* Posts by mbc

7 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Feb 2024

Foursquare to close, but Swarm game will live on

mbc

Re: How did the company manage to last this long?

Foursquare licensed their database to Garmin, who put its data in my car's GPS. It's typically more useful than Garmin's results, at least in my part of the USA. I bet they pull in some good money licensing their database. I'm surprised and happy they're open sourcing that data!

Internet Archive wobbles back online, with limited functionality

mbc
Pirate

Re: Netscout not as helpful as could be

I'm predicting it's an Android-based set-top box, like one of those Fire sticks or something like that. The countries involved make me think that maybe there's a rogue "free IPTV" app on there that is a Trojan horse. Let's see how clairvoyant I am!

Lightweight Dillo browser springs back to life, still doesn't care about JavaScript

mbc

Very performant if you don't need JS

I like to use Dillo to browse non-commercial websites (and The Register) because everything loads so fast in Dillo. If it works in Dillo, it's a good website. If it looks horrible or won't load at all, I just don't bother using the site. Now of course I still need to log into my bank and that sort of stuff with another browser, but if I'm just poking around or reading tech docs or basically any web page made by someone who's not trying to sell me something then Dillo's my weapon of choice. I'm very glad it's being updated again, although the old version works fine for me.

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

mbc

Re: Eat my shorts!

I was just going to write "buy a Switch and ditch Windows" but you did it justice! I run Mac/OpenBSD at home so I haven't been up-to-date on WINE compatibility and Steam on Linux. Things look to be going quite well! Thanks for the detailed report.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

mbc

Re: Android has a 70% global market share.

Global market share's probably the wrong metric to be using. What you'd want to be looking at is global revenue. Phone users who don't buy things (valuable things, ideally) from the app store are not worth chasing if you're a developer. The Apple store revenue is much higher than the Google store revenue so it's worth being in that store.

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

mbc
Boffin

Peer to peer works this way

The Register knows my IP address as well, when my browser client connects to the server. Peer-to-peer video calls would, by their very nature, also require disclosing one's IP address to the other peer. The workaround is to run traffic through an intermediary, which seems like what X is doing. How is this any different than any number of other Internet-related services? The Register hates X and Elon, I get that, but the fact that sniffing traffic from a peer-to-peer connection reveals the destination of the traffic is obvious.

Not to mention that knowing someone's IP address does not let you "physically" track them. The author needs to write more clearly and possibly gain a better understanding of how the IP protocol works. Not everything X does is malicious.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

mbc
Thumb Up

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

I had never heard of the Julian date concept before. Thanks for introducing me to the concept. I've got a programming project in mind that'll be able to make good use of this, I think. Don't worry, I'm not a professional programmer who's about to display his ignorance about time. I'm doing that here!