Posts by sisk

Adobe spies on readers: EVERY DRM page turn leaked to base over SSL

Re: How does Adobe stay in business?

Texted based website building? This ain't the 1990s anymore, Old School Steve.

You're obviously not a professional in the field if that's what you think. Yes, some website designers use Dreamweaver. But only about half of them, if that. The rest use a text editor.

Kompozer? Don't make me laugh. It's just Navigator Composer all over again.

Can't comment. I've never used it. The websites that put food on my table are written with Sublime Text. I only mentioned it as an alternative to Dreamweaver.

I merely pointed out that Flash was once the defacto video compression tool of choice and no longer is and that STRAIGHT Java itself was and is taking the place of the interactive menus that were once created in Flash as well.

No it's not. That would be CSS3, and sometimes JavaScript. Only an utter fool would use Java for something as simple as interactive controls in this day and age. Java is only used for complete web apps, and then only rarely. You can't count on the client device being able to run it anymore. These days HTML5+CSS3+JavaScript is the way to go. That's why I assumed you meant JavaScript.

Re: How does Adobe stay in business?

It is rather less painful

Here I have to disagree with you. My server side scripting language of choice, when I'm given a choice, is PHP (for a number of reasons I'll not go into at the moment), but CFML is ludicrously easy to work with. Adobe's implementation of it is in some ways ahead of (Java POI integration) and in some ways behind (CFScript syntax, optimization) Railo, but both are relatively painless ways to get the job done.

Re: How does Adobe stay in business?

How? Because nobody has come up with any real alternative to their products.

Yes, they have.

Sure, there are PS and Illustrator clones out there, so why aren't people using them?

PS and Illustrator are the industry standards. THere's very little PS can do that Gimp can't, but anyone with a design degree in the last 20 years or so has had classes on PS. Ditto for Illustrator and Inkscape.

Also, as far as I know, there NO alternative to Dreamweaver

Kompozer

or Coldfusion

Railo, or BlueDragon.

or Flash

HTML5 + CSS3 or, failing that, it's still possible to use Java applets to do what it does (you know. the things we used before Flash?)

although Flash is fading away now that enough people have the bandwidth for real video and sophisticated interactive can now be done with Java.

You just triggered my pet peeve. Java != JavaScript. They're two totally unrelated languages which just happen to have a similar name. Java was made by Sun about the same time Netscape made the first version of JavaScript.

Wanna hop carriers with your iPad's Apple SIM? AVOID AT&T

I could be crazy here, but it seems to me that the case could be made that AT&T is damaging the SIM cards and are therefore liable for property damage to the owners. You'd need a hotshot lawyer to make it fly, and they'd better be damn big hotshots to go up against the team of hotshot lawyers AT&T will throw at them, but I think that you could at least make the case.

In the next four weeks, 100 people will decide the future of the web

Bigger than Christmas

It's not in most of the nation, but it is a very close second. Then again that's partially because so many Americans celebrate Hanukwanzmastis* instead.

*Yes, I'm making up words.

DOUBLE BONK: Fanbois catch Apple Pay picking pockets

Not Apple's faust

Much as I dislike Apple all suspicion of it being their problem vanished the instant I saw the words "Bank of America". A more corrupt and/or less competent financial organization would be difficult to find.

Guns don't scare people, hackers do: Americans fear identity theft more than shooting sprees

Re: The media strikes again!

Perhaps a rewording is in order: school shootings were very rare before the mid-90s. There's been more in the last decade than in all of US history before 1990 though.

Re: The media strikes again!

OF COURSE we fear identity theft more than getting shot by a stranger. Identity theft happens all the time. Getting shot by a stranger is incredibly rare, despite that the extreme left wing and mainstream media would have you believe. Look up the statistics and there's a couple orders of magnitude of difference.

As for the perceived increase, well school shootings have increased. They just plain didn't happen before the mid 90s. Other crimes may have decreased (though you wouldn't know it from watching the news), but school shootings are far more common now than when I was in high school.

Lords take revenge on revenge porn publishers

Personally I'm of the opinion that revenge porn should be considered a serious offense. It is no better than someone posting hidden cameras in a locker room.

Doctor Who's Flatline: Cool monsters, yes, but utterly limp subplots

Re: The end ?!

I'm still wishing that the attempted backdoor pilot with McGann had worked honestly. He's a great Doctor, but there's a huge chunk of Whovian culture that barely knows he exists because he's only been on screen twice.

Re: The end ?!

I saw precious little of Colin Baker, but McCoy was a pretty strong Doctor in my opinion. He was no Tom Baker, but he wasn't bad.

News Flash: The premise of the show is a 2000ish year old alien tooling around time and space in a craft that violates the laws of physics as we know them in half a dozen ways. It is not and never has been a hard sci-fi. That's not what the fans watch it for.

If you can't learn to suspend your disbelief and let go of the science long enough to enjoy a show which never made a claim to be scientifically accurate long enough to just enjoy it you really should stick to hard sci-fi and leave Doctor Who and the like to people capable of enjoying it. The reviews I've read here lately are about as credible as someone criticizing an action movie for the star getting out of situations he shouldn't have been able to survive.

Now if you want to slam the stories, go right ahead. I happen to disagree (this week was a SUPERB story in my opinion), but at least you'll be credible doing it.

Torvalds CONFESSES: 'I'm pretty good at alienating devs'

Re: Eric Raymond's (in)famous quote

You do know the if not the majority, a very large portion of the FOSS written today is written by paid developers (at work, explicitly tasked by the employer) many of which work for large corporations right?

I'm pretty sure it's the vast majority of them when it comes to the kernel. How many people do you know who's put up with Linus' management style for free? I know exactly one, a guy who'd love the prestige of being able to call himself a Linux kernel dev enough to put up with it if he had the skills to match his ego. I sure as heck wouldn't put up with it unless I was being paid.

Re: Social skills and techies

if you don't understand people and understand technology enough to properly troubleshoot and fix it, you are not a good support engineer.

That's why the first person you talk to when you call tech support is usually using a flipbook.While it's possible to have excellent people skills and technical skills in the same person it doesn't seem to happen very often.

Re: Eric Raymond's (in)famous quote

Cutting through management waffle is fine. Being derogatory I don't think is necessary.

Indeed. Direct, blunt communication is one thing. Profanity and personal insults are another. The former usually saves trouble. The latter causes problems more often than not and is considered by some to be a sign of immaturity.

Australian spookhaus busted for warrantless tap of own phones

Possible spook quote

"I'm doing something wrong and I'm going to catch me doing it! Hand me that inline interceptor!"

City council thinks what we're all thinking: 'Comcast is terrible – and NOT welcome here'

Re: Ugh

"Kansas City" isn't in the state of Kansas,

Part of it is. Kansas City sits on the Kansas-Missouri border.

a state by the way, that is named after a city in another state.

Actually it's named after the Kansa Native American tribe.

Comcast is atrocious. I admin a bank of servers that are or a Comcast connection. I thought my ISP was bad until I started trying to do SSH over Comcast's network. I've never before in my life seen a SSH connection randomly freeze and/or drop so often. How it manages video traffic is beyond me.

Re: Ugh

I live in a town that shares its name with at least 40 other towns in the US, all in different states. Google it and you'll likely get the one in New York first (unless Google happens to detect you're here that is), us second, and then the other 38 further down. It's not at all unusual a phenomenon in the US.

Bad news, fandroids: He who controls the IPC tool, controls the DROID

You know, I like Android. I really do. It gives a great user experience in my opinion. But it's starting to look more and more like a security graveyard on par with Windows 2000.

I'm just shy of hatred in my opinion of iOS. I use the iPad forced on me at work only when there's no other choice, and other choices do include lugging a laptop around. That's how much I dislike iOS. Not saying anything against it other than my personal opinion of it is negative. And Windows Phone? I'm not exactly a Windows fan under the best of circumstances.

I think it's about time for a new contender in the mobile market to come along.

Arab States make play for greater government control of the internet

Let them try

It'll work out almost as well as using legal bludgeons to stop online file sharing has worked. Just look at governments that have tried to lock down the Internet and how well that's worked on people who actually give a <insert expletive of choice here>.

Scientists skeptical of Lockheed Martin's truck-sized fusion reactor breakthrough boast

Polywell

Whatever happened to Bussard's Polywell research? From what I read he was startlingly close to a practical fusion power plant when his funding ran out.

Return of the Jedi – Apache reclaims web server crown

Re: Closed is out of flavour these days.

Really? Heartbleed, Shellshock ring any bells? The two greatest security threats the Internet has had to weather were caused by open code.

Holy hyperbole Batman.

No, neither of those is even in the top 5 greatest security threats the Internet has had to weather. Maybe not even in the top 10. What they are is the two most heavily reported security threats yet known to the Internet.

Both of them combined don't come close to the ongoing threat posed by SQL injection attacks. (Apparently there's still quite a few web developers out there who haven't figured out to always cleanse their inputs.) It's not such a big deal now, but cross site scripting was huge for a long time to. And then there's the various flavors of DoS attacks. Code Red and Nimda both took down systems in droves back in their day, far more than the systems that were attacked via Heartbleed or Shellshock. I'm sure there are other viruses that did the same. There are viruses like Stuxnet, which with a little tweaking can cause major industrial accidents and kill hundreds or thousands of people. And lets not forget the many and varied attack vectors of IE6 that hung around for years and years because Microsoft refused to fix them (thank goodness they've learned since then). But if you really want to get down to it, I'd say the crown for biggest threat goes to the malware that's slurping credit card information from retailers left and right lately.

Heartbleed and Shellshock were both very serious, but no, sir, they're not in the running for 'greatest security threat the Internet has ever known'. Not even close.

Re: Hooray for Apache!

I moved the last one when the Open SSL mess hit

Which was the first major hole in how many years? And not even an Apache bug at that. IIS could have the same vulnerability if you were running Open SSL on it (though admittedly I can't think of any reason why anyone would run Open SSL on an IIS server - anyone that fanatical about using OSS wouldn't be running IIS in the first place).

and i'm glad I did looking at the latest OSS catastrophe with BASH.

Shellshock? Which was an issue for what, a couple days, tops, before the patch was in every major distro's repository? Debian had it before I'd even HEARD of Shellshock (I was too busy to read the news that week). Compare that to how long IIS bugs stick around. And it's not an Apache bug either.

Yes, Heartbleed and Shellshock were serious vulnerabilities, but they were fixed very quickly and you're fooling yourself if you think IIS' track record is any better.

Judge nukes Ulbricht's complaint about WARRANTLESS FBI Silk Road server raid

I think the judge is operating on flawed logic here. SOMEONE'S 4th Amendment rights were violated if the operator was an American. Whether it was Ulbricht's or not is irrelevant: the FBI still acted illegally and the evidence should be inadmissible.

Then again the 4th is all but dead, right along with the sixth.

No one wants iOS 8 because it's for NERDS - dev

Re: But.. (Flawed fandroid logic...)

Not really. Android obtained its market share by offering a better product - as defined by hardware specs and usable life and software capabilities - at one end of the market and lower costs at the other end. Choosing a product based on those factors doesn't make one a sheep, even if most people come to the same conclusion you do.

Granted, there are iWhatsit users who choose Apple for what they feel is a better user experience (more power to them), but there's also a huge contingent of Apple users who have iPhones because that's what the cool kids have.

Researchers: Trolls have dark tetrad of personality defects

Re: Trolls....

People trolling, just not as much of it due to the number of players online back then?

I dunno. One MUD I used to play would give any modernish MMO I've ever been on a run for its money in that regard despite only having 50 or so players at any given time.

Siri ... why is this semi headed RIGHT AT ME? Phone apps distracting as ever – new study

My car has a built in voice dialer. From experience I can understand this perfectly. If I'm calling someone in the onboard phonebook (hit a button, listen for the beep, say "Call wife", all of about 2 seconds) it's usually not a big deal, but if I have to actually dial a number, then listen to it's confirmation to make sure the half-deaf piece of junk got it right (it never does on the first try with numbers), then confirm, the road certainly does get less of my concentration for about 30 seconds. I don't do that while driving. Still it's better than pulling out my phone and scrolling through my contacts would be (again, not something I'd do while driving, but a lot of idiots do).

OMG! With nothing but machine tools, steel and parts you can make a GUN!!

Re: The 'AR-15' myth.

The thing's aren't even all that deadly. Or dependable. Or durable. They're suitable for one thing and one thing only: paper targets. And they're a blast for that, but I don't know anyone who'd reach for one in any other scenario given a safe full of guns like the average gun collector has.

You misunderstand what a militia is. Militias do not drill. They do not train and they do not have standing membership. The militia is made up of whoever is willing to jump out of bed in the middle of the night, grab their gun, and go fight to defend their homeland, be it against foreign invaders or against a government out of control. That's what the militia the men who wrote that amendment had belonged to was. Just guys who happened to own guns and had the balls to use them. These days there's a mistaken tendency to think of para-military groups as militia, and in a sense they are, but that's not all there is to a militia.

Re: ...except as...

"I Hope You Leave Here And Walk Out And Say, 'What Did He Say?'" - George W Bush

I think about half the audience leaves saying that about every time he makes a speech even to this day. He really is fairly smart, right around the same IQ as the average PHD recipient, but good grief does he sound like a moron when he speaks. Some people just need to confine all their communications to the written word.

Re: good lord

so I'm thinking that running around with a half dozen banana clips and one of the "printed" rifles would be a wonderful example of the law of natural selection

The magazines are probably safe. The stresses exerted on them in real-world use are pretty minimal. Those printed guns though....yeah, I don't want to be at the same range as someone who's shooting one, let alone holding the damn things.

As far as the whole gun control issue, it's a very complex issue and it's not going to be resolved over night, nor is it going to be resolved by penalizing licensed and law abiding people.

Exactly my view on the matter. We don't need rednecks toting around 50 cal sniper rifles or Vulcan cannons, but at the same time you're not going to reduce crime by taking away their hunting rifles.

That being said, I think the immediate, short term focus should be on mental health issues

Lots of us have been saying that for years no. No one seems to be listening.

There is no such thing as an accident with a fire arm.

Here I have to disagree with you. Stuff happens, especially with cheap guns. I've seen a gun go off when the owner pulled the slide to chamber a round. I've also seen one get dropped and go off when the guy holding it had a freak muscle spasm. Fortunately in both cases no one was hurt. Another case I saw a pistol explode as, near as I can tell, every round in the magazine decided it needed to go off at the same time. That person wasn't so fortunate, but lucky for her there happened to be a few paramedics out shooting that day. All three were very cheap guns, which is why I won't buy any brand I've never heard of, but accidents DO happen. Thing about it is though they're exceedingly rare, even with Hi Points (if there's a cheaper brand I don't know it).

The number of people injured, maimed or killed by driving (even if they're licensed) is exponentially more than all of the firearms related deaths combined (excluding military crap).

My dad says the exact same thing, and after 30 years of scraping people off the street and into the back of either an ambulance or a hearse for a living he'd know.

Re: @ A J Stiles

There are times when someone with a firearm handy stops or reduces a crime. There's also many times when someone with a firearm escalates something, or shoots at a legitimate target and misses (see NZ cops killing innocent teenagers), or has their gun taken from then and used either against them or on someone else.

True enuogh, but the fact is that the first one of those outnumbers the latter two massively, especially if you take into account all the times when someone averts a crime simply by HAVING a gun and doesn't have to fire it.

Re: @ A J Stiles

O.K. Name some property that you consider worth more than your life.

Not that I'd consider it property, but my family's safety is worth more to me that my life. Truth is I'd probably let someone steal all the stuff I own before I'd pull the trigger. But give me a reason to think you're a danger to my family and I'll double tap just to make sure.

My family's safety is worth more than some rapist or serial killer's life to me. If you've broken into my house I don't know if you're there for my stuff or if you're a rapist there for my wife, or a pedo freak there for one of my kids, or a serial killer there for any of us. You'll get a chance to leave if I can give you one, but when it comes down to shooting someone or putting my family in harms way I'll shoot someone and deal with having trouble looking in mirrors for a while.

Re: it is rare for civilian US gun owners to use their weapons legally against criminals

I would also point out that by far the most common method of using a gun against criminals is to simply point it their direction, tell them to go away, and not pull the trigger. I've done this myself twice, once with a gun I didn't even have any ammo for (the guy trying to break into my house didn't know that, obviously). It's pretty rare that you actually have to shoot the criminals. Usually you point a gun their direction and they're happy to leave you alone. Those situations probably outnumber the criminals getting shot by 10-1, but they don't show up in the statistics.

Re: Why?

or why they're so desireable.

In my case it's mostly that I grew up shooting DCM with an AR-15. A bit of nostalgia, a bit of familiarity, and that's about it.

Should I ever find myself in the unenviable position of needing a gun to defend myself I'd much rather have a 12ga or a .45 pistol, and I can't think of anything I'd consider hunting with a .223. For deer my weapon of choice is an old M1 Garand that's been around longer than I have and for game birds it's back to the shotgun. There's really nothing else worth hunting here unless you like rabbit (I don't) and I'd opt for a high power pellet gun or a .22 for them if I were going to hunt them. If I were to find myself in need of an actual battlefield-worthy gun I'd want an AK-47 or, if we were going short range, an AA12.

Literally the only place my first choice of guns would be an AR-15 is on a shooting range, and then only if I'm shooting for fun. It's just not a practical gun for much of anything else. Even so if I ever got the chance to get one I'd take it.

Re: From semi-auto to auto

Has anybody tried this? Is there any technical reason why it shouldn't be done?

I haven't tried it, but I have a friend who attempted to turn a semi-automatic .22 rifle into a full automatic (yes, he's an idiot, but he's usually good whenever machines are involved). What he ended up with was a rifle that'd fire 2 rounds and then jam every single time. Judging by his lack of success I'd have to say that the process isn't as easy as you'd think.

On the other hand I have another friend (a gunsmith who actually gets paid to repair guns) who accidentally made a full auto AR-15 once by forgetting to put in a certain spring. (In case you're wondering he took it back to the shop and fixed it after the first unexpected burst.) It stands to reason that there's a significant difference between something that was engineered 'down' from full auto to be semi-auto, like an AR-15, and something that was designed as a semi-auto to begin with, like a pistol.

Plus it would have to be a very heavy but low caliber pistol for anyone but a very experienced shooter to control in full auto. You'd need something that weighed like a Desert Eagle but fired 9mm for it to actually be usable, which is about what a Micro-Uzi is.

Re: Defending against the government in the US

....an adequate rifle is a tool that can help feed the family. Hunting isn't just sport.

That's no joke. Have a thumbs up.

I know multiple families who'd be living off beans and rice if you took away their hunting rifles or deep freezes. You can tell the hunters who consider it a sport from the hunters who consider it a survival technique pretty easily: these guys don't have trophies because they don't have extra money to give a taxidermist. What they do have is chest freezers full of meat they've butchered themselves that needs to last till the next hunting season.

I do have to say that this machine is...well let me put it this way. About a year ago I was seriously considering buying one of these 'unfinished' lower receivers* and did my research. To finish them you need nothing more than 5 minutes and a drill press. Why would anyone buy an expensive, dedicated to do that?

*Not because I have any particular problem with my guns being registered. I was just sort of hoping it'd be a less expensive way to get an AR-15. It is cheaper, but still too an order of magnitude more expensive than what I can justify spending on a sport rifle.

Hey, non-US websites – FBI don't have to show you any stinkin' warrant

I was following their logic right up until phpMyAdmin. If the presence of phpMyAdmin is enough to rifle through its drives looking for evidence of crimes then very few servers running MySQL (or MariaDB for that matter) are safe.

Women! Worried you won't get that Job in IT? Mention how hot you are

Unfortunately these two things, personality and looks rarely come together in IT.

That's because most of the current crop of IT pros grew up in an era when a strong interest in computers was a good way to get labeled a nerd or geek.* You had to be fairly pretty to level the odds of positive social interactions with your peers if you had that interest. I have hopes that 20 years from now things will be different.

*OK, so it'll still get you the label. But these days only a fool wants to be on the bad side of the guy who knows how to fix your smart phone with a few magic swipes or get you past the filters on school computers. Being a geek no longer carries the stigma it did 20 years ago.

Revealed: Malware that forces weak ATMs to spit out 'ALL THE CASH'

Baffled

To this day I remain astounded that ATMs don't run some proprietary system, or at the very least some obscure OS that no one knows very well like MinuetOS. I realize that obscurity on its own is terrible security, but surely obscurity plus mediocre security practices would be far better than everyone-knows-its-holes Windows plus mediocre security practices.

Doctor Who becomes an illogical, unscientific, silly soap opera in Kill The Moon

Why then did he do his utmost to be rude, nasty and generally demoralising before he left?

Let's be fair here: Capaldi's Doctor has never been anything BUT rude and nasty to Clara, though occasionally he slips up and shows that he really does care. My read on it is that he believes he cares too much and goes out of his way to put on a show of not caring at all. Normally the balance is there to see, but in this episode he simply takes it too far.

All the same I've been sort of wondering how long she was going to tolerate it. Cranky old men can get away with a lot because they're cranky old men, but eventually the kids start finding reasons not to visit them anymore.

And yes, this Doctor can be quite a prat at times.

...an unsubtle hint that this Doctor isn’t nearly as keen on people as previous incarnations.

Not quite the read I got on that. I think if he'd believed for one second they might actually start shooting people he'd have been standing in front, not behind. I find it far more likely that he'd already noted the lack of guns and was going out of his way to make them feel foolish.

Next week it’s the Orient Express in space, and Clara does not feature in the trailer … will she return?

Doubtful. At least a permanent return is doubtful. I seem to recall seeing headlines before this season (or series, depending on which side of the pond you're on) started airing that Jenna Coleman hadn't signed on for another. That pretty well means that at some point Clara's leaving.

Maybe a companion-free Doctor would be good for a while - fewer episodes set on Earth for a start

Companion-free? Nah. We're way overdue for an alien and/or robotic companion. Unless you count the couple episodes with K-9 there hasn't been one in the revival.

BENDY iPhone 6, you say? Pah, warp claims are bent out of shape: Consumer Reports

Much as I like to believe the worst of Apple I'm more inclined to believe Consumer Reports than the blogosphere.

FBI boss: Apple's iPhone, iPad encryption puts people 'ABOVE THE LAW'

Post-Snowden world?

Oh sure, let's just blame the guy who's only crime was telling the world just how badly the NSA was breaking every wiretapping law in existence and not, say, the NSA who was breaking every wiretapping law in existence.

4chan outraged by Emma Watson nudie photo leak SCAM

The mainstream media have allowed themselves to be used in a viral marketing scheme

The mainstream media have allowed themselves to be used for far worse things than that. Political pawns, for instance.

Bill Gates, drugs and the internet: Top 10 Larry Ellison quotes

Re: Thought Experiment.

Apple, Google, and Yahoo! all scream foul and get anti-trust regulators involved. 2 years later, after the investigation determines there's no reason for an investigation, Ellison is finally able to assume the position, at which point he forces the rest of the world to assume the position.

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

Re: lets look at this in another way..

Hardware specs are very easy to replicate and improve upon but user experience is a whole other ballgame

Indeed it is, but there's a large factor of personal preference in user experience. I love the UX on Android. I have an iPad at work that I've been forced to use for the last 2 years. The UX on it makes me want to pull my hair out. On the other hand I know a lot of people who can't handle Android.

To paraphrase Steve Wozniac: if you are willing to take the time to learn how to use it you'll get far more out of Android. If you're willing to settle for less and just want to pick it up and go, get an iPhone.

Re: lets look at this in another way..

No, for a start, you can transfer a pic, file, or contact, via Bluetooth¹ to any bugger who's got a non-Apple phone.

Ok....you're kidding, right? iPhone's can't talk via Bluetooth to non-Apple products? My disgust with Apple just rose a couple notches. Believe it or not pushing things around via Bluetooth is something I do all teh time.