devcpp

Well, the way I understand RMS's fomulation of the 4 basic freedoms is that the right to keep your code secret is a freedom of the individual, not of the software, because no one can enjoy software that they couldn't have had if that right hadn't been granted. On the other hand, removing this right "frees" the software. You see, the FSF is all about "free software", not free people. Only indirectly do the people benefit from the software being free.

More practically, history has shown us that the GPL is necessary in order to ensure that companies don't short the community, suddenly improve everything and leave us with 99% of people using the proprietary fork. To illustrate my point, the clearest example (and the only large one) is the free distributions of BSD, mainly used by companies developing proprietary forks for it and contributing back very little. On the other side is Linux, used by companies for its freedom, security and reliability. The companies using it contribute back because they have to, continually making it stronger and always remaining free (unlike BSD, which can have many proprietary and untrusted libraries which cannot be used with security or reliability in mind). Linux is therefore getting larger only thanks to the GPL and its strong enforcement.

And this example can be applied to the entire copyleft vs permissive license debate, showing how software being free benefits the people more than people being free.

Because if you admit that it's a possibility, then the Facebook login security measure accomplishes nothing at all.

Fair enough, you know much more than me in that domain. :)

Are you going to argue about the famous general instability of Windows compared to its large competitors though? It seems like a good indicator of bad design in low level implementations.

You make some good points but you lost me there:

>Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS

Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores, threads, paging, scheduling and so on) so there's really nothing to be amazed at.

I'll spare you my opinions on Bing. Reinventing the wheel is not worth describing, no matter how beautiful that wheel is, although I'm happy for you to be a part of the team making that wheel. If only Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search, some people under 70 would actually consider migrating. But if you're happy with your default-search-engine-bundled-with-IE market share at 20%, good for you (eh, it does bring a lot of ad money). You may not call the shots at MS, but you can at least admit all the shortcomings.

Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that anything Microsoft produces is out of question. The reason for that is that whenever I use one of their products, it progressively turns into a locked proprietary program and getting out of it becomes impossible. That's fine if the product remains unbeatable in quality but it's rarely the case to say the least. I try to not have that happen again and FOSS never lets me down on that.

There is also the question of privacy. That's why my Org files are on my ownCloud and I have peace of mind forever.

Everything that remotely relates to health is risky. The problem is simply the lack of regulation.

Huh, I'll remember the "take it to HN" option if I ever run into big problems with a high-tech company.

Exactly. After all, it's pretty much how Apple made its historic unprecedented profits: more designers than engineers.

According to Wikipedia, Bell Labs most notably contributed to the invention of "radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language". Google doesn't come close to such groundbreaking innovations [1]. Granted, there's not a whole lot of those these days but it can't be a coincidence that innovation slowed down at the same moment Bell Labs was downsized. Google doesn't help with that.

[1] MapReduce is probably the most important thing Google researched but it only helps with companies' computing load, much like AT&T's telephony protocol improvements we never talk about.

Your body generally prevents you from drinking too much water, and from eating too much food, etc. Besides, water and food is a necessity while heroin is not (far from it, almost no one will ever need it).

And that's what the person above meant: it's not the highly addictive or the easily lethal nature of heroin that is a problem, but the combination of both. Most things that combine these two attributes are illegal.

However, I go agree that there is a problem with the fact that it is so addictive that making it illegal makes things worse because of low quality products. Doesn't undermine the point of the post above though. In an ideal world, no one would try to get heroin.

Again, these applications are important to their customers (advertisers), not to the users. And while the research might be reused somewhere else, these companies are so big that the negative impact to users will be much larger.

A more proper analogy is: do you think it would be helpful to everyone to know the process for making laws?

I doubt it, he replied to himself.

Gabe was the 271st employee at Microsoft[0] and "was the producer on the first three releases of Windows"[1], so I suppose that, even if he hasn't contributed to the very same code as Bill Gates did, there must be an earlier employee who has. I don't estimate his Gates code number to be more than 2.

[0] http://www.giantbomb.com/gabe-newell/3040-4498/

[1] http://www.computerandvideogames.com/172835/interviews/creat...

I got a scrollbar too but the page is neatly arranged to fit the browser's window so I didn't pay attention to it. It's the first time I've seen a footer from the top of a scrollpage.

Very legitimate concern. Jolla is a company that strives for profit, unlike Mozilla. And as such we can't expect them to have the same motives to keep their platform free.

However, Mozilla also doesn't have the same influence, because of that, and makes pretty weak phones.

Like they said, "Your level of privacy is up to you". It seems like most people are competent enough to manage keeping their wallets safe...

Politicians often pull this sort of "I'm not here for the money and I'm proving it" trick. Please don't compare them with corporations.

Agreed, there are relatively few idiots on /b/, most posts there just have a special kind of humor. Not for everyone, but certainly enjoyable for the people who can get used to this.

Youtube, on the other hand, is simply plagued by stupid comments.

Decentralized email, uh?

It's been attempted, but the issue of storage remains the most bothering. A mailbox can be pretty big and having it distributed over the network is difficult. Not to mention spamming problems.

Maybe some day we'll find the right formula. But I think the who-owns-the-private-key problem is a bigger priority.

Yup, same on the latest Firefox Nightly. This isn't really acceptable behavior for a released product.

I don't think so, otherwise we'd still have black and white operating systems, because colors add so much memory usage.

If Apple doesn't let its apps get more intricated, competitors will do it first...

And the CEO of Facebook of all people. If one non-public person in the entire world deserves scrutiny, it's Zuckerberg.

On the other hand, the POTUS is at least supposed to look powerful in the eyes of the citizens. By recognizing that he doesn't know (and can't know) what's going on, he is announcing to the world that he is a puppet and that the POTUS is nothing but a servant to higher interests.

Bad move by the puppet masters.

Agreed, it struck me as unique that the author says anything about women. I have seen dozens (if not hundreds) of programming tutorials and that was the first one that said anything about genders. The problem is somewhere else.

Exactly. I have never heard of Google sending emails on my behalf through gmail without me knowing about it.

As everyone said, you have created a stream cipher. But I feel that I have to add that your idea (OTP with small key) is usually implemented this way: the small key is a counter used an input to some PRNG specifically designed for this (you should try AES in CTR mode), which you increment every time.

This produces a sequence which is always the same for each session, but because the keyspace is so large (2^128 with AES-128), this is acceptable because these PRNGs are actually cryptographically secure hash functions, which makes them very hard to reverse. Therefore, the only efficient way to crack your session is to either catch the key (your counter) or to brute force it by using every value of the counter and test whether this leads to a successful decryption. Not only are there 2^n possibilities, but every possibility is extremely expensive to test and then you have to accurately check whether the decrypted values are coherent (this is difficult with packets with a fixed header and nearly impossible with raw binary data).

The big disadvantage is having to store your small key until decryption.

He meant free (as in freedom), not open. "Proof" of that is in the submission's article. It's not exactly a formal proof but it has convinced most people here.

Unfortunately, this highlights some weaknesses in the GPLv2, which is supposed to guarantee freedom.

Problem is, the prompt doesn't appear until the encryption has ended, the key has been sent to the servers (it's kind of complicated, it apparently tries to find servers on its own, I wonder if it can be fooled) and that key has been locally destroyed.

So, by the time the user is notified that there is malware on their PC, it's too late. People who know to detect viruses while they're running don't run attachments in the first place.

I share that opinion so I'll answer. IMO, China letting control over currency just slip away is as realistic as China letting control over anything slip away. AFAIK it's still an authoritarian state. It could happen (it has a relatively free economy after all) but it's not consistent with China.