indisputable however it's what not people are seeking for when they're choosing new tech toys to buy.
Another confirmation of my statement is the fact that no one has offered a similar position to Brian May, who's a rare scientist in the pop sphere.
Subject: Microsoft disables p2p Skype protocol starting March 1, 2017
In a recent update of Skype for Windows Microsoft has announced that starting March 1, 2017 older, p2p versions of Skype will cease to work. This affects Skype for Windows versions 7.16 and below, Skype for Mac version 7.0 to 7.18 and the native Linux client (its only functional version 4.3). This news is especially unpleasant for Linux users of Skype, since the new "cloud ready" version of Skype for Linux is nothing more than a packaged Google Chromium web browser with Node.js running a web version of Skype, which means its memory consumption is huge and it's unable to store your conversation history locally indefinitely like the native client did.
P.S. One can only wonder why./ editors choose less informative posts over more informative ones.
Slashdot Mirror
While we are at it, I've found it:
The Addon Bar (Restored) still works. Hopefully slashdotters will forgive me for 100+ messages in the comments section.
For anyone who has the same problems (they are all caused by the same add-on): the culprit is
Status-4-Evar
Disable it and Firefox becomes functional, albeit without a status bar. I'm now trying to understand what status bar add ons still work with Firefox 52 (the status bar was removed aeons ago because Firefox developers believe no one needs it).
Nowadays Mozilla devs have a peculiar way of treating new bug reports: first, they offer you to disable all add-ons, then reset all settings, then try a fresh profile. I don't like any of these "options".
Alas, that's what I'm going to do, because Firefox is still the best web browser out there. Too bad, it's headed in the direction of becoming a Chrome clone.
Have you even followed your own link? Firefox 45 will see the last release in several weeks and after that it's 52 for the next 9 months or so.
45 ESR is basically dead and unsupported.
You must have zero add-ons installed, IOW you could use any other web browser. That's the sole reason Firefox was created, right? To allow extreme customizability, no?
I have a shitton of addons installed because it's the only way to make Firefox behave like I want it to.
The worst update ever. I'm horrified by the prospect of upcoming Firefox 57 which will kill at least the third of my XUL add-ons.
The previous ESR release is no longer supported. Fuck you Mozilla.
I doubt it will ever be possible because ISVs are not interested in that, in fact they actively oppose that. Every modern proprietary OS tries to become a walled garden for its own apps - even Microsoft has felt victim to that with their Store.
Still it's quite possible nowadays if you are ready to sacrifice your CPU/Storage resources: in Windows/Linux/MacOS you can run pretty much every modern OS (except Mac OS X which requires certain hacks) by using a VM.
Why don't software vendors create software which can run on all OSes? That's because different OSes have very different APIs, different users, different use cases, and while ostensibly you can port your application to Qt/C++, there's still a problem with your target audience: users of another OS might not need your software so your money will be spent in vain. Also, while Qt is ostensibly multiplatform, you will still have to maintain and verify compatibility with every target OS, because they all work differently - which is very costly and time consuming.
No. More like in 300 years considering the "progress" in AI. We are good at creating highly specialized algorithms for completing certain tasks. We have nothing generic which can function and solve never seen before tasks completely on its own.
What's more we still have no idea what intelligence and consciousness are. AI is certainly a buzzword today considering the number of recent films dedicated to it. But something tells me we'll soon hit another major winter in AI development unless someone comes up with better ideas about intelligence or its implementation in silicone because we're quickly running of ideas and transistors - Moor's "law" (there has never been any law, except in the imagination of some silly journalists) is barely alive and it'll soon hit the wall of physics and diminishing returns.
150,000 Indian Rupees are $2250 which sounds simply astonishing. I guess someone bought something which wasn't really needed, so color me unconvinced.
Besides the article gives exactly zero information about the obtained commercial software. To me everything looks a little bit too fishy.
Windows since Windows Vista makes your user a non administrator by default, unless you 1) disable UAC completely or 2) specifically enable the Administrator account and log under it.
I guess I'll have to read the article because something feels wrong about it.
I haven't read the article, my bad, my I guess it's not talking about vulnerabilities but about various malware which indeed in most cases requires admin rights to be properly installed.
However a great number of modern viruses live under various hidden directories in the user's profile, e.g. C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming, so Admin Rights or not but you will be successfully infected.
The real problem with Windows is that most users blindly trust whatever .exe/.pdf/.docx/.xlsx files they receive from absolute strangers and they don't associate them with threats. Microsoft is trying hard to solve this problem by migrating to an app model which is used by Android and iOS but it just cannot work with Windows for far too many reasons, the primary two are of course compatibility and UWP limitations. It can be solved by a new OS which won't be called Windows but Microsoft just doesn't have the guts for that.
What's in there for us, mere mortals? The guy got lucky and earned 6800% on his investment, great. Now where are the stories of people losing money by investing in a bad stock?
Also, where would most people get $400K to invest in stock options when they have no spare money at all or even owe lots of money until they hit their late 50s?
Or is it a story about a super successful company which is known to have a cult status, which allows it to sell the same product year after year with minimal changes, yet earn billions? I don't understand.
This whole story makes me think: bumblebees have very primitive, simple brains, with comparatively few neurons (I've heard reports which mention one million) yet they master the task which seems impossible for any "AI" invented to this day. I've got a feeling a modern CPU with 4 billion transistors running at 4GHz (at least 4 million times faster than brains in nature which work at up to 1000Hz a second) and having 128GB of RAM can easily replicate all the processes running in the bumblebee's brain yet no one is doing that to the best of my knowledge.
What's more I've heard that even extremely primitive earthworms show signs of intelligence yet we cannot recreate their AI. That makes me feel true or general AI is still nowhere close and all this talk about "AI", is really a talk about smart algorithms which cannot reason or create (new solutions, new behavioral patterns, new ideas, new concepts) which is the staple of any true intelligent entity.
We've almost reached the limits of physics and there's basically no viable competition because modern technologies require capex in an order of billions of dollars. What's there to marvel at or be happy about when, for instance, we've had a stagnation in the x86 CPU market since the introduction of Sandy Bridge (don't remind me of Ryzen: AMD has just reached IPC parity with two years old Intel CPUs)? Also GPUs don't grow as fast as they used to in the past, and even then in the past GPUs required passive cooling while certain modern GPUs have three slots cooling solutions with over 200 watts of power dissipation and have billions of transistors (NVIDIA Pascal Titan X has 12 billion transistors working at roughly 1500MHz).
However in my opinion it's astonishing what we've reached so far: certain modern computer games are just breathtakingly beautiful while not being too far off from being photo realistic: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, The Division, Quantum Break and others. Recently, I just gave up on playing in The Division for two hours and just roamed NYC and enjoyed the scenery.
Just look at this and compare to this.
True! As for me I usually run downloaded PDFs though virustotal.com and then all scripting features in my Acrobat Reader are completely disabled.
Speaking of ISO's: most Ubuntu mirrors (and their official servers as well) distribute Ubuntu ISO's via ... HTTP and FTP. That's so "lovely" considering that any ISP can easily replace your HTTP traffic. Yes, they have PGP signatures but 99% of people out there have no idea how to verify them. And those PGP signatures are distributed from the same ... insecure channels.
Perhaps I was completely wrong - skip to the Mysid's comment. My sincere apologies then. But this explanation just doesn't work/compute in my head - even today finding MD5 collisions is extremely computationally expensive, yet the person says SHA1 + MD5 is only slightly more computationally expensive.
Let's put it in layman's terms: let's say your cluster made of a thousand GPUs finds MD5 collisions for given data every second. Now finding an SHA1 collision in Google's case required 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 computations based either on purely random data or data which needed to be fed to the SHA1 algorithm in succession both of which you cannot get using your already found MD5 collisions, because they are not random. I cannot see how your non random MD5 data could be used as a basis for cracking SHA-1 simultaneously. Again, maybe I'm totally wrong about that.
I'd also love to hear someone with a good cryptography background rather than believe a random person on the net or my amateurish logic.
Complex doesn't mean perfect or without flaws. Also, you cannot imagine how many germs coexist with us and we depend our life on them.
Also I'm not a biologist however as far as I understand it's not viruses that kill us, it's our own failing biology due to our DNA: death is programmed deep in our DNA, or otherwise there wouldn't be evolution. I might be totally wrong of course - I'd like to hear what actual biologists would say.
If Google can do that, NSA can surely do that - maybe not right now but quite soon.
Also don't underestimate various botnets - right now they are mostly used for spamming/DDOS'ing/crypto currency mining (which in itself is ... hashing) but they can be used for finding collisions in SHA-1 as well.
Also don't forget that "practical" in this case means that an attack can be carried out using currently existing availble computational resources, vs. something purely theoretical which requires billions of CPUs/GPUs or quantum computers.
The human body is the most complex organism in the known universe so there's nothing to be sneezed at or be surprised by. For instance recent studies have shown that for a lot of people placebo works even when people have a perfect knowledge that they are given placebo.
As another confirmation, the brain has the ability to directly change/affect the chemical processes in the body as demonstrated by Wim Hof who can manage his body's temperature at will.
It's almost impossible to eradicate cheaters in CS:GO and similar games for one important reason: CS:GO servers send you full information about all the gamers who're playing the match with you, which means it's quite trivial to intercept this information and modify certain game engine variables to e.g. make other players visible though the walls (wallhack) or to make your bullets always reach the destination (aimbot). Now even if you don't send all the information, the game still has to show other visible nearby players to you, so dealing with aimbots seems like a lost game.
Speaking frankly I've got no idea if this problem can be fixed at all except for controlled LAN matches (but even then we've had reports that certain cheaters made through by bringing their cheat programs inside their mice - the mouse is connected via USB which makes it trivial to extend its internals to include a mass storage device).
To give Valve credit they're now testing an AI to detect cheaters. They do it because it's virtually impossible to detect cheat applications using any sort of matching (like antiviruses do).
Looks like a very slow news days.
Water came to Earth after the Moon formed. Remember it was 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system hadn't yet been formed and stable and it had a lot of dust.
Or maybe there was no collision at all, and Moon and Earth formed independently from the same rocks orbiting the Sun.
What exactly is the role of tech conferences?
To establish new business connections. To discover new trends/solutions/ideas which you might have missed due to being busy. To talk to your purveyors and discuss the things in person which are difficult to discuss over the phone/e-mail.
And then what's in it for my employer, who's paying to send me there?
Likewise.
No one needs singing idiots in the IT industry. Their vocal talents are indisputable however it's what not people are seeking for when they're choosing new tech toys to buy.
Another confirmation of my statement is the fact that no one has offered a similar position to Brian May, who's a rare scientist in the pop sphere.
Subject: Microsoft disables p2p Skype protocol starting March 1, 2017
In a recent update of Skype for Windows Microsoft has announced that starting March 1, 2017 older, p2p versions of Skype will cease to work. This affects Skype for Windows versions 7.16 and below, Skype for Mac version 7.0 to 7.18 and the native Linux client (its only functional version 4.3). This news is especially unpleasant for Linux users of Skype, since the new "cloud ready" version of Skype for Linux is nothing more than a packaged Google Chromium web browser with Node.js running a web version of Skype, which means its memory consumption is huge and it's unable to store your conversation history locally indefinitely like the native client did.
P.S. One can only wonder why ./ editors choose less informative posts over more informative ones.