Posts by Old Handle 1605 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2011
I donno what's going on inside Mozilla, but it feels like somewhere along the way, they lost track of what they were good at. It used to be the slightly techy browser that geeks would recommend to their less savvy friends and family. That was the only marketing department it needed. Then around the time Chrome came out they started chasing trends, adding bloat and alienating it's biggest fans by repeatedly breaking plug-ins and such.
But if you take away the AI part, isn't this done all freaking time? Okay, maybe not so much in the consumer world, but in business to business kind of industries. Like anything where you see "request a quote" instead of a price list. Having worked in that kind of field a little bit, I don't for a minute believe the price quote you get depends solely on material and labor costs.
Yep. That's my concern. It's a bit hard to keep track because at least two different bills have been called "the tiktok ban", but even the less bad of the two (which I think it the one we're talking about) contains some worryingly vague language about when and why the government could order a service blocked.
That might not be too far from what Richard Sutton believes. He wrote The Bitter Lesson, where he argued that history shows AI advances always come more from computing power than human ingenuity.
So the bulk of the world's population is still maximally exposed.
Not necessarily. Because you know, immune systems were a thing before vaccines were invented. A large proportion of people (often more than half, and certainly more than got the vaccine in many places) have by now already been exposed to Covid-19 and developed immunity naturally. Why is this constantly ignored in these discussions?
Could be a "work from home because Covid" deal. I'm almost surprised I haven't heard more stories of companies getting compromised because they implemented something stupid and insecure in their rush to quickly deploy a system to let people work from home.
I mean it's not really an excuse, but if that's what happened it doesn't surprise me at all.
Firefox used to be the savvy user's browser. And it was darn good at being that. It was also good enough that let's say "non-geeks" started to see the value too. But then Chrome got big, and I swear someone at Mozilla must have said "See boys, that's what we need to be." But they can't out-Google Google, so that was never going to work. Instead they just made a browser that doesn't really have a target audience anymore. The old users mostly hate the changes, and I can't see any reason for users to pick it up when almost all the changes are to make it more like Chrome, the browser they're probably already using.
Tumblr already lost all respect I may have ever held for them with their earlier censorship sprees, but this Russian infiltrator thing is just absurd. There were only 84 accounts, a ridiculously tiny fraction of their userbase. But they claim I interacted with 2 of them. And this is a seldom used, non politics oriented blog! It doesn't even make sense.
This is something they should have addressed decades ago.
WHOIS strikes me as a holdover from the early Internet, when it was all universities and large companies. Now that many (perhaps even most?) domain names are owned by private individuals, it makes no sense to have all their personal contact information, published by default.
All it does is cause problems. You try to connect from an old device? Boom "no cypher overlap". They forget to renew their cert? Now everybody's locked out because browser makers are too stupid to realize this isn't even a serious problem.
And almost invariably this nonsense happens on sites that don't even have a legitimate need for security. Knock it off, people.
There's no such thing as perfect security. Tor does a pretty good job, but it's not perfect, and more importantly it's only part of a solution. This attack was probably against the browser it comes with and/or the OS it was running on (Windows) not Tor itself. If you want to be completely untraceable A) tough luck, see first sentence and B) you're gonna have to do more than just downloading the Tor Browser bundle to get close.
This doesn't have to be done in a privacy-violating way. It could just query a server for a list of recently compromised sites each time you start it/daily or whatever and then alert you if you visit one on the list, rather than checking each site you visit individually. Checking each site separately would be bad from a speed standpoint too, and Firefox is all about speed now...
It's very disheartening that the sex trafficking myth has been allowed to get so big as to threaten the entire internet. Even The Register seems to buy into it by shirking their journalistic duty and reporting the delusions of this dead girl's estranged family as fact. It's almost certain that she was never kidnapped or "bought". She ran away from home and stayed with her grandparents for a while, that much is known for sure. Then something tragic happened and she was murdered.
But that story doesn't sell books and laws, "sex trafficking" does. Why let truth get in the way of a good opportunity to sew fear in the public and reap financial and political gain?
Here's what really happened. A teenager ran away from home, stayed with her grandparents for a while, and somewhere along the line decided to make some money as a prostitute. Possibly with help from others, she posted an ad on Backpage. Tragically one of her customers proved unstable and murdered her.
There was zero people-purchasing involved.
Orv may be referring to a previous article here, but if so that's a misstatement of the what the study actually showed. They found that that contributions from accounts which were easily identifiable as belonging to a woman were accepted less often. Interestingly, they also found that that contributions from accounts which were easily identifiable as belonging to a man were accepted less often (though this was smaller effect). So perhaps "keep your private life private" really is the best advice.
In any case it did not get into the issue of women using male pseudonyms, as such. Perhaps Orv is basing that claim on something else though, I don't know.
I think it's mostly that writing docs is boring. If you're the type of person to get involved in an open source project, you're probably either enthusiastic about the product itself or enjoy the problem-solving aspect of coding.
So which would you rather do, work on that exciting new feature or write a detailed explanation of the existing product?
Recently Epson has (at least supposedly) puled a heel-face turn and started selling some printers with refillable ink tanks. Don't know how good a deal they are ultimately, but it's nice to see companies at least considering the possibility that pissing off their customers isn't necessarily the best business model.
Came too late to win me over though, I've already switched to laser. Toner may well be a ripoff too, but at least it doesn't evaporate when you're not using it.
Anyone else notice a problem with the probabilities on the image match?
The article itself points out the car is not really vintage, but that's OK, that was only 88% confidence. That's not the problem. The problem is 99% car, 97% land vehicle. Since all cars are land vehicles*, it cannot by any reasonable definition be "more likely", a car than a land vehicle. I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons for these numbers, but it's another example of why "trust the tools, don't worry about how it works" might not be good advice.
*It's 2017, where's my damn flying car?
I'm not the only who thinks this article is kind of bizarre without any examples, right? Just something simple like "We all remember when Foocorp released Barbot which became sentient and tried to assassinate the president of Bazistan, but you may not have known... Yep that was a hackathon project."
I mean... there has been a real example of what the author is talking about, right?
Human trafficking is a completely invented problem pushed by politicians and fake do-gooders who stand to gain by stirring people up. It's a great issue for them because it has appeal across party lines. Leftists hate because those poor womens. Conservatives like because that nasty evil sex. Who cares if it doesn't really exist? It's a great excuse for draconian laws, right up there with terrorism and a lovely gravy train for "charities".
Case in point: This attack on Back Page was initiated by California's Attorney General in an effort to look good while she was running for senate. Back Page has been around for years, yet in what would be an example of deplorable laxity if it were a real problem, she saved it until election season just to get her name out there.
I don't think that's really true. That illustration in the article was just an example comparing grid to flexbox. After reading up on grid a bit (I must admit I never heard of it before) I have to say it actually looks very handy. It can easily solve classic layout needs like header/content/sidebar/footer that web designers might otherwise be tempted to use a table for.
Here's the article I read. Looks like it was originally written some time ago so I can't be sure it's up to date and complete.
Where legitimate = helpful to the user, not harmful.
About all I can think of would be streaming illegal content (whether pirated or more illegal than that) and making sure no trace is left on your computer. Has anyone made an EME module for facilitate this? Maybe it would change the industry's tune.
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