Posts by Notas Badoff

Dot-Amazon spat latest: Brazil tells ICANN to go fsck itself, only 'govts control the internet'

Upgrade Brazil's TLD

to ".bs"

At some point I fear we'll have to move the whole 'free' internet under a new TLD: .xkcd

"Help us Randall-san, you're our only hope!"

Mozilla whips out Rusty new Firefox Quantum (and that's a good thing)

Re: First look

I'm going to try it for a few days, looking for bugs. With the encrusted paleocode they were lumbered with from the old days, it was near impossible to address some bugs. Apparently some things - new and old - just couldn't be handled by architectures dreamt of 10 and 15 years ago. Some bugs had multiple attempts at fixes, but which broke too many things and had to be abandoned. Today I came across yet another bug report that was 6 years in the fixing.

I've got crossed toes hoping they've got a platform for the modern age.

The power JavaScript: 'Gandalf of JS' Wirfs-Brock on ECMAscript 2017

"I think JS is perceived as "cool" especially to a lot of younger developers." As it has a very low bar to use on the browser and now on the backend, it is easy to get involved with. Like back last century for me, for enhancing user interactions with lists. (woo)

"... and just seems really obsessed with it." That enabling immediate response to users can be rewarding and addictive for devs should be obvious. I'm surprised you haven't noticed.

"Whilst all of this has been going on, I've ignored JavaScript ..." Um... uh... nevermind.

"For me it just seems inappropriate for about 90% of the things it's used for. Or, there are better ways." Mmm, okay John Henry, don't have a heart attack.

Web devs griping about iPhone X notch: You're rendering it wrong

Give it a shot I say

It should be called the 'cup', cuz they've got such big uns, and they need the protection now.

More than half of small firms plan on using Privacy Shield – survey

Link?

Could some kind soul post a link or two to an actual definition of Privacy Shield? I can find much discussion about it, but not *of* the actual subject. I'm assuming of course that there is something more definite than "we'll never peek" and "best effort".

IoT botnet Linux.ProxyM turns its grubby claws to spam rather than DDoS

Re: ... monkey masturbates

"He's made this and many other ... not only possible but inevitable ..." Ah yes, blame Tesla and Edison for the electric chair. Right.

Finance sector is littered with vulns, and guess what – most can be resolved by patching

Eye opening

"And not as smart as they think they are."

After working through some 'improved' 'secure' connection options for enabling credit card processing for a $company, I discovered that the two banks involved didn't know which SSH programs they were using over the wire, then with that answered they couldn't say what versions they were running. Then that they hadn't thought to check for reasons to update, like vulns listed by version. Epochs of vulns given the age of those versions.

They didn't know, they didn't know, they didn't know - reads just like "they didn't care", eh? As bad as the phone companies I'd worked with and swore off. All big companies have soft spots. Start with the heads...

IT plonker stuffed 'destructive' logic bomb into US Army servers in contract revenge attack

Timing

First rule of (logic) bomb is timing. Make the delay long enough to remove yourself from the blast radius. Like Russia. Or Burma.

Crap cracked fat-attack Pact app chaps slapped in pact backtrack infract

Misnomer

"Get a down payment from Loftium, Airbnb an extra bedroom in your new home for 12-36 months, and share the income with us."

I know it isn't the right term for this, but can I call this a pyramid scheme?

GitLab freezes GraphQL project amid looming Facebook patent fears

Defense and deafness

"... that they think is a valuable part of their defensive portfolio because of its broad applicability."

So they're lots of people all angsty because of the patents clause. And they each would swear they would never be party to suing Facebook, so why the "hostile action" by Facebook?

And then their company gets taken over by someone. And then another takeover. And a few steps later they find out their 'feelings' don't mean nothing, and there's a someone looking only at what their technology is worth in patentable ideas. You don't even count as cannon-fodder at that point, but your work could be used offensively in a patent war.

Now how do you prevent this being possible? Because Facebook apparently is looking at the world as being a bit more, well, angsty, than you do.

BTW: This obviously does not apply to that open source where a company is not declaring ownership of a product. If it can be or has been turned over to a community governance or whatever, then there is no one - no company - who would be suing Facebook, right? So I'm really rather confused at these pure open source projects getting confused at this. Or can you tell me who would be suing Facebook and get into this problem. A 'foundation'?

Python explosion blamed on pandas

"It's fun (for a programming language)

It's readable

It has lots of libraries

It's approachable for novice programmers"

.

alt.sysadmin.recovery always had a very useful motto: "All hardware sucks. All software sucks. They all suck the same."

As applicable here, all programming languages suck. 'Fun' is an orthogonal concept.

Libraries, people, documentation - that's the package that makes progress possible in any particular language. The language is a circumstance.

Unloved Microsoft Edge is much improved – but will anyone use it?

Re: 330 million active devices?

Well that's where they count my hit. 'Bout monthly I verify that the latest code still works on Edge/IE. But the visuals are dreadful.

Apparently one of the "bad olds" they dropped/deemphasized was SVG support. Oh, it's there, but everything is viewed as though through a 'veil', smeared so bad that parts of diagrams merely resemble the intended results.

Atlassian kills God, rebrands as a mountain, a structurally unsound 'A' or a high five

Have you looked at the product icons?

Only three 'winners' there. For 'statuspage' I see a nurse attending, for 'crowd' I see a police badge, and 'sourcetree' has a reversed question mark. Is this subliminal? The rest look like various arrangements of dumped sardines and white rice. Only 'trello' is pedestrian and actually suggestive of the product. Perhaps only they still have their heads on straight?

Re: That's racist!!!

I think you're throwing shade here (and not noticing it there)

我的天啊! China gives Weibo users a week to use their real names

Re: Theresa's getting her ideas from somewhere...

That is perhaps a wedge we should use. That is, list and characterize all these shady maneuvers of suppression by China, Russia, the countries that turn off cell services, etc. Label the list "things that evil countries do".

Then call out each that matches up with something our democratically elected representatives propose. Saying "we've heard of this before" ask "why do you want to emulate the CCP or Putin or Mugabe? Do you *want* dictatorial powers?"

Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email

His claims...

to having a massive ego were never in doubt.

FCC taps the brakes on fudging US broadband speed amid senator fury

Rank

Just appeal to the small-brained logic that demands "We're Number 1!" by monthly, publicly, listing the ranking of delivered network speeds to plebes, compared to other countries. If indeed America is number 17 on a list, perhaps that will be odious enough to short-circuit some of this "it's good enough" ?

Linus Torvalds passed a kidney stone and then squeezed out Linux 4.13

Relief and radiance

Perhaps I can forestall the inevitable comments in saying that I'm *sure* that he spoke quite a number of curses at the roughness and unpolished edges in those pushes, the amount of time to convince those contributors to get their act together, and the number of inquiries over whether things were now better and a release could be expected.

And yes, now that he has gone through that experience (described by many many as the worst pain they've ever experienced) I'm sure that nothing else will ever seem so painful and he will never again feel the need to curse even the most painful star-shaped devs. Or not.

Node.js forks again – this time it's a war of words over anti-sex-pest codes of conduct

I'll see that, and raise you!

Remember back when Joyent sat on everything and forced a fork, and then the foundation was formed, that CoC's were much in fashion, and this one was elaborate and larded with touchy feeley inclusiveness and no-touchy no-feeley warnings to the point of exclusion. I don't think any rational group would make this same mistake to the same degree now.

That is, the pendulum is swinging back towards mere civility and politeness. Why is it that every excess, perceived and real, is met with such extreme excess, somehow meant to make up for all possible past sins and prevent future ones.

Oracle caves, promises to crack open Java EE as v8 crawls ever closer

Reading comprehension

I've been snarky to others when they couldn't understand the plain text, so let me volunteer I'm stuck in that "huh?" state here.

How is this different than just expanding the process "... the firm was funnelling engineers onto other projects." ?

Judge yanks plug out of AT&T's latest attack on Google Fiber

2007 Malibu Canyon Fire

I can't find the picture I remember seeing, of a pole so loaded with telephone, cable, and power lines that it was bent over at least 30 degrees, maybe 40. Somebody was so amazed at the overloading they took a picture. Later came the pole breaking, sparking fires in Malibu Canyon. It was just so obvious, and later documented, that each different company just hung their latest new lines on the same isolated poles. (Bet you wouldn't believe four different cellphone companies too!) No one even kept records of how many. No coordination, no responsibility.

But later, $nn millions in fines and settlements to the state. One article I found said they "set aside $900 millions for settlements with homeowners." But... that insurance would cover their (the company's) losses!

This suit is BS, as the companies really don't give a damn, except as leverage.

FYI: Web ad fraud looks really bad. Like, really, really bad. Bigly bad

Re: Why am I not surprised?

I noticed that today. Annoyed at one ad, I waited through multiple slide-ins, color changes, and text flashing and what all, just to finally see at the end who was foisting the travesty in my face. No, I will not fly your airline, characterized as it is by "clear ad turbulence"

HPE sales chief Peter Ryan abandons ship amid downsizing ploy

Re: Hmm - selling involves travel doesn't it?

I once moved into a position where they said it would involve no more than 50% travel. After a couple years I was only 'off', not traveling, two weeks a year. I think that was called 'vacation'.

(The position move was a conscious decision, "if I'm traveling: 1) they can't find me to layoff, 2) I'm saving some VPs reputation (bullet-proofing), 3) I'm saving some customer's production (bullet-proofing), and 4) I can look around outside the company." It worked, but only in the sense that *I* got to pick when to leave.)

Tech billionaire Khosla loses battle over public beach again – and still grants no access

Over my dead body!

So the guy has enough money to fund lawyers until he dies. Um, okay. So can we stipulate that when all the lawsuits fail and the public win, that he gets buried on that beach? He walked over everybody else, it seems fair play for everybody and their dog to walk over him (until global warming flushes the turd out to sea)

'Adversarial DNA' breeds buffer overflow bugs in PCs

Oh, letdown on the article title

I thought you had a clever title subtly referring to the "Gene editing used to eliminate viruses in live pigs". Instead, this was pen-testing of a different strain.

Our day with Larry Page: Embedded with one of the world's richest men

Honesty

FOR THE DEFENDANTS UBER TECHNOLOGIES INC.:

MORRISON & FOERSTER LLP

By: ARTURO GONZALEZ, Esq.

425 Market Street

San Francisco, California 94105-2482

Phone: [phone]

[e-mail]

.

Some details just leap out at you. A lawyer firm. An honest lawyer firm.

Site name : mofo.com

Forget sexy zero-days. Siemens medical scanners can be pwned by two-year-old-days

I'm totally amazed that the department of security theatre is able to help fix the theatre of the absurd (being Siemens). How bad is that?

Re: I'm not sure if the hackers are the worry in this case

My partner has had perhaps an even dozen PET scans in the last 3.5 years. They are a godsend for definite answers. When the cancer is potentially as mobile as this one, they told exactly where and how much was involved, and then the progress against the cancer. And perhaps even more important (now) they say that 3 years post stem cell transplant "still clear". Some like that kind of reassurance, y'kno?

So given that in the developed world one in three of us or someone very close to us will get cancer, I am very glad for the possibility for definite answers.

Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

re: financial investment vehicles

Yes, yes! A current vendor I am forced to use bought the vendor I (happily) used to use, and then was itself bought out by the vendor I was forced to use 20 years ago.

The thought that the reams and reams of money extorted from me back then financed the ever-expanding conglomerate that swallowed up the good vendors just burns.

McAfee online scan used plain old HTTP to fetch screen elements

Fool proof

The only reason that the average Joe is proof against rejecting McAfee is that the average Joe can't grasp just how mindbogglingly stupid this exploit is.

You know the piping that brings the stove gas into your house? We put a switch at the curb so that your neighbor's kid could pick natural gas, hydrogen sulfide, or hydrogen cyanide. The first is so you can have tea, the second two so you won't have bugs. Convenient, eh?

Australia's .au internet registry chair quits amid no-confidence vote

Good Governance

With so many examples of people doggedly outstripping honesty, can we simply shortcut the description phase and cut straight to saying here's a new 'Mugabe' ?

Twitter's twits turned troll's tech taunt into thought-provoking tonic

Note for future use

Not "the social propaganda company"

but "the social agitprop company"

If you don't include the agitation part, you're missing its chief current usage.

Tired: Java. Desired: Node.js. Retired: The suggestion a JavaScript runtime is bonkers

Re: I wonder what node.js is written in?

With C++ as needed to interface to OS platforms and the Javascript platform (V8, Chakra) (as Ben Noordhuis mentioned below is forced to do). The Javascript platform host is a huge part of Node.js. Oh yes, parts of Chrome and I believe V8 are also in Javascript.

Using the hosted language internally is appropriate when the highest priority interface is between the application code and the library code. Saves a bit of marshalling data back and forth when the data traffic is heaviest on the application side of the runtime library. Depends on which APIs.

I don't understand why 'snark' is valued above understanding.

Re: I don't get it.

Nothing special about Node.js event loop. 30+ years ago the same thing was called "cooperative multi-tasking" and was similarly disparaged by purists, etc. If you know people that think it is new and different, laugh at them on my behalf.

You're missing the attraction. The same language available on both sides of world-spanning conversations. If you've got developers willing to put up with this one particular language (*every* language has its distractions and detractors) they can work on the entire stack. You know, let's just get to work. Some companies appreciate fewer distractions, okay?

Node.js is simply Javascript made available outside of browsers, nicely, fast and usable. That the ecosystem grown around it rivals CPAN, etc. is very much of equal importance to evaluators. More of the value of a language is in its ecosystem (libraries, tools, community, documentation) than in the language itself. If the mood of that community matches your down-to-earth sensibilities, all to the better.

I like the ecosystem, especially the community. That makes the language not so much a consideration for me.

And the event loop is one minor detail of Node.js. Ben Noordhuis and friends (thank you!) have made it work across multiple platforms. The implementation is a minor miracle, the idea is not.

Wisconsin badgers Apple to cough up half a billion dollars for ripping off chip designs

Do not mess with badgers

They will make you bleed.

Kid found a way to travel for free in Budapest. He filed a bug report. And was promptly arrested

Re: Reminds me of...

He did things, to see if he could do things. Sorta like this kid. Encourage talent, win wars. Lock'em up, everybody loses.

Crims snatch 5.5 million social security numbers from Kansas govt box

Discounted?

Gee, will the state get a cheaper rate for the credit monitoring since those people are out of work or low-paid, thus not having much in the way of credit activity?

After all, Kansas doesn't have much money to throw around. Seems that the expected trickle-down from Brownback's TP economics never happened, and the tax cuts emptied the coffers.

IETF moves meeting from USA to Canada to dodge Trump travel ban

Next year in wallmerica

A world-wide organization I'm a member of finally set next year's meeting, in Washington, D.C. The only way this makes sense to me, is that it will be so short a distance to go protest outside the Capital.

"You're attending a conference on 'religion' and 'violence'? Denied!" I'm not sure even the Canadians will be able to get there, to talk about their amazing work on non-violence and conflict resolution.

It may just end up being a two venue teleconference after all. (Hmm, I think that's the see-through wall Trump has been talking about?)

Dear racist Airbnb host, we've enrolled you in an Asian American studies course

Short-term memory

How many Americans know the ancestry of even their grandparents, much less great-grandparents?

For every single -ish or -ism trying to get to America in the past there were people actively opposing their ancestors. Every single religion, regionalism, language, or 'look', there were Americans hating them.

Why has this been forgotten?

Or... is it being 'celebrated'? :-((

We're the Benighted States of Unawareica!

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

Deep time

Talk about Easter eggs. Is it possible that the definition of Unix time was influenced by someone French? La Marseillaise anyone?

Google Chrome's HTTPS ban-hammer drops on WoSign, StartCom in two months

Wo is me

Chinese pinyin for 'I' is 'wǒ'. Anybody remember if in the "product trademarking wars" Chinese companies simply tried working around the trademarks by using 'wophone', 'wopad', etc.? wophone.com seems null-terminated. (Mebbe Apple bought it?) wopad.com is for sale. wophone.net is too. Guess discerning customers wanted the "real thing" or not at all.

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

Codiocracy

If someone ever wants to do movie along the lines of Idiocracy about code, development, projects, benevolent dicks for life, etc., there's a big part in it for this guy. Just doesn't *know* when he's being stupid kinda describes the casting, right?

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

You will appreciate what *we* say you should appreciate!

Recently Google 'updated' Google News to a new ~visual~ format. Each news item is now a 'card', with picture and headline and a few more bits, each 'card' about a half screen high. Material design? The total effect is a long line of billboards I have to walk down with a lead foot on the pagedown accelerator.

This isn't design. This is ego-ridden grandiosity repainting the screen using norovirus.

Kaspersky repeats offer: America can see my source code

Ave Senatus Populusque Russia!

Strange that I wonder if the stated aim of the US senators and the hidden aim of (cough) other governments just might align in some way. The goals might be diametrically opposed, but perhaps one group is aiding the other group without realizing it?

(I used to think I was cynical but the world just keeps on making me feel naive.)

Photobucket says photo-f**k-it, starts off-site image shakedown

Have they tried...

turning it off and on again?

As in the site simply not serving those images for awhile, and then noting to enquirers that 'free' does have limits. 14 years and the users aren't amazed that the site is still there, might just need a little moola and 'free' has limits? It never occurred to them that they hadn't ever actually supported the delivery of their pictures?

Common sense has become noticeably rare.

Search results suddenly missing from Google? Well, BLAME CANADA!

Shootout at the OK court

At some point the transnational companies are just going to have to challenge all the authorities together to find a workable common sense solution.

My feeling is it would be a wonderful gesture (how many fingers?) for Google to say - okay, now searches for horse products will result in displaying only "Sorry, Canada says no".

That will give people a starting point for discussion. I could not predict where the discussions would end up, or when.

WikiLeaks doc dump reveals CIA tools for infecting air-gapped PCs

"Suspicion Deflection"

Oh if only they'd named it "Drop Bear" then they could believably claim it was one of them Asian nation states!

(Yeah, yeah, I know, but the American public wouldn't remember 'continents' ...)

Tesla death smash probe: Neither driver nor autopilot saw the truck

Re: Bleh

Until seeing in a recent article that there was a difference between the "aerodynamic side panels" versus the side-impact guards that prevent cars under-running the trailers, I thought they were the same.

But one is designed to save fuel, and is just a simple panel, and doesn't cost that much. The other will also save fuel, but has lots of structure behind it to stop cars from doing the guillotine thing.

I'm'a gonna guess the one with lots of metal costs enough more that it won't be implemented until required by law.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

Hey, did you know the editor could do that automatically?

"... is the equivalent of an extra 2.4 years of experience in terms of salary expectations."

Haven't looked at the survey yet, and don't know whether this fact can be extracted, but is it just possible that using spaces correlates with an extra 2.4 years or so of experience?

That it might take an extra couple years to discover how to make your favorite editor expand tabs to spaces as you type - so there is are no extra characters to type - is disturbing but I could believe of some I've worked with.

When we said don't link to the article, Google, we meant DON'T LINK TO THE ARTICLE!

Re: Not so easy...

No one can learn from history if it is erased bit by bit, labeling this bit mistaken and that bit misattributed. Some plumber named Bonaparte should not be able to claim his toilet fixing skills have been slandered and his business impeded by the phrase "that was his water loo".

The right to be forgotten *must* be very judiciously applied, or else no one will remember when we weren't at war with Europa.