Posts by Ivan Voras

Student falsely IDed by Reddit as Boston bomber found dead

Re: sigh

I wish there was something like tvtropes.org for real-world social tropes which repeat but people just don't recognize them. Sort of like a combination of snopes.com and a history handbook.

Mozilla millions still 86% Google cash

Where did that money go?

Seriously, a company in which Google dumps nearly $100 million a year produced *what*? Firefox 3.6, a recently resurrected (and still not finished) Thunderbird 3.x and a couple of side projects which are not much better than academic exercises?

From that statement it looks like more than $40 million was spent on "Software development". WTF? Where are the results?

And if I'm reading it correctly, $115 million was "Purchases of investments" - again, WTF? Someone is playing Wall street broker in a supposedly charitable, open-source company?

More: Mozilla apparently holds $1.8 million in "Furniture and office equipment" ???

Am I missing something here? Why is all that considered normal?

RSA says it fathered orphan credential in Firefox, Mac OS

CAs are a scam anyway

It's nothing new - many have observed that the current situation where there are a dozen CAs who do at best the bare minimum of checks of their certificate applicants and where the users are so confused over whether to trust certificates or not (in the light of self-signed certificates, etc), the whole CA idea has become broken.

It's centered on dozens of "blessed as infallible" certificate issuers - and there can be no formulaic guarantees that people wielding such high-level "trust supply" are not prone to errors. Adding to this is the issue of "green address bar" vs "yellow address bar" certificates and the whole thing degenerates into a money extracting operation without proper services being provided.

The biggest flash drive in the world

Backup of the Internet?

Back in the day we were joking about people trying to backup the Internet on their diskettes "to carry home" ... now these guys are trying to backup the Internet -- in real time :)

Google Chocolate Factory patents Data Center Navy

Mil-SF-tastic!

This is simply a fantastic background for some geek-oriented mil-SF... think huge slow "brains of the operation" datacenter ships (either in the sea or in the space), controlling everything in the combat arena... either indirectly or directly, with war drones.

Surreal appeal of Sun's JavaFX for mobile

MIDP signing is killing JavaME

JavaME's window of opportunity died when they yielded to mobile network operators and introduced certificates and signed applications. Case in point - every advanced feature on mobile phones that JavaME has access to (camera, bluetooth, Internet access, sensors, file system access [not private data access; regular mp3-storing-kind file system]) is restricted only to signed applications. This is killing small, independent developers (shareware / freeware) that made such a big part of what e.g. PalmOS once was. Often, it's not enough to sign applications (midlets) by a well-known CA (Thawte etc.) but the application needs to be signed by a carrier-specific CA before it can use these features.

A direct consequence of this is that freely available JavaME applications usually look crummy and outdated, which then sheds a bad light on the entire platform. About the only popular category of midlets are games, distributed, of course, by cell operators, which is a shame when the platform is in the ideal position to do a lot more.

Of course, if JavaFX mobile needs any kind of upgrade or an add-on runtime library to existing JavaME installations (which seems likely), it will be stillborn.

Feds: IT admin plotted to erase Fannie Mae

Amateur :)

Obviously he should have encrypted all the files and demanded a ransom :)