martinced

Until the day where the main server serving the automated updates gets compromised and instead of serving, say, an updated Chrome, it serves a version of Chrome which a) is compromised on the behalf of a botnet master and b) never ever accepts any other update automatically.

Because people have been trained never to update their browser themselves anymore they'll think everything is fine.

Because hundreds of millions --if not billions-- of people are running Chrome suddenly you have the biggest botnet ever out there.

I find it very interesting that you fear extortion, exploits, DDoS, identity theft, invasion of privacy and whatnots as an argument for putting something in place which potentially can be way more destructive.

But of course this shall never happen right? Just as we haven't seen FaceBook getting penetrated and just as we've seen any major bank getting hacked right? And rogue employees also don't exist right?

Be careful about what you wish in the future...

What if a botnet is used to do the brute-force, does fail2ban lock everybody out, effectively making fail2ban a tool that can be used for Denial of Service?

All I'd have to do now is to hammer your system with SSH attempts from my botnet and you can't log in anymore...

Once a system is compromised by a root exploit what makes you think that any information that this system is giving is true?

While it may be likely seen the circumstances it is by no way certain. For all we know it may have been a bruteforce attempt which, once in, got disguised as a known-root-password attack.

As long as people are going to think that a compromised system is actually giving true information about what happened we'll be in big trouble.

Or OP tells us that SSH login and SSH login attemps are logged automatically on another server which hasn't been compromised and then it's a different story...

That's totally un-democratic just like what's happening in Cyprus is anti-democratic. Note that this shouldn't come as a surprise: Europe is mostly socialists and socialist only believe in democracy ("social democracy") as a mean to get in power and, once in power, to act in non-democratic ways. This is precisely what's happening: non-democratic confiscation of citizens' money to fund the state (please spare me the propaganda about the banks: it's about saving the european governments).

(I digress but I so wish they weren't in it, because France is f^cked: people unwilling to work more than 32 hours/week, super high sense of entitlement, uncontrollable state debt exploding and they're going to default in a few years, just like Greece).

I do really hope that the U.K. massively vote to get out of the European Union when the referendum shall take place.

Of course they're wagging the dog with "rich russians" and whatnots: later on they'll blame the working people (who have economies) has being responsible of all the evil in Europe.

Not a single time are you going to see socialists do some introspection.

Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France are all going to state default (Greece will indeed default again).

Oh, and Cyprus shall never have a state debt of 100% of their GDP in 2020 as stated for this measure.

There are way too many public servants, way too many state benefits, in all these countries for them to ever be able to repay their state debt.

Socialism inevitably leads to state default and that's what we'll witness soon (we already witnessed it with Greece).

We're now witnessing what happens when states spending more than what they make are running out of money.

Of course socialists are trying to pretend it's a financial crisis and that without the financial crisis in the U.S. nothing would ever have gone wrong with all these highly socialists states in Europe spending more than they're making and creating an ever bigger state debt.

Seriously who's buying that? When you're borrowing more money than what you make at one point payback time comes.

And payback time is coming for socialists. And they don't like it.

The problem is that politician dream up of an european union to make sure no more french / german war would happen. But politicians can't count: they're for the most part lawyers.

So they build this monstrosity: the European Union. A mad bureaucracy / technocracy where every document is translated in 27 languages (including obscure ones): small countries love it because they can send people to get jobs in Brussels at crazy high salaries. For what? Paperwork. Nothing but paperwork.

Then they dreamed up the most stupid thing ever: a common currency (the euro) without a common fiscality. Only stupid lawyers can come up with nonsense like this. Economists did warn them, before the first euro even circulated, that it would end up in precisely the current situation (even the default of Greece and Spain had been forecast).

Nobody listened.

Wanna know what's coming next? It's easy: go read what economists who predicted the current situation are saying. They're from the Milton Friedman school of economics thought. Keynesians lost is and lost it a long time ago. Nothing to learn there: they never predicted anything more than a few years (two or three) before it happened. If you want to predict 15 years+ ahead you have to read Friedman and its disciples.

What coming next is simple: these stupid politicians and lawyers who created all this crazy paperwork and non-sense laws are going to try anything they can, including more and more non-democratic measures, to try to save the euro.

But they can't save it: it's fundamentally flawed. Countries have to get out or the entire eurozone is going to split and go back to national currencies.

The cost is going to be about 15% of the GDP for all the countries exiting.

If the euro ain't split in the few years coming we'll be going to have the BCE defaulting (the BCE basically already became a bad bank, drowning under state debt from states who are going to default) and massive civil unrest: people losing everything.

Here we're talking about a worldwide GDP drop of about 30%.

So either we bit the bullet now and take about a 15% GDP loss by going to national currencies or we try desperately to save the euro and we'll end up creating a much bigger problem.

We're witnessing history. We're seeing a bunch of clueless politicians (who are mostly lawyers) totally f^cking up the entire economy of a continent (and probably of the entire world).

Here's an oversimplification: basically by running always on deficit the various eurozone countries have reached closed to an unsustainable point: at one point where the country has too much public debt the country is trapped in the "debt trap". At that point there simply is no way that you can get out because the interest of the debt alone is impossible to be paid without contracting more and more debt.

That is what happened to Greece, for example, where a state default took place.

Now people know that states are going to default so nobody wants to buy government bonds anymore: so the states are basically forcing the banks to buy govt bonds (with a last resort using the BCE as a "bad bank").

So when a country defaults, lots of banks are suddenly virtually bankrupt: they either need a bail-out or go bankrupt. Should they go bankrupt that would deal a huge blow to the economy. Nobody wants Deutsche Bank or BNP Paribas going down: that would probably mean civil war and the end of the western world as we know it.

So states are basically forced to bail out these banks. But, guess what, states are already way too indebted. So they're contracting even more debt, making it even more likely that they'll default.

Cyprus' banks happened to hold lots of govt bonds from Greece. Hence they got fuxx0red when Greece defaulted on part of its state debt.

Now of course if Cyprus defaults, more banks are going to be bankrupt and need a bailout or trigger massive civil unrest... etc.

Because after Cyprus it's going to be Spain, Italy, Portugal... In 2014 it's very likely that France won't be able to finance itself on the market at reasonable rates.

Nigel Farage explained this quite well in a talk in front of the european parliament: this cycle / state default / bank bailout / more state default is endless.

So the eurocrisis is first and foremost a crisis due to the various governments being ruled by clueless monkeys who can't count ("It's all lawyers, lawyers, lawyers" as Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote) and who've been hiding state debt behind growth.

Add to that a gang of banksters sharks always willing to try to create more money out of thin air with crazy leveraging and you get the crazy situation we're in.

It's now gonna end well because if you try to "analyze the curves" you realize we're going into a wall.

There is no way out.

Now of course the various politicians, most notably the socialist ones, are trying to tell us it's all the fault of liberalism and banksters but the cold hard truth is that when you run a country always on deficit at one point it becomes unsustainable.

Sweden got this in 1993 and in 20 years they went from a public sector representing 67% of the GDP to 49% today, meanwhile lowering they public debt from 70% of the GDP to 30%.

And that's a socialist country. And that's something socialists in the eurozone simply do not understand: the public sector is way too important, the private sector is way too taxed and we're going into a wall.

The solution is less state.

I'm nostalgic too (not about Windows that said) but... Windows XP is the most exploited Windows right now: zombie botnets are made of a huge part of Windows XP PCs. Microsoft ain't patching several critical exploits on XP and it has been demonstrated for a fact that any local hole on XP means admin rights.

This is already a crazy tax but if they're confiscating money on private companies' bank accounts they'll be killing the economy.

What is going to happen is lots of politicians blatantly lying and saying: "Something like this is unthinkable in our country, even if we're in the eurozone our situation is not the same as that one of Cyprus".

Just as politicians from Cyprus blatantly lied throughout all this week when that option was mentioned: they said it wouldn't happen.

And people didn't bank run.

Cyprus is too small (0.2% of the GDP) to be detonating factor.

The U.S. has its own way to confiscate citizen's money and that is called quantitative easing, which creates inflation. That's why they abandoned the gold standard: to be able to confiscate as much as they want using inflation.

The problem with "doing your part" is that once you reach a certain level of taxation you have diminishing returns: that's the Laffer curve and, sadly, socialists don't seem to be able to understand that.

And I can tell you that in many countries of the eurozone the private sector is "doing its part" since decades, only to pay for the lifestyle and entitlements of the ever growing number of public servants.

F^ck socialism. We're witnessing the failure of socialism and I can tell you that I love it. What I don't love is all the states running at deficit since decades trying to wag the dog and pretend the problem is not that states are indebted at crazy high levels.

The public sector is way too important in Europe. That's the Laffer curve and you can't do anything about it besides lowering taxation on the private sector and citizen if you want an efficient economy.

Socialists always end up with state default. There's no other way. Because socialist economies do not work. Even Sweden lowered it's public sector from 67% of the GDP to 49% in 20 years, realizing they were otherwise going into a wall.

Some countries, like Switzerland, have a constitution forbidding the state to run with a deficit too important.

This is what the eurozone should do. We should beat the socialists who are ruining our economy and destroy the entrepreneurship spirit...

The problem is that the state is broke. It's that or they're out of the eurozone.

Anyway: this is just the beginning and it's not going to stop anytime soon. The Eurozone is in big trouble: it simply cannot work when you have people who only want to work 32 hours / week and stop working at 60 years old (France) while on the other side you have hard-working germans.

The crisis we're witnessing since a few years in the eurozone is really simple: the GDP growth number in most of the eurozone are fake in that they do not correspond to wealth created but to wealth created + state debt. Nearly every single country in the eurozone is running at deficit.

The crisis is due to one and only one thing: states that are so indebted that they cannot borrow anymore.

Economists warned about precisely that scenario before the first euro even circulated: Greece, Spain, France, Cyprus... 15 years ago people warned that it would happen just like that. It was just a matter of time.

I can tell you what's coming next: Greece is going to default a second time.

In 2014 France shall have its deficit skyrocketing and shall have issue re-financing itself on the market.

France is the 2nd biggest economy of the eurozone and the eurozone is f^cked. It's game over. France has taxed the private sector so much that it cannot tax it anymore and, anyway, it's too late: investors did flee the country and now individuals are engaging in a bank run (or leaving the country).

The obvious solution would be a massive devaluation of the euro but this cannot happen because if it happens Japan goes down (and probably the U.S.).

We're near the endgame: the house of cards may fall soon.

And I can tell you thing: I want less state. This entire euro-crisis is a debt of sovereign states having way too much public debt because they've constantly been running at deficit, for decades. And now they're running out of money.

It didn't help that they borrowed money to save banksters but don't be mistaken: nobody forced these states to run with crazy-high deficit for decades.

F^ck socialism. Really f^ck it.

Btw I don't care if Cyprus was supposed to be very liberal: Cyprus is 0.2% of the GDP of the eurozone and doesn't matter.

What matter is that socialist Spain, Greece, Portugal and France are close to state default.

They'll be watching closely how announcing money confiscation just before a long week-end plays out (monday is a legal day off in Cyprus) and they'll probably be desperately trying to do the same in these countries.

And it's not going to work.

People should really start realizing that Keynes was all wrong all along and that the Friedman school is the only correct one: they did predict all this. Keynesians didn't.

Btw if the eurozone goes down dont' think the U.S. is going to be fine: some economists are predicting a worldwide drop of the world GDP by as much as 30%.

It's just a matter of years, maybe less.

I tried to install AdBlock Plus in Chromium and it asked the same question...

SO is also hardly something impressive from a UI point of view: it is a very simple UI really not doing much. Usenet readers from 20 years ago were way more capable than SO...

I've read a theory that if as soon as someone as heart attack you put ice on his head you lower the risk of permanent brain damage. If I'm not mistaken there's been a doctor / hospital / ambulances allowing to test this theory in the U.S. (don't remember which one) and they had apparently statistically significant better results when ambulancers did immediately put the head in ice.

Our brain is one heck of a CPU and when the blood doesn't cool it it starts melting fast apparently : (

Lowering temp to 32 deg certainly helped but apparently every second counts: the faster you put the head in ice, the lower the brain damage. So while someone is trying to do CPR, someone else should go fetch lots of ice.

Interesting "feeling lucky to have a great life that I just want to continue to live".

Welcome back!

Looks like anything "free" is quickly disappearing : )

I'm 100% that the future security-wise is stuff like esL4 (the L4 micro-kernel, but which has been formally verified to be free from a lot of common mistakes typically leading to security exploits).

So before criticizing things as "toys" because they have don't have goto etc. you have to realize that there are ends (security) that do justify quite some means.

And don't get me wrong: I've done my faire share of 680x0 and 80x86 assembly coding and just loved to be "in control" of everything. It gave me a sensation of power.

But now I much prefer to look far ahead and dream about the days where we'll be able to use provers on not just micro-kernels that are 7000 lines long (and already on such a trivial number of lines already find hundreds of potential security exploits which have all been fixed) but also use provers on much bigger programs.

So saying: "I want to be able to modify a lookup table by accessing two bytes as if they were a 16-bit word so that on the next pass I'll automagically JMP to this place" (I'm just making that up) is, IMHO, a bit shortsighted when considering the real problems we face today.

Most people have way enough power and totally underused computers (often with many cores idling). The problem is hardly CPU perfs.

I'm not trading security for performance.

I just love this offensive/defensive writing style: Nicholas Nassim Taleb does the same, all the time, throughout his books (and I'm a big Taleb fan).

I've noticed that people with strong ego typically hate that kind of writing that said.

That is very interesting. It took me indeed may months of night-time programming in Clojure and elisp to get at a point where I could feel confortable with the syntax. I had a series of small "enlightenment" during that journey: the last one was not long ago, when I realized how I could "carry" state through a high-order function.

But to stay focused I kept reading and re-reading great writing about Lisp by Paul Graham and kept viewing and re-viewing amazing videos by Rich Hickey.

It's as with everything: keep your eyes on the goal, not on the obstacles.

And at one point things are going to click in.

So while I think that it's somehow wrong to always paint Lisp dialects as "having almost no syntax", I do also think that it's totally correct to say: "Lisp dialects have almost no syntax compare to mainstream language".

P.S: don't get me started on JavaScript where syntax gets inserted for you automagically, leading to bugs that can be very hard to track (re- Crockford on the error that inserting automated semi-colons in JavaScript was).

The situation in the eurozone is really degrading quickly: it's not gonna get better with the second state default of Greece and the 50% unemployment amongst young people in Spain. Portugal, Italy and France (Greece is economically dead as of now) are on life support. France let way too many people in and gave them way too much welfare-state goodness (that's the way socialist buy votes to get re-elected). Lost of immigration is good when the GDP is growing: 100 000 people is 0.1 additional % of GDP growth... But when you're in recession, all the immigrants can't find job and suddenly they accelerate the fall of the GDP (due to all the wellfare-state benefits that have to be paid).

Moreover the socialists made sure to give a sense of entitlement to most of the french population: so as soon as something is talked about getting lowered or removed, there are strikes and revolts.

Physical security is a real issue: it's really not reassuring to take the subway in Paris and exit at station "Chatelet" to see groups of heavy armed military trying to make sure the situation doesn't degenerate too quickly.

I think most people are living in a fairy tale, refusing to see what is going on.

France is going to state default just like Greece, the question is just when. The officials keeps lying about the predicted GDP numbers and state deficit numbers: now they admitted that they'll be in recession in 2013 and plan on a state deficit of 3,7%. It's going to be much more than that. In 2014 the french state shall have so many debts to pay back that it's going to have a very hard time refinancing itself on the market, bringing it closer to a default (skyrocketing public debt).

No country in the eurozone is safe due to the common currency.

You have to be IMHO a totally stupid and fcked up person to start an online business in France as of now.

Don't forget that should you succeed you'd be regarded with jalousy and hatred.

Last year while on vacation in France my girlfriend was driving in a 8K convertible car (bought used for 8K). 8K. Hardly a "rich" person's car. Yet she could see the disdain and hate at trafic light from french people.

Socialism ruined France. While Sarkozy was in place it was still a wellfare-state and the local communities created more state servants than Sarkozy managed to terminate at the state level (Sarkozy suppressed 180 000 public state jobs, trying to keep the public debt in control but meanwhile the socialist in charge of the local communities created... 500 000 public state jobs!).

Socialism is killing France and is killing the eurozone.

It's killing entrepreneurship and encouraging a very* concerning hate of the succesful (President Hollande said himself: "I don't like the rich").

I moved out. Do the same. Do not even consider starting a company there.

Btw go further than the eurozone: the only way out of the euro-crisis is going to mean either a gigantic depreciation of the euro or a split of the eurozone and a move back to local currencies (which would be followed by a massive recession in all these countries).

I'm considering Switzerland as of now. It's expensive but at least people there aren't all nuts.

I don't mind giving Godwin the win: not that long ago in Germany there were national socialists who put in place 8 of Marx's ten major point of communism and who spread hatred of the wealthy and the succesful. France is going this same path right now and this worries me a lot. People are getting nervous. Hate is growing up left and right. The situation sucks.

The military are already in charge of subway stations and doing surveillance in front of important buildings (like Notre Dame). There are only going to be more and more of them. If the situation gets worse I expect the "couvre feu" to be put in place in big cities.

People are free to believe in fearytale and pink unicorn pooping rainbow butterflies that said...

That and videos of bikers waiting, stopped, at a red trafic light only to get killed or very seriously injured by cars losing controls. Accidents in which people in cars were still perfectly fine.

Life is too short to make it even shorter or to experience it has a paraplegic when you're perfectly healthy. Do like me: get rid of your bikes and buy a fancy Porsche 911 Carrera ; )

The Carrera is probably more dangerous than a Prius but doctors do not refer to Carrera owners as "organ donors'.

This is simply not ok and goes totally against HN's mentality IMHO.

This "article" from 13 march 2013 is clearly an "answer" to the very recent new text editor for writers / proofreaders (where people can collaboratively work on the same text) that made it to the frontpage.

Please please please do not upvote this "article".

This is just a "contrarian" entry by a frustrated person trying to surf on the success of the recent new text editor for writers.

And by all means: please do try to enhance the tools we have and create new great webapps and do not pay attention to the frustrated contrarians.

Geez: is is that hard to serve videos in a HTML5 format recognized by a Flash-less Chrome browser? I mean: many websites seems to be doing it perfectly fine...

(btw I didn't pay attention before clicking: when I see Wired, CNN or Fox, for example, I'm never opening these links : )

At which point should people consider not using a technology which has been repeatedly exploited and start using something where security has been thought about from the start?

Because we all know that the article "How I hacked FB using OAuth a 3rd time" is coming...

It's nearly always the same "idea": try to prevent users from having opinions and individuality.

Atwood's discourse.org was supposed to be the "next generation of forums because the current forum aren't civilized enough": people supposedly aren't "civilized" enough to be able to have their own forums. No, one should use a forum engine made for and by control freaks that shall enforce civilized discourses.

Now this Kiln Harmony thing is supposed to "end the flamewar" between git/hg: people are allowed to have their own preferences anymore. Everybody is going to "win" because they'd be using the system created by and for control freaks.

And StackOverflow is preventing individuality and allowing a few control freaks to reign king and decided what kind of thoughts people are allowed to have.

In other words these guys think they've identified a "problem": individuality and personal opinions. And they think they have a "solution": control.

Interestingly enough when I just entered discourse.org to see how that one is catching up it seems to be the better ranked in... The republic of China! (no kidding here).

Which is normal: control freaks are going to love software restricting choices and individuality.

But I love my freedom. I love individuality and I think everyone should be free, including free to chose and say why they prefer hg over git or vice-versa.

So their "solutions" (discourse.org, Kiln Harmony) aren't going to be the "next gen anything" because there are too many individuals who value their individuality.

Oh and, and even though I was an early hg adopter, I have to admit that git (and github) won big times.

It's as if they realized they didn't bet on the correct horse (inherent qualities aside, I'm purely talking about market share here) and that hence they've been "owned" by people pointing out to them that git / github was winning. It's an argument they couldn't win: there's no way hg is as succesful as Git (once again: I haven't switched yet to git... I'm a long time hg user but I have to admit defeat here). So because they couldn't admit that they were wrong they decided to create an utterly complicated solution: "To put an end to the flamewar".

I really hate the Spolsky and Atwood of this world because to me they love dictatorship.

I'm for freedom and individuality, not for control freaks trying to decide how people should think / talk / code / use DVCSes etc.

And thankfully there are way enough people like me so that these control freaks are never going to win.

Even SO is going to be replaced the day something less bent on dictatorship comes along.

A Clojure example would have been really slow because Clojure adds even more slowness to the already incredibly slow JVM startup time (big Clojure fan here btw).

But it's nothing new: we know that Java, for example, totally and utterly sucks at scripting and there's a reason why scripts commonly piped on Unx systems aren't written in Java.

You still can* do some scripting in Java (or Ruby for that matters) but you have to keep in mind that it's going to be really slow.

And, yes, startup time for scripts does matter: once again there's a reason why small utils regularly piped are typically written in languages allowing fast startup time.