Posts by SimonLoki

Rust projects open to denial of service thanks to Hyper mistakes

Re: So Rust is not memory safe then

This is not an issue of memory safety. In the event that the length in the header is too long then the process will panic and stop which is defined behaviour. It is a problem because it can lead to a DOS, but it does not invoke undefined behaviour (for example, in 'Ye Olde C Days', a failure to check an input length and reading into a fixed length buffer could cause a buffer over-run - this is not possible in safe Rust).

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Re: And I thought it was just me...

Another me too. Like others here I've had my gmail account since when it was invitiation only and I get a steady (but not too large) stream of mails from the US, UK, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and, once, the UAE. I've had a couple of wedding invitations as well as an invitation to a Christmas party (remember those from before Covid?), a report on some Australian guy's Uber trips as well as his (I think it's the same person given the location) luck on online dating sites and reminders about servicing his car. I've had legal documents from a firm of lawyers in S. Africa, a job contract from the UAE, and information concerning an application for universal credit from the UK. As well as a lot of crap about sports clubs, newsletters etc. from all over. In general the important or personal stuff I try to reply to the sender and then delete the email (I got a nice reply regarding one of the wedding invitations, and my replies concerning the legal documents and employment contract got a prompt thank you with a polite demand to delete the documents). For the univeral credit application I spent some time opening a ticket explaining that some poor guy wasn't getting any of the confirmation emails and, presumably, not succeeding with his application, and hopefully that was sorted out. For the rest I normally just mark as spam and forget it. In general it is more amusing than annoying, but I do wonder about all of my namesakes (presumably) across the world who don't know their own email address...

It's now officially the WhackBook Pro: If the keyboards weren't bad enough, now MacBook Pro batts are a fire risk

Re: This is not the Macbook Pro with the butterfly keyboard.

You can't go bringing facts into an Apple bashing session...!

Scientists love MacBooks (true) – but what about you?

Re: Speaking as a Scientist...

The above comment is pretty similar to our situation. I spend a lot of time developing analysis software (mostly in C) and running data analyses (genomics so typical projects involve TB of data). I can develop on the Mac and transfer the working code to the linux cluster for the heavy lifting. Yes, I could do this in Linux and I have had linux and *BSD laptops over the years, but at some point I got bored with the hassle each time i wanted to do 'odd' things like, for example, give a lecture/presentation. In fact in bioinformatics in general (which is a fairly computationally intensive field) you see a lot of mac laptops at meetings.

The other major reason that I have been using mac laptops now for the last 10 years or so is that I have been living in France and Spain and many companies apart from Apple make it really difficult to get a US keyboard on a laptop, and I hate programming on a French or Spanish keyboard!