dmethvin

> "this should be illegal"

Governments define legality, and governments are likely to be some of Mitnick's best clients. Funny thing is, if I were Iran's government I would be concerned about buying exploits there because for all I know Mitnick has double-crossed me and given the US government info on the exploit and how to neutralize or detect it.

Pervasive encryption only helps if the endpoints doing the encryption aren't compromised, and this type of service is aimed at those endpoints.

You can essentially do what you're asking in Excel using named ranges. Getting novices to use advanced Excel features is just as difficult as getting novices to use advanced features in any other language.

It reminds me of Microsoft's early attempts at portable devices, where they seemed to think they needed a huge chunk of the Windows desktop API and its conventions in a phone or tablet. Watches are not phones, they're peripherals, and they don't need such a bulky software stack. Maybe Apple will handle this differently.

Interesting in an academic sense, but it seems like a very clickbaity way to converse with someone and waste some of their time.

I'm sure your coding skills are great. Thanks for the downvote.

At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour.

I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh these things objectively. It's like going directly to a surgeon with an ailment and asking their recommended course of action. Their expertise is surgery, so their resolution is more likely to involve a knife.

> I suspect you can be quite rigorous about the definition of a "breaking change."

You'd be surprised. Here are two real examples.

1) Project X 1.5.2 inadvertently returns `undefined` in some edge cases when it is documented to return (and previously returned) `null`. Due to the way people use the API, it's rarely encountered (hey they're both falsy) and nobody even bothers to report the discrepancy between docs and behavior until 1.7.2 is the current version. Unfortunately, some large projects that are very common use the actual behavior of 1.6.0 and are checking for a return `=== undefined`. Are you justified in breaking them?

2) Project X 1.8.0 does a big refactoring that eliminates tons of bugs and improves performance, and even passes extensive unit tests with flying colors. Unfortunately there are lots of "Ten things I learned by reading the source for Project X" blogs that describe non-public API behavior. And again, the projects using these behaviors are popular projects that many other people depend on. How do you deal with these breaking changes of undocumented functionality?

How can everyone--including O'Callahan--be giving Apple a free pass on this issue? Pointer events are a great example of Apple's obstructionism. The W3C tried for years to standardize touch events and Apple blocked them several times by claiming patent rights. Microsoft proposed pointer events, and everyone seems to agree that they are much better as a future standard and a way to unify pointer models, but Apple seems to have no interest in implementing them.

Whether you agree with Google or not (I don't), be realistic and admit that any web platform standard like pointer events that lacks an Apple implementation won't help developers--how good is a "standard" that doesn't work on the iPhone/iPad? My guess is that Apple sees no reason to move quickly on improving web standards, since they'd rather have people develop for their proprietary walled garden. They just created a new proprietary language to do so!

Microsoft and Mozilla lack the market share in mobile devices to be able to move standards in any direction by themselves. Google is in the driver's seat. Apple is willing to sit quietly in the back and we seem to be okay with that?

The unifying nature of pointer events is what makes them so important for the future. Otherwise you have to implement multiple pointer models on a device that provides more than one, or try to simulate one from the other which becomes a mess of lies that the app developer has to sort through.

I've already worked with a couple of companies that have been bitten by assuming a device has either touch or mouse, but not both. They had code to the effect of `if ( touchstart in document ) { attach touch events } else { attach mouse events }` but then they ran into Chrome on a Windows 8 system with a touch screen. Whoops. Now their site only works if you touch the screen.

If you think this is "only a problem on those crazy Windows 8 notebooks" then you're not thinking ahead to systems that will use a Kinect, eye tracking, or some other advanced technique to implement pointers. Devs are really going to hate it when those interesting input methods are sliced and diced into mouse or touch (or God forbid BOTH) in order to shove it into Apple's 2007 vision of a web page input world.

Right, I guess it's a question whether you see him as a wayward whistleblower who is otherwise on the side of the American people, or a wily double-agent who is using this to cover his disclosure of sensitive information to foreign powers. The NSA and CIA are used to dealing with the latter so it is their default; they want to throw the former into the same bucket and use the same tactics/propaganda against them.

To me it seems a dangerous game to give US intelligence any more information about what you know. At every turn they're going to use what they know Snowden knows. For example, if they really did have absolute knowledge of what Snowden took, they'd be able to craft a story that took the leaked information into account but protected all the shady stuff they're doing that Snowden didn't take.

Given that our government doesn't even consider punishing US intelligence leaders when they outright lie to Congress, maybe they don't need to worry about getting the story straight.

At the moment, both riders and drivers benefit from Uber and Lyft beating each other's brains out with bags of money. It can't last forever but while it does we can benefit. At some point the party will be over and we'll need to pay more.

I'm not sure I believe the "keep you from getting drunk" part of this, as this experiment bears out. However, yeast is a good source of B vitamins, and alcohol often causes B vitamin deficiency. So taking yeast (or drinking unfiltered beer) is a good way to avoid that. So it might help with the hangover or long-term effects.

It's really common for retailers and marketers to segment the population by demographic or price. Look at Gap, which also owns the Old Navy, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta, and Piperlime brands. They're selling the same basic thing--clothing--but targeting different segments in ways that let them maximize profit by pushing the right buttons.

So why wouldn't that approach work for something like online dating?

> Walt viewed his theme parks almost as “factories” that produced delight and entertainment.

That's one of the reasons I don't enjoy Disney parks. They're too automated, too perfect, like some sort of strange Twilight Zone where things just seem fake.

The voiceover is William Schallert, who played Patty Duke's father on The Patty Duke Show[1].

[1] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0769974/

No, the bar isn't packed at all. The bouncer is being a dick and only letting in the people who bribe him.

They are saying "The Verizon network is crowded right now" but in the letter they say that the problem is with "interconnection congestion". So yes the problem lies with Verizon and its hesitancy to open up peering points, but if I were a Netflix lawyer that wording would have me concerned since Verizon's network is not crowded. It's like having a crowd outside a bar waiting to get in.

I agree on security, but as a more practical point the market disrupters like Nest aren't thinking about reliability or the risks of DIY installation. I have to think Honeywell weighs that differently since they're not targeting the DIY crowd, at least initially.

For example, there were many incidents in January [1] where houses with Nest thermostats malfunctioned in the middle of a serious cold snap. One reason was that the batteries went dead in some thermostats, but normally the battery shouldn't be needed in normal operation when it's wired properly. Guess what, it wasn't wired properly by the homeowner. There should be a built-in diagnosis for that.

Another reason was that Nest sent a firmware update to thermostats in early January--in the middle of a cold winter? Where was their risk assessment on that? Maybe there's little risk of frozen pipes in Palo Alto, but it's a major risk in the eastern and midwestern USA.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/06/nest-4-0-firmware-battery-p...

Agreed, the site looks fine and functional as it started in the demo. Why is consistency across sites necessarily a bad thing?

Scan your pages with this, at least your static HTML pages: http://kangax.github.io/domlint/

> due to Microsoft's decision to buck the spec and enable it by default for all IE10 users

Did you ever install IE10? The screen gave users the option to configure everything but selected the most likely settings for many things, not just DNT: http://img.wonderhowto.com/img/21/42/63487287284459/0/yahoo-...

What level of "not by default" would have been acceptable to advertisers? I suspect they would be happy only if the option was disabled by default and hidden from view. An uninformed consumer is a trackable consumer.

This is one of the reasons why continuous performance testing is important. Even when your own code doesn't regress, the platform beneath you may do so. In this case it sounds like a case of the platform making most stuff faster but not page faults, so it looks proportionally worse.

Why do people always focus on the code part? Even when the code is written in a language you don't understand, you can contribute by making the documentation, install process, or general community better.

In the article one of the questions asked is, "Is the documentation good?" If it's not, but you use and like the project, that is your opportunity. Perhaps you can see there are a lot of bugs filed, but nobody is triaging them. Even when you don't know the programming language the project uses, getting or making reproducible test cases for bugs is something you can do.

I completely agree with the "relatedness" aspect. If you're not using a project in your day-to-day work it's hard to stay involved with it. The best Open Source developers are those who understand the perspective of the users, because they are a user.

From a business standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. Before the deadline, the high maintenance cost helped scoot companies over to Windows 7. After the deadline, giving a deep discount (carrot) with supposedly hard migration deadlines (stick) may help to get another bunch of them moving. The key part is the last paragraph in the article:

> It's also worth noting that there is a time limit -- which Microsoft is not disclosing -- on how long the company will continue to provide XP patches to those users who are paying for CSA coverage. And in order to qualify for CSA coverage, customers must have migration plans with quarterly deployment milestones and a project completion date.

Sure, and for that upside you pay the downside of not knowing when that ever-changing dependency may inadvertently break your application. There's no free lunch.

If it snows and you have kids at home, it's pretty hard to work. Especially if you have meetings.

The work-at-home environment brings a lot of questions to the whole employer-employee relationship and work environment. For example, my wife works at a US government job where they have the ability to work from home 3 days a week and "liberal leave" for snow days. If someone is scheduled to work from home on a snow day, should they still work? What if their kids can't get to day care, and who will shovel the sidewalk?

This is similar to the "kill Hitler" time travel joke [1], it's easy to say things would be better but all we know for sure is that they would be different. Instead of `char` we'd have strings that were `struct` and we'd STILL have a ton of different string formats because of lengths and character formats. (Bonus problem: are the lengths in bytes, or in chars?)

[1] http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory

It's not ironic at all, it's the intended consequence.

Thoughtful, in-depth, well-researched articles are not only more time-consuming to write, they're more time-consuming to read and that's not what a lot of people want as they browse aimlessly on the web to fill their work breaks.

You'll get better traffic from a catchy headline and a few emotion-inspiring comments, and that can give you the page views needed to display enough ads to get some accidental clicks. The shorter the article, and the catchier the headline, the more pages they'll click. That's what the analytics will tell you.

This isn't a new concept. Since the 1950s, William Gaines of Mad Magazine fame refused to do a study of their readers because they didn't want to begin pandering to 13-year-old boys (the presumed audience). Instead, he wanted the writers and artists to do what they thought was funny.

In plenty of companies I've seen people get off with warnings for at least their first few offenses of sexual harassment, being drunk or stoned on the job, and abusive language towards others. Yet here is something the execs should have known is clearly illegal and they're firing employees on the first offense. Supposedly recruiters were given a briefing about it but you have to wonder how much it was emphasized or written down, especially if their supervisors realized it was illegal.