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pepr

148 karma · joined July 17, 2011

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pepr··on US companies hit by 'colossal' cyber-attack
Equifax is a private company.
pepr··on Google bans niche browsers from Gmail?
I have tried switching to fastmail and it was incredibly painful. In a nutshell, Microsoft/Hotmail and possibly other providers started to throw my emails to people to spam. I've missed out on important things in the physical world because of this. I've invested a lot of time trying to debug the issue. To their credit, Fastmail's customer service was excellent and they really tried to resolve the issues but in the end could not.

Also, fastmail web UI was okay but not great. I do like the new GMail UI better.

pepr··on Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life
For me, it sure beats dying!
pepr··on uBlock Origin 1.20
You wouldn't download a car, you wouldn't block an ad! :)
pepr··on Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
You are required to get a new prescription because your original prescription expired.
pepr··on Does Australia's access and assistance law impact 1Password?
How about simply visiting Australia without your corporate laptop? Or take the laptop but without the means to connect to the corporate network/accounts?
pepr··on Amazon Quantum Ledger Database
Sure but QLDB isn't a blockchain. Blockchain is just one of many things that can be implemented on top of it. You could implement the same thing with an SQL database and signed history tables.
pepr··on Amazon Quantum Ledger Database
That doesn't give you the ability to cryptographically verify integrity of the database. Think git repository with pgp signature on every commit.
pepr··on Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft
I regularly buy Darigold milk (a local PNW brand) at Safeway.
pepr··on The foundation of a more secure web: Google Trust Services
Because the browser (or the user) has no way of knowing if the certificate changed for a good reason. Certificate pinning tries to tackle this at the CA level but it's not perfect (in a nutshell, browsers know that google.com can be signed only by a certain small subset of CAs).
pepr··on Pandora is laying off 7% of its US workforce
That's exactly why I like Spotify - it doesn't shove the social nonsense down my throat like everybody else. Don't take it the bad way but I don't care what you, or anybody else with very few exceptions, thinks about this or that album.
pepr··on Highly Available Block Storage
What should be used for I/O throughput tests instead?
pepr··on Slack was hacked
That's why AWS also started offering Key Management Service: https://aws.amazon.com/kms/

You don't get your own HSM but it's MUCH cheaper ($1/key/month) and more scalable and available than an HSM.

pepr··on Stripe: Bitcoin
This. I tried buying a pair of flight tickets from a German airline Condor with a US credit card. What a hassle, in the end I had to call the bank, get redirected and verified 4 times (because they don't pass the verification along when they redirect your call) and I was finally able to pay for the damn tickets when they "pre-authorized" the transaction.
pepr··on Let's Encrypt: How It Works
I'm also happy to see EFF now accepts Bitcoin.
pepr··on Meteor hits 1.0
It doesn't, this is a separate coding platform. If your coding platform is Rails, you don't integrate Django into it.
pepr··on Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC
I think it's simply self-preservation. If they don't get reelected, they lose their job. Few people want that. Would you lose your job over your views on issues like gun control? May you would, but a lot (maybe majority) of people wouldn't. Look at the stories of people in former communist countries. Majority of them didn't want to even risk their jobs over much, much more serious issues than gun control, NSA, or abortion.
pepr··on Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential
Well, at the very least, it's a smaller piece of code :). (Don't get me wrong, I'm very strongly opposed to DRM and HTML5 DRM in particular.)
pepr··on Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better Than Python 2.7 (2013)
I haven't been able to find any good repo (recent, maintained, reputable maintainer) unfortunately. I usually end up compiling them myself. I was actually surprised how easy it is, nevertheless a (possibly official) repo would be _very_ nice.
pepr··on US bugged Merkel's phone from 2002 until 2013, report claims
Well, at least she is pretending - US politicians aren't even prentending to be outraged :-D
pepr··on Why Putting SSH On Another Port is a Good Idea
His argument is that we can't be sure whether we're talking to the real SSH running or some rogue SSH run by an unprivileged user. That's why SSH servers have their server host keys with fingerprints you're supposed to verify using a different channel when first connecting: if someone managed to spin up a rogue SSH server, it would have a different host key and you would get a big fat warning from your SSH client that the server key doesn't match.
pepr··on Deutsche Telekom, Web.de and GMX launch "E-mail made in Germany" initiative
The point here isn't that ANY government can't listen on. That's a noble goal but so not achievable in a short period of time for everyone. The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because the US government has shown utter lack of respect to rights of anyone who isn't a US citizen. The point here is that if your own democratic government is spying on you, you have some (albeit limited) degree of control (elections) and rights (because you're voter, so they care about you). When a foreign government spies on you, you have almost zero control.
pepr··on Coming Out as a Porn Addict
Ah, I didn't notice that one :)
pepr··on Coming Out as a Porn Addict
Once I read the first line I immediatelly remembered that sign on Valley Mills and thought: "could this be a fellow sufferer from Waco?" :-D This reminds me how much I look forward to moving out of Waco this summer.
pepr··on Music to Let you Concentrate
"... two out of three of people like to listen to music while they work, study or read but it’s difficult to find and manage music that consistently works well for this purpose."

Precisely! I like to listen to ambient music when working and constantly trying to find new music for this purpose is quite a hassle.

pepr··on US intelligence mining data from 9 US Internet companies in broad secret program
This also implies he has vested interest in convincing people more catastrophes are on the way to sell more insurance.
pepr··on Foxconn Joins the Firefox OS Eco-System
> Is it because the Win8 HTML5/JS apps are more closed-system-esque than Firefox OS apps will be?

Yes, basically. At least for me. It comes down to trust. I trust Mozilla that they want to do good for the community. I trust Microsoft first and foremost wants to make money for their shareholders and only after that for the community. This is fine, they're a for-profit company. It's just that doing good for your shareholders doesn't always lead to doing good to the community.

Not to mention Microsoft doesn't exactly have the greatest of reputations when it comes to vendor lock-in issues.

pepr··on Our XMPP services at DuckDuckGo
Does anybody know if this supports custom domains or just the domain assigned by DDG? They seem to support only dukgo.com
pepr··on Our XMPP services at DuckDuckGo
You can do that in principle (XMPP servers for the given domain are stored in SRV records, e.g. for my domain praus.net, it's _jabber._tcp.praus.net) but I can't find anywhere that the DDG XMPP server supports custom domains. So you can do it but I think not with DDG just yet.
pepr··on What a stupid idea
Gnome 3 is far from dead compared to Zune HD (officially killed) or Google Wave (ditto). (Not sure about WebOS, I remember reading it was sold off.)

The primary reason you don't see it around is that Ubuntu has such a large market share of the desktop Linux and chose Unity as the default. And few people bother (or know about the possibility for that matter) to change from the default even though it's trivial (apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop). But remember that Gnome 2 used to be the default and quite popular (i.e. everyone had it because everyone had Ubuntu).

Now of course, I'm biased - I got pissed off with Unity, tried bunch of various desktop environments and settled on Gnome 3 and I really like it. The dynamic creation & removal of desktops feels strange at first but is so convenient after a while that I miss it everywhere else.

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