samuellb

In practice, no. The legislation has major loopholes, such as allowing unsolicited business-to-business marketing. And spammers still send junk to individuals with a disclaimer such as "This message is addressed to a business, if this is in error click here to opt out". And they seem to get away with it.

These kinds of attacks are already happening. It has actually happened in the apartment area where I live:

We have a hot water central heating system that distributes heat to the apartments buildings. To improve efficiency, this system was upgraded with "weather forecast" functionality. The supplier stated that this system would not work behind NAT or a firewall, and required a public IP address, so it was connected directly to the ISP's switch.

A couple of years later, in the summer, the system got cracked and the heating system was turned on and the system temperature was increased to the maximum. Because all radiators have (analog) thermostats on them, it didn't affect the indoor temperature, and it took a week until it was noticed.

If nobody had noticed, it would have resulted in a huge district heating bill. And if done on large scale, I guess it could overload or underload power plants (if using electric heating). So I disagree that there are little incentives (to bad guys) to crack heating systems.

As long as there are still incoming links to the domain, I think it's hard to make Google reset it's page rank permanently. You could do a HTTP 301 permanent redirect and use Google Webmaster Tools to make Google point to the new GitLab site, but a squatter can always revert these changes so it will never be 100% effective.

I know a small company that shut down it's Facebook page while keeping it's website (an old one, from 2005). Probably because it's not selling directly to it's end-customers, so the web site is focused on contact info (for store chains etc) + static web pages with product information. B2B doesn't seem to use Facebook very much at all.

Technology improvements are good, but all these sensors in devices scare me, especially in network-connected stuff. Let's say someone exploits and modifies the firmware to trigger on the word "confidential" and then upload the recordings to some server of the attackers choice. Or hides a modified device in someones office/home/etc.

Of course, that's not at all specific to IoT or voice-triggered microphones. Laptops and phones have large batteries and are regularly recharged so they could be exploited as well.

I've noticed that sometimes updates to Firefox cause it to stop working until it's restarted. If you're writing a long message, or filling in some form, or if you have an order confirmation page open, then you might lose that data.

I've never seen that happen in native GNU/Linux applications, though. I guess it might be related to the XUL stuff in Firefox.

But given that Firefox (and Chrome/ium) are memory hogs that eventually get OOM killed, you need to restart them periodically anyway, so it might not make a big difference if the OS does auto-updates in the background.

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702845

There's also the question of where we should draw the line. It's very different if you post a funny video of a cat, or if you write a joke at the end of a comment. IMHO the latter is OK.

I learned to program myself and did some small-scale freelancing as a web developer while in high school. But after that I went to university because I felt it would be easier to get a job with an academic education, and also because it's free in my country.

If I had to pay I'd probably not have applied. IMHO you can learn pretty much everything by reading Wikipedia and other free sites, as long as you're able to stay focused. On the other hand, you'll get to know like-minded people in university, and many people find their first job through their fellow students. So there's definitely a social aspect to it as you say.

Protocols that require online signing are impossible to cache and hard to scale. Even OCSP is often used with pre-produced offline signed responses for that reason (but they are periodically re-signed of course). So that's probably why DNSSEC supports offline signatures.

And while I agree that confidentiality of DNS would be a step in the right direction, there would still be many other leaks, e.g. the SNI field in TLS, or the destination IP address. To completely hide who is accessing which site, you'd need some kind of mixnet or onion routing.

Sealed with tape, with your signature on the tape? And/or some tiny mark on the container that's hard to find.

On the other hand, it's quite convenient to not have to do null checks in debug messages. Compare:

log.trace("doStuff(" + obj1 + ", " + obj2 + ")");

to this:

log.trace("doStuff(" + (obj1 != null ? obj1 : "null") + ", " + (obj2 != null ? obj2 : "null") + ")");

The second one is IMHO quite hard to read, even in this short example (and code readability is important when you do code reviews)

Previous HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12397246

Or people who use a "mixed tabs and spaces" indentation, e.g. size 8 tabs with 4 characters wide indentation, and spaces for uneven indentations. (Which IMHO is broken because it leads to unreadable code when you don't have the same settings as the person who wrote the code).

Also, I guess C-style block comments could cause an over-counting of spaces (but looking at the numbers, it seems that either the query takes this into account, or C code simply has a poor comment-to-code ratio)

Yes, security of number porting is too lax. My number was once ported by a telco (accidentally in this case). They did call me and I had to confirm that I would get a new SIM card and which size I needed, but since I was expecting a new SIM card from the very same telco I didn't understand that they were in fact porting my number. They forgot to say that.

Luckily I was able to get my number back, after many calls to customer support (they managed to undo the porting when I wanted to check how it was going) and a couple of weeks of waiting.

Yes, it's quite different in different countries.

My web server gets only 3,9% IPv6 traffic (based on counting unique IPs). Quite OK given that none of the major ISPs in my country offer IPv6 (neither on broadband or on mobile). Even for businesses it can be hard to get native IPv6 here.

3. open source software projects (and distributions, e.g. Debian) usually don't want to be dependent on non-open source software. And they are usually very strict with licenses, so "almost open source" won't cut it. So I think BSL licensed software would get less adoption and less of the "free marketing" that open source software normally gets.

I've used a re-compressed version in the past, with reduced xml markup, and with the most rarely visited articles removed. It was around 1GB when I downloaded it, and it used the proprietary MDX/MDict format. You can find downloads here (from 2010):

http://sh0dan.blogspot.com/

Or you could just download the Wikipedia CD. It contains 5500 articles from 2007:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_CD_Selecti...

Neither of those two are very up to date of course, but it shows that it can be done.

Or a lid that can be slided over it. As a bonus, it would also protect the camera from being scratched

0.0.x = proof of concept? 0.1.x = first actually usable version (but may be buggy, missing features, etc.)

I'd call a systems programming language "something which can use the low level ABI of the underlying platform". So C and e.g. FreePascal would fit the description (for most hardware platforms). And Java, for instance, would not unless the platform runs Java bytecode.

That's true. And in the OOP case you usually have exception handling (i.e. try/catch blocks) as well, instead of "goto error" style error handling which is common in C.

The Linux kernel has a code style with 8 spaces and still has the 80 characters maximum. The coding style says "if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.". So not everybody agrees that you need deep indentation.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle

I welcome this change, because I've lost a lot of form data with the backspace key. Not specifically in Chrome, because I remember having the same problem with IE 6 at the time when Firefox was still in alpha and was called "Phoenix".

Now I wish that the Thunderbird developers also remove or change their single letter shortcuts that are easy to mis-type. E.g. "A" for archive, which creates an undeletable "Archive" folder in your mail account. There's a bugzilla issue for it here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615957

C is easy to package and distribute. I once built a Python + GTK application for a school project. On Ubuntu that was no problem at all, but on Windows it was a complete mess because I had to bundle Python + GTK for Windows + all their dependencies. I think the result was around 200 MB of dependencies and ~100 kB of actual Python code. C + libui would have been much better in this regard.

I don't know about Spain in particular, but to me it feels that apartment electricity is massively overpowered (in terms of the effect). In my country the max effect for apartments is 3x16 A = 11 kW. My consumption is 35-40 kWh/month. Unsurprisingly I pay more for the grid connection and the effect, than the actual energy production.

Ok, if I max out my stove completely it could _theoretically_ reach around 10 kW, but only if all four burners AND the oven are turned on at the same time.

It feels like it would be a better idea to install a battery in high-effect appliances to spread out the consumption over the day, than having a guaranteed 11 kW effect available 24/7/365 just in case... (and not everybody needs a stove with four burners, or even reliable power)

Many (or perhaps even most?) web hosts will offer to install Wordpress for their customers, usually with some "Install Wordpress" option either at sign up or in the control panel. And I suppose these installations are configured with automatic upgrades, and are supported to some degree by the web host. Federated and open source doesn't mean that every end-user installs and maintains the software by themselves.

[I edited my answer, because now I read that new system is claimed to be end-to-end secure as well]

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sync-your-firefox-bookm...

In the old system your data was encrypted with a key that was only stored on your devices. Adding a new device meant that you had to do a kind of key exchange process (which was perceived as complicated[1]).

When Mozilla introduced the new system there was very little information on how the data was encrypted. I think the documentation only said that they used TLS (or something like that). But when reading their current documentation I see that it's not the case; they are apparently encrypting your data with a key derived from your password. So if you use a (cryptographically) strong password it should be secure[2]. Assuming that it works as documented of course.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-adopts-plain-vanilla-passwo...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-upgrade-fr...

Better check for characters that aren't letters in ASCII, and assume that everything else is a letter (i.e. including Unicode). Not 100% correct, but simple and future proof.

And when it comes to the diaeresis, it's rare enough that it will create confusion for people who are used to German, Swedish, Finish, etc. (except for in words like naïve where there's no risk for confusion).

It seems to be an implementation of a subset of the Linux kernel ABI (binary interface to applications) on top of the NT kernel. It's most likely written from scratch, similar to WINE or FreeBSD's Linux ABI, and in that case there shouldn't be any copyright issues.