The advantage for some people is that it also runs in little-endian,
Well x86 is little endian too, so that's more of a non-disadvantage than an advantage. Being big endian in a little endian world was a major disadvantage.
something I shall never understand
If you have a big codebase that has only ever been run on little endian platforms it very likely will have issues when running on big endian platforms. Rooting out and fixing these issues will often be a non trivial task. Since Intel and little endian arm are the readilly accessible platforms today a lot more code gets written with little endian assumptions than big endian ones.
AMDs integrated graphics USED TO leave Intel's in the dust but these last few generations Intel has been working very hard to fix that and it seems with their latest generation they are suceeding.
Out of interest which country? Here in the UK phone service is still usually delievered over "real POTS". ADSL and VDSL (FTTC) users use filters/splitters to seperate voice and DSL. The cable company runs phone wiring alongside the cable TV wiring (and have done so since long before the days of cable modems).
FTTH services may be an exception but those are still pretty rare here.
I haven't had a landline in about 10 years, but I hand out my last landline phone number to anyone who asks for a phone number - let them waste time calling a dead line.
Phone numbers get reused so there is a good chance they will not be calling a dead line but instead will be calling whoever happened to be allocated that number after you stopped renting it.
The question is what is a reasonable metric. They have a buisness model for building out new capacity that assumes that said capacity will be in use for many years. Usually this works quite well, for commercial property it doesn't really matter who is in the builiding as long as someone is and for heavy industry once the facility is bought and paid for it's likely to keep working for years (even if it's original owner goes bankrupt).
Bitcoin mining is different, the system is rigged so for a given size of bitcoin economy mining gets less profitable over time. Furthermore to mine profitablly you have to be on the latest equipment, if you are replacing all your equipment every year or two anyway will you see much motivation to stay in one place? The utility rightly sees this as a risk. If they were a normal buisness they would just jack up their rates for the customers they considered high-risk.
But utilities are (rightly) highly regulated because normal customers can't just up-sticks and leave. So if the utility wants to deter bitcoin miners from moving in to their area (or at least charge them more to make up for the risk) they need to work with the local government to draw a line in the sand somewhere. That line needs to be drawn in a way that non-technical lawyers, judges and politicans can understand and that can be enforced using information the utility has access to.
IIRC slashdot tried wide open unicode and quickly turned it off again (and even broke 8859-1) when people started doing weired shit with control characters related to right to left text.
My suggestion would be a whitelist but a reasonablly open one. Let us use greek letters, accented latin letters, curvy quotes, mathemetical and technical symbols etc but forbid any blocks that have strange rendering rules (explicit control characters, RTL text, scripts with different physical verses logical order) etc.
The problem here is the term "country" is vauge. In most contexts when people say country they mean "Sovereign state" which Scotland is not (they had an independence refferendum recently but voted against independence). Yet the constituant parts of the united kingdom are reffered to as countries despite not being sovereign.
I would imagine the main reason is complexity which leads to cost though from some googling it seems poorly written regulations may be an issue in some places.
Most grid-tie systems are built to be installed just like a load would be installed, you add a breaker in your panel, wire up the panels to the inverter and the inverter to the breaker and turn things on. Depending on your locality there may also be a bit of beuracracy but it's typically fairly minimal.
A system that can go into an "intentional island" state is more complex. There now needs to be a contactor to seperate the load and inverter from the grid in the event of grid failure. The inverter control system needs to support both islanded and grid-tie modes and the process for switching between those modes needs to be carefully designed to prevent back-feeding. There is also the problem that even on a bright sunny day the peak load of a household may well be higher than the solar panels can supply. These problems can be managed but it all adds cost.
From some googling (e.g. I found http://www2.buildinggreen.com/... ) it seems that such systems do exist but they are the exception not the rule.
Domain names (without IDN) are formed from the ascii letters, numbers and hyphens. Letters were case insensitive and in practice at least in web browsers (which is where spoofing attacks were the biggest concern) were displayed to the user in lowercase.
So that leaves us with
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-
The closest thing to a homograph pair in that set is 1 and l but still in most fonts they are visiblly distinct (the spacing is usually the biggest givaway). If we consider uppercase letters then that gives us a couple more pairs. (0 and O, l and I) which are less obviously distinct. Still for a typical name even considering uppercase letters the number of variants that would have to be registered to block Ascii homograph attacks is small.
Compare that to unicode where you have the latin greek and cryllic alphabets (among others) which have many letters that look identical but have seperate code points for each alphabet. Many different accents that can be combined arbiterally with any base character and so-on.
So in summary yes there was some possibility of spoofing attacks before IDN but it was minimal compared to the possibility with unregulated IDN.
Major web browsers have hacked arround this with ad-hoc soloutions but that isn't exactly a good basis for security.
The USA is still a major internet hub. If the american telcos won't accept your addresses then you are likely to have major communication issues not just with the USA but with large parts of the world.
As I understand it the "backbone of the internet" started in the USA and later grew across the pond to Europe (helped by a transatlantic fiber glut and by the relatively open state of the communications market in Europe). South america, africa and australasia are not big/powerful enough to really matter and Asia is mired in political issues.
I would guess that when they started putting in central heating systems they saw little point in using a lower voltage. 240V (standard mains voltage in the UK) works fine for bimetallic strip thermostats, pumps, mechanical timers and motorised valves.
Individual components have got fancier over the years and wiring plans have got more complex but the basic system hasn't changed much.
In my experiance the most common type of heating in the UK is gas-fired central heating with water used to carry the heat from the "boiler"* to the radiators. This system also heats the water, traditionally using a hot water tank though some modern systems heat the water directly (this is reffered to as a "combi boiler"). The control wiring is 240V. Theres a few different variants depending on what equipment is used but it would typically be something like http://www.electriciansblog.co...
Electric heating seems to be done with self-contained heaters (often storage heaters) which have their thermostats integrated.
* Techically it doesn't boil anything but that is what everyone calls them.
For the benefit of forieng readers note that this may be true in the USA but it's not true everywhere. Here in the UK heating control wiring is usually 240V.
The supposition that the Mint loses money when it costs more to make a coin than than the value it represents is ridiculous.
I disagree
currency's intrinsic value is in its utility
A coin only has utility while it remains in circulation.
Coins leave circulation for various reasons,
Worn-out coins are replaced which clearly costs the government money regardless of how the coins production cost compares to it's face value but the government gets to decide how worn out a coin has to be before it gets replaced and there is no real motivation to deliberately put extra wear on the coins in your possesion. So this is limited and tolerable.
Coins also leave circulation in ways the government has no control over. Hoarding, collecting, throwing in the trash because they think the coin's value is too small to bother with. If the coins production cost is greater than it's face value then every time a coin leaves circulation through one of these means the government loses money.
Worse if the face value is significantly less than it's scrap metal value then people will start treating the coins as scrap metal. That is going to dramatically increase the rate at which coins leave circulation. You can put in place draconian laws to try and stop this but it seems like a cure worse than the disease.
However such a crop makes far more sense with video than with stills.
With stills recording the still at the native resoloution of the camera still is managable. So cropping to zoom or to change the aspect ratio means throwing away information that you could otherwise have kept. You can always crop after capture.
With video on the other hand you are forced to throw away most of the data from the sensor since the storage and encoding pipeline can't cope with all of it. Adding functionality to chose what you throw away in a more flexible manner sounds useful to me.
The problem with that sort of thing is that it can get your game a reputation for being a buggy peice of shit either because the pirates don't disclose that they are running a pirate version or because your triggers accidently get set off by some legitimate users.
Todays contracts are not forever. If spacex can demonstrate high relibility with reused first stages then presumablly that will be taken into account in future contract negotiations.
Of course it will likely take some time to demonstrate that relibaility.
The number of circuits in a UK property varies depending on the size of the property, when it was wired and who specified the wiring. A couple of examples below
Currently the UK usually uses 32A breakers on socket circuits.
I'm not convinced that reducing that to 16A or so (and you can't really go much lower than that given that some appliances draw 13A) would help much. 16A is more than enough to make the electronics in a wall wart go up in smoke.
Why the hell do browser companies want to remove SHA1 support all together?
The whole point of a certificate is to validate that you are talking to the site you think you are talking to. If an attacker manages to obtain a certificate for facebook.com via a SHA1 collision attack then he can pose as facebook regardless of what certificate signature algorithm is used on the legitimate facebook server.
will they just stop support plain HTTP because HTTP is far more likely to be abused.
They aren't stopping it but they are trying to reduce the potential for abuse. Read up on http strict transport security.
Give the users some kind of feedback to know that SHA1 is being used by the site and that they should maybe get their shit together
Most users tend to ignore such feedback and even if they don't it can come too late. By the time they notice it the information can already be in the attackers hands.
If a browser will trust SHA1 certificates then it doesn't really matter whether the legitimate site sends a SHA1 cert or a SHA2 cert. What matters is that they will accept a SHA1 cert from an attacker and there is nothing the legitimate site can do about that.
Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.
The latter we are stuck with but the former is something humanity has the power to change. There are basically three choices.
1: Disconnect the civil time second from the SI second. Allow the civil time second to vary slightly to match the mean solar day. 2: Allow civil time to drift relative to solar time 3: Make periodic adjustments to civil time to keep it close to solar time.
Each choice hurts different people. Choice 1 hurts anyone who needs to convert between civil time and "atom time". Choice 2 hurts people who rely on civil time as a navigational aid and future historians. Choice 3 puts a rarely excersised special case into computer systems leading to systematic failures.
Slashdot Mirror
The advantage for some people is that it also runs in little-endian,
Well x86 is little endian too, so that's more of a non-disadvantage than an advantage. Being big endian in a little endian world was a major disadvantage.
something I shall never understand
If you have a big codebase that has only ever been run on little endian platforms it very likely will have issues when running on big endian platforms. Rooting out and fixing these issues will often be a non trivial task. Since Intel and little endian arm are the readilly accessible platforms today a lot more code gets written with little endian assumptions than big endian ones.
AMDs integrated graphics USED TO leave Intel's in the dust but these last few generations Intel has been working very hard to fix that and it seems with their latest generation they are suceeding.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...
Out of interest which country? Here in the UK phone service is still usually delievered over "real POTS". ADSL and VDSL (FTTC) users use filters/splitters to seperate voice and DSL. The cable company runs phone wiring alongside the cable TV wiring (and have done so since long before the days of cable modems).
FTTH services may be an exception but those are still pretty rare here.
I haven't had a landline in about 10 years, but I hand out my last landline phone number to anyone who asks for a phone number - let them waste time calling a dead line.
Phone numbers get reused so there is a good chance they will not be calling a dead line but instead will be calling whoever happened to be allocated that number after you stopped renting it.
The question is what is a reasonable metric. They have a buisness model for building out new capacity that assumes that said capacity will be in use for many years. Usually this works quite well, for commercial property it doesn't really matter who is in the builiding as long as someone is and for heavy industry once the facility is bought and paid for it's likely to keep working for years (even if it's original owner goes bankrupt).
Bitcoin mining is different, the system is rigged so for a given size of bitcoin economy mining gets less profitable over time. Furthermore to mine profitablly you have to be on the latest equipment, if you are replacing all your equipment every year or two anyway will you see much motivation to stay in one place? The utility rightly sees this as a risk. If they were a normal buisness they would just jack up their rates for the customers they considered high-risk.
But utilities are (rightly) highly regulated because normal customers can't just up-sticks and leave. So if the utility wants to deter bitcoin miners from moving in to their area (or at least charge them more to make up for the risk) they need to work with the local government to draw a line in the sand somewhere. That line needs to be drawn in a way that non-technical lawyers, judges and politicans can understand and that can be enforced using information the utility has access to.
IIRC slashdot tried wide open unicode and quickly turned it off again (and even broke 8859-1) when people started doing weired shit with control characters related to right to left text.
My suggestion would be a whitelist but a reasonablly open one. Let us use greek letters, accented latin letters, curvy quotes, mathemetical and technical symbols etc but forbid any blocks that have strange rendering rules (explicit control characters, RTL text, scripts with different physical verses logical order) etc.
The problem here is the term "country" is vauge. In most contexts when people say country they mean "Sovereign state" which Scotland is not (they had an independence refferendum recently but voted against independence). Yet the constituant parts of the united kingdom are reffered to as countries despite not being sovereign.
I would imagine the main reason is complexity which leads to cost though from some googling it seems poorly written regulations may be an issue in some places.
Most grid-tie systems are built to be installed just like a load would be installed, you add a breaker in your panel, wire up the panels to the inverter and the inverter to the breaker and turn things on. Depending on your locality there may also be a bit of beuracracy but it's typically fairly minimal.
A system that can go into an "intentional island" state is more complex. There now needs to be a contactor to seperate the load and inverter from the grid in the event of grid failure. The inverter control system needs to support both islanded and grid-tie modes and the process for switching between those modes needs to be carefully designed to prevent back-feeding. There is also the problem that even on a bright sunny day the peak load of a household may well be higher than the solar panels can supply. These problems can be managed but it all adds cost.
From some googling (e.g. I found http://www2.buildinggreen.com/... ) it seems that such systems do exist but they are the exception not the rule.
Domain names (without IDN) are formed from the ascii letters, numbers and hyphens. Letters were case insensitive and in practice at least in web browsers (which is where spoofing attacks were the biggest concern) were displayed to the user in lowercase.
So that leaves us with
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-
The closest thing to a homograph pair in that set is 1 and l but still in most fonts they are visiblly distinct (the spacing is usually the biggest givaway). If we consider uppercase letters then that gives us a couple more pairs. (0 and O, l and I) which are less obviously distinct. Still for a typical name even considering uppercase letters the number of variants that would have to be registered to block Ascii homograph attacks is small.
Compare that to unicode where you have the latin greek and cryllic alphabets (among others) which have many letters that look identical but have seperate code points for each alphabet. Many different accents that can be combined arbiterally with any base character and so-on.
So in summary yes there was some possibility of spoofing attacks before IDN but it was minimal compared to the possibility with unregulated IDN.
Major web browsers have hacked arround this with ad-hoc soloutions but that isn't exactly a good basis for security.
The USA is still a major internet hub. If the american telcos won't accept your addresses then you are likely to have major communication issues not just with the USA but with large parts of the world.
As I understand it the "backbone of the internet" started in the USA and later grew across the pond to Europe (helped by a transatlantic fiber glut and by the relatively open state of the communications market in Europe). South america, africa and australasia are not big/powerful enough to really matter and Asia is mired in political issues.
I would guess that when they started putting in central heating systems they saw little point in using a lower voltage. 240V (standard mains voltage in the UK) works fine for bimetallic strip thermostats, pumps, mechanical timers and motorised valves.
Individual components have got fancier over the years and wiring plans have got more complex but the basic system hasn't changed much.
At least according to wikipedia all macbooks are SATA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In my experiance the most common type of heating in the UK is gas-fired central heating with water used to carry the heat from the "boiler"* to the radiators. This system also heats the water, traditionally using a hot water tank though some modern systems heat the water directly (this is reffered to as a "combi boiler"). The control wiring is 240V. Theres a few different variants depending on what equipment is used but it would typically be something like http://www.electriciansblog.co...
Electric heating seems to be done with self-contained heaters (often storage heaters) which have their thermostats integrated.
* Techically it doesn't boil anything but that is what everyone calls them.
For the benefit of forieng readers note that this may be true in the USA but it's not true everywhere. Here in the UK heating control wiring is usually 240V.
The supposition that the Mint loses money when it costs more to make a coin than than the value it represents is ridiculous.
I disagree
currency's intrinsic value is in its utility
A coin only has utility while it remains in circulation.
Coins leave circulation for various reasons,
Worn-out coins are replaced which clearly costs the government money regardless of how the coins production cost compares to it's face value but the government gets to decide how worn out a coin has to be before it gets replaced and there is no real motivation to deliberately put extra wear on the coins in your possesion. So this is limited and tolerable.
Coins also leave circulation in ways the government has no control over. Hoarding, collecting, throwing in the trash because they think the coin's value is too small to bother with. If the coins production cost is greater than it's face value then every time a coin leaves circulation through one of these means the government loses money.
Worse if the face value is significantly less than it's scrap metal value then people will start treating the coins as scrap metal. That is going to dramatically increase the rate at which coins leave circulation. You can put in place draconian laws to try and stop this but it seems like a cure worse than the disease.
However such a crop makes far more sense with video than with stills.
With stills recording the still at the native resoloution of the camera still is managable. So cropping to zoom or to change the aspect ratio means throwing away information that you could otherwise have kept. You can always crop after capture.
With video on the other hand you are forced to throw away most of the data from the sensor since the storage and encoding pipeline can't cope with all of it. Adding functionality to chose what you throw away in a more flexible manner sounds useful to me.
The problem with that sort of thing is that it can get your game a reputation for being a buggy peice of shit either because the pirates don't disclose that they are running a pirate version or because your triggers accidently get set off by some legitimate users.
Todays contracts are not forever. If spacex can demonstrate high relibility with reused first stages then presumablly that will be taken into account in future contract negotiations.
Of course it will likely take some time to demonstrate that relibaility.
The number of circuits in a UK property varies depending on the size of the property, when it was wired and who specified the wiring. A couple of examples below
my paretents 4 bedroom house:
6A upstairs lights
6A downstairs lights
32A downstairs sockets
32A upstairs sockets
32A kitchen sockets
40A shower
16A outbuilding power
16A immersion heater
my 2 bedroom flat
6A lights
32A sockets
32A cooker
40A shower
Currently the UK usually uses 32A breakers on socket circuits.
I'm not convinced that reducing that to 16A or so (and you can't really go much lower than that given that some appliances draw 13A) would help much. 16A is more than enough to make the electronics in a wall wart go up in smoke.
UK: Could real circuit breakers prevented this?
No. This was a problem with power bars (supplementry battery packs), not with mains adaptors.
Why the hell do browser companies want to remove SHA1 support all together?
The whole point of a certificate is to validate that you are talking to the site you think you are talking to. If an attacker manages to obtain a certificate for facebook.com via a SHA1 collision attack then he can pose as facebook regardless of what certificate signature algorithm is used on the legitimate facebook server.
will they just stop support plain HTTP because HTTP is far more likely to be abused.
They aren't stopping it but they are trying to reduce the potential for abuse. Read up on http strict transport security.
Give the users some kind of feedback to know that SHA1 is being used by the site and that they should maybe get their shit together
Most users tend to ignore such feedback and even if they don't it can come too late. By the time they notice it the information can already be in the attackers hands.
If a browser will trust SHA1 certificates then it doesn't really matter whether the legitimate site sends a SHA1 cert or a SHA2 cert. What matters is that they will accept a SHA1 cert from an attacker and there is nothing the legitimate site can do about that.
Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.
The latter we are stuck with but the former is something humanity has the power to change. There are basically three choices.
1: Disconnect the civil time second from the SI second. Allow the civil time second to vary slightly to match the mean solar day.
2: Allow civil time to drift relative to solar time
3: Make periodic adjustments to civil time to keep it close to solar time.
Each choice hurts different people. Choice 1 hurts anyone who needs to convert between civil time and "atom time". Choice 2 hurts people who rely on civil time as a navigational aid and future historians. Choice 3 puts a rarely excersised special case into computer systems leading to systematic failures.