Posts by Lexxy 85 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2009
"Gentlemen, I know how anxious you've all been during these last few days. But now I think I can safely say that your time and money have been well-spent. We're about to witness the greatest miracle of the machine age. Based on the revolutionary Computonian Law of Probability, this machine will tell us the precise location of the 3 remaining golden tickets."
It says: "I won't tell. That would be cheating."
Tim knew the potential on his hands. A few notes from his prototype website (http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Bugs.html):
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"Things to be done"
Form processing
If you can edit hypertext, you edit a hypertext form and return it. To be able to submit a form back to the server would allow special search patterns, administrative processing, electronic voting, ...
Search engines
Now the web of data and indexes exists, some really smart intelligent algorithms ("knowbots?") could run on it. Recursive index and link tracing, Just think...
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"Just think" indeed Tim! I can't help but read that and feel a proud sense of nostalgia.
"3. Update the VBA IDE to something vaguely modern please. How hard can it be to take VS2013 Express for Desktop, rip out all of the extra bits, bung in some default interop references and let us poor sods take advantage of the IDE advancements such as..."
Pretty hard. For a start VBA doesn't have a place in the cloud, and that's the way the wind is blowing, though I appreciate there'll still be corporates using it in anger. VS2013 doesn't include a VB6 SDK - it's all .NET. The enhancements you suggest are certainly nice to haves productivity wise but they're not changing the fundamentals of what you actually can or can't do.
Better the devil you know, I suspect.
As a suggestion if you're keen to use the latest gear, if you _can_ break out of macros you can develop for Office in Visual Studio 2005-2015 using the PIA and Office SDK.
"For context, I use Excel 2010 on a daily basis and I _HATE_ its ribbon interface. Even now after years of using it, I still have to hunt around to find several quite basic functions!"
Dr. Farnsworth good news for you then! Microsoft have added a "Tell Me" bar so you can stop hunting around to find aforementioned basic functions. Your complaint is the entire point this exists.
I've seen that game before. It's an example game project included with the .NET game development SDK - Microsoft XNA Framework - which had exactly two levels. They don't appear to have made any changes whatsoever to the original sample, so it looks like they've just added malware, wrapped it for Android consumption and shipped it.
Edit: I looked it up, this ought to look familiar: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davrous/archive/2011/09/09/html5-platformer-the-complete-port-of-the-xna-game-to-lt-canvas-gt-with-easeljs.aspx - seems you can easily add new levels too via a simple text based map formatting.
You see, this is what irks me.
Criticize something that's not cool to criticize like Acrobat and you get called a hater.
To lay my cards on the table I agree with the OP: PDF.js just doesn't work for me. I found it slower and less reliable to display the document I wanted correctly than the alternatives - and don't get me started on Mozilla making this the default handler for the mime-type.
There are fewer security holes - that we know about....
Michael,
It seems I'm not making myself clear as you have over generalized what I'm saying. I'm not providing a critique - I'm asking for genuine opinions on why I would want to do my cryptography in an untrusted environment.
The last reading I did on the subject was this document which makes some very valid points and explains the issue better than I did above:
http://matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
So - I'm asking out of genuine interest - does WebCrypto advance us further from where we were when this document was written?
Okay. So I as I understand it WebCrypto provides an API to "crypto primitives" via the browser. Playing the role of Mallory, what's to stop me from then bypassing this Javascript tier entirely and returning whatever I feel like to the caller?
Point being - the crypto itself can be harder than a coffin nail but that counts for nothing if the environment the code is running in can't be trusted? Or is the idea that I'd be running this through Node.Js or something?
Trevor,
Thanks again for taking the time reply, especially in such detail, bar the opening judgement on my credibility which I have no interest in - If you (and others) think I'm a fool then so be it, at least I had the bottle to speak my mind amongst an audience which, as you mentioned, have their beliefs firmly grounded in scientific method.
Please ignore my previous flippancy in response to Vociferous, I do not believe that an adult and a group of cells in an early fetus are rationally equivalent at all - I simply grow tired of people assuming on the basis of my views that I'm not aware of this. He addressed me like a cretin and perhaps got a cretinous reply.
I, like you, consider myself open minded. Right now, and throughout this conversation, I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything - how can I claim to have the "right" opinion on something so complicated where forming an argument with evidence, reasoning, logic and rationale deserves more than the 10-15 minutes of time allocated for writing a comment on The Register. I'm simply sharing an opinion, and I am listening to yours. That is all.
You have defined the parameters of our debate in "The Borg" style fashion (to paraphrase: strength is irrelevant. death is irrelevant. you will be assimilated) by defining what is relevant and what is not but I argue that those relevancies are to you and not the topic as a whole. Empathy and emotion are part of what makes us more than the chemical machines you have clearly defined and why as a species we do not always choose the (sometimes blindingly obvious) logical solution to our problems. You may point out the irony that these feelings are a result of a biological process in themselves - I don't however think that this is a reason to ignore them.
I realise that we are now clearly off-topic of the original news story, so I invite any closing comments you may have on our discussion, however, I think I've said what I came here to say and therefore "I rest my case".
Trevor,
Thanks for your reply. For me life is more than the sum of its parts and your clinical perspective (and attitude) on this matter saddens me deeply. We know its a bunch of cells - but we don't know why it's alive. That spark of life which we take away we can never give back.
I reject your arguments that it's about the "here and now" on the basis that in such circumstances the "here and now" is a living entity which will*, without interference, develop into a human being with thoughts/feelings of his/her own. I was granted this life. You were granted this life. Would you not argue for your chance to sit here now and debate this with me? Even if your lot in life is to die at a terribly young age (even still within the womb), surely you deserved an honest shot?
I don't have an answer for some of your more difficult arguments (what if it endangers the mother, what if the child will be born into poverty etc.) and I'd like to meet someone who does - but all I know is that in conclusion I'm glad I'm here, I'm glad I'm alive and I'm glad nobody made a choice to take that away from me.
* Before you jump on me (abnormalities, miscarriage, could be the next Führer enacting a 4th Reich blitzkrieg of Nazis mounted on dinosaurs), as far as I'm aware in general most foetuses go on to develop normally, be birthed normally and live normal mostly uneventful (in world stage terms) lives.
If I knew stating the blindingly obvious (as in "what does this big 'Show Password' button do in my web browser?") would get my blog coverage on all the major IT news sites I'd of done this years ago.
Food for thought - if this is a bug, and there should be a master password - that implies the encryption of the keystore, which in turns means that the software itself would need to ask for the key (as FF currently does now with a master password set) the first time a user needs to auto-fill a password. As ever, security or convenience, friends - rarely both. I believe though it's the users choice which they desire here, not that of a internet knee-jerk reaction.
Why? - let's put this into perspective. The exposure of a typical vulnerability is generality the entirety of the WWW. This is much worse than the exposure of this issue, which is typically going to be your family, friends or co-workers who have actual physical access to your PC. Generally these people can be trusted not to go off and steal your identity/bank/both. Most of the time, anyway. Besides, if they did, you can poke them with sticks, or whatever it is you do when you're mad. The fact is, the likelihood in my mind of this vulnerability being used for criminal purposes is low. It would more likely be used for a prank.
Many of the readers here know that their passwords are the keys to their IT/enterprise kingdom. The anxiety surrounding these passwords being lost or compromised are the cause of much angst and sleepless nights. Do I want to encrypt my keystore and provide my master password when I log on for my work network? You're damn right. [Shaft, 1971]. Do I want to provide my master password at home and I want to log into Icanhazcheezburger? No, not really. Not that I have a login for Icanhazcheezburger, but hypothetically if I did, I'll be damned if a bunch of internet do-gooders are going to take my right to not have to type a password for pictures of cats+Arial bold away from me!!
Yes yes, by methane or something and definitely not fracking, which is totally without consequence. If anything the value of your property will go up when in the vicinity of hydraulic fracturing as that's also one of the community benefits. Better do it near Sheffield or something because that area could use a housing price boost. But come on, fiery faucets ... - no? nothing? not even a titter? Tough sub.
P.S. Will use the correct icon next time!
Ah, the "Have my cake and stuff my face with it too" argument. Whilst I agree that in the real world, as you put it, this it what happens - it's a method of consumerism which isn't grounded in reality in my view, especially with games where the value is often in the novelty of the product which starts to depreciate as soon as the player fires up their cracked version: and that doesn't even begin to touch on the actual market depreciation of the product itself, i.e. play now (RRP £30), pay later at bargain basement prices (£10). But hey, a sale is a sale right?
It boggles my mind somewhat what world people are living in where this pro-piracy argument makes sense - try walking out of a supermarket with a trolly full of nicked (read: pirated) gear and explaining to the bobby: "But it's okay, mate, if I like this stuff I might pay for it later!"
Nor do I buy the "cracked games are full demonstrations because vendors don't make demo's any more" argument in 2013 when YouTube will be overflowing with hours of "Let's play" videos where you can evaluate if you think you'd enjoy the product. Buyers remorse is not an excuse for self-entitlement to pirate.
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