Posts by Psy-Q 26 posts • joined 5 Nov 2013
I've been a FF user since the age when is was named Phoenix (this is pre-Y2k for young people here)
Oh! Oh! We're playing old-person games! Let me play! I've been using Netscape since I had to buy Netscape Navigator on floppy disk. Came in a big mostly white box. Green icon with a lighthouse. It was pretty!
And before that, NCSA Mosaic. Came in a nothing, because 9600 baud modem and... ZMODEM transfers? My memory is cloudy around that time.
Remember when it was the same with Internet Explorer in the 90s, when people only used that to download Netscape Navigator or later Firefox? And then Microsoft aggressively made IE the default, and soon IE was the dominant browser.
Maybe it can happen again. Although Google is a powerful rival, they seem to shotgun the Chrome installer all over the place and bundle it with thousands of unrelated products. I've seen people using Chrome by default who usually don't even know how to install software, so they must have managed to install *that* somehow.
The multinational hotel chain I recently went to that wanted my credit card details sent in plain text said the same thing when I told them that this is bad security practice and surely a breach of PCI DSS. I think it's something that is taught to spokesdrones to always say as the very first thing when security is being questioned.
Prior evidence seems to indicate that encryption is not any priority at Slack. Your chat history has to be stored unencrypted and indexed for their product to even work. They also can't encrypt at rest because they promise unlimited history. I expect any shared documents to be similarly indexed so to come with the same caveats.
I think (guess?) he was talking about the time when Android was new and open and upcoming, Google and Facebook actually endorsed open standards (XMPP etc.) and it all seemed like it was going to end well. At least that's what I like to assume in my happy dreams full of pink ponies and rainbows.
A practical question: How did they get to his queries, since they're surely transmitted via HTTPS. Do they MITM every employee's computer? Keyloggers? Cameras filming the screen? I think none of this would even be legal here (Switzerland) unless done by the feds themselves and only with a court order.
This is the year when external powers force this smelly 20-years-of-Linux admin to learn PowerShell on Windows, and I think it could be much worse. PowerShell 2.0 was mostly atrocious, but from 3.0 on things have been solidifying and you don't even have to go to W32_ every 3 lines of code to accomplish things anymore.
I was wary and expected a shoddy thing, but when I started to use it I was surprised how much you can accomplish with this in a halfway legible fashion that perhaps even your team mates can decipher. The only nasty surprise was that piping things from one cmdlet to the other can reveal *more* information in the data that's piped. "Oh, so we're piping objects, not text?". Yeah, duh, apparently we are.
I struggle to think how they could abstract away the underlying OS, though. I'm writing a lot of Windowsisms, there's no way this code would run unchanged on Linux, but maybe that's not the point of an open source PowerShell anyway. Anyhoo. More FOSS is never wrong.
If you run DavMail in the shop and have a benevolent admin there, they can set up a multiuser DavMail, run it in server mode and make everyone in the company happy by translating the string-of-netherworldly-incantations MS protocols to some real standards. This isn't even a hack, the DavMail people have all the features in place for it and I can vow that it works at least up to Exchange 2007. Don't know how beefy the server needs to be for what size of company, though.
The author suffers from some convoluted misunderstanding of open source/free software that is hard to untangle. Is he saying that Slack is open source? It isn't. Is he saying FOSS developers are cheapskates? That's hard to quantify, some teams of two really just can't afford to pay for any services through no fault of their own, some others spend their own money to provide services for thousands or millions of members of the community (Diaspora, Gitlab, etc.). Is he saying Slack is mostly used by FOSS developers? Where are those numbers to back that up? Or is he saying "having a free version of a service is like being open source"? In that case, reading and understanding an introduction to FOSS might be in order.
Maybe Arch isn't the most desktop-user-friendly distro of all time? Blasphemous, I know!
I've been remotely upgrading a series of desktops and laptops used as bait in a restaurant. People sit there and can use them for free, so they do all kinds of ungodly things to the machines. Every night a cronjob copies back a clean home dir and restarts the desktop environment. It's Debian. Never had issues like the ones you describe. To be fair, the machines have Intel graphics so that part just works with FOSS drivers.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021