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How hard is it to import a European router to the US? Is that illegal? I would think as long as one operated it within the FCC's limits it would be legal to use it.

How dependent is Rust on Mozilla for support now? Has it developed its own community of contributors? I like Mozilla and their mission, but with the way things have been going the past few years I wouldn't want to put a lot of time into porting my projects to something whose future was dependent on Mozilla.

"This person who used to be your peer is now your manager."

Welcome to reality, GitHubbers. Not sure how else you expect a 500+ person company to run itself.

Maybe raw productivity is not increased, but all of these reasons have the effect of increasing morale and thus productivity.

It's good for user privacy, but not good for the ad networks wanting to keep an accurate account of how many times their ads are being loaded.

There are legitimate concerns about police overreach, etc., but I can't get past the part where we start off talking about someone checking $11,000 in cash.

Was this guy just not familiar with air travel? Or is it less likely that money will be seized from a checked bag than from a carry-on? It's just absurd to me to put that much value into a checked bag, especially in the form of cash.

Not sure if this is true for all vidoes, but I have watched several shows on Amazon using Chromium, and I don't have Flash installed.

I was hoping for a nice outrage inducing story, but this one left too much ambiguity about who was really at fault for me.

The thing that stands out to me in the discussions on the Mozilla mailing list is how Mozilla is changing the goals of extension signing after the fact. It was initially presented as a method of combatting malware but with the back and forth over Zotero they now seem to be expanding the scope to include add-ons with performance problems, addons with code that is hard to read, addons with code that touch powerful API's unnecessarily. That's opening up a whole lot of grey area for their volunteer reviewers to wade into. In hindsight, I also wonder if they shouldn't have just waited for XUL addons to be phased out since the screening process for the more limited WebExtensions API should be easier.

Free speech is important but for some reason this story does not make me feel much sympathy for the author. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like the newsletter was posting borderline defamatory comments anonymously.

There is a Chrome extension called FooTab that does #2. Maybe Chrome will add this functionality at some point. I have heard that they are working on unloading tabs when many are opened at once.

I believe Google is also still the default for some locales including most of Europe.

It's probably better to compare Firefox to Chromium which is as free as Firefox. I think the RAM and address bar comparisons could be addressed by extensions in Chromium. So really you are left with the last point about funding, but Mozilla gets its money somehow and it's mostly not coming from charitable donations.

One of the maintainers already committed to flipping the switch on the mailing list. The reasoning given was that extension signing was a security feature and it is better to trust Mozilla than to trust an old add-on whose developer did not bother to update so that it could be signed.

Electrolysis is mostly already implemented with the XUL version of Firefox and many add-ons have been ported over to be compatible with it.

The main new change being announced recently (electrolysis and extension signing have been known about for a while now) is the deprecation of XUL in the browser in general and for add-ons in particular and the adoption of a new extension API's that are more limited in functionality (WebExtensions and whatever else they decide to do to allow more functionality than is available in Chrome). There are security implications to these changes but multi-process Firefox is not the main driver. Mozilla is giving up on XUL in favor of HTML and using this as a pretext to limit the functionality of add-ons (which many Firefox developers have wanted to do for a long time for security and stability reasons).

According to Aaronson and others, the D-Wave architecture has not demonstrated any behavior that can't be explained using classical physics, so just making the device bigger shouldn't change it into a quantum device with a quantum speed up. That said -- who knows, maybe the architecture is different enough from everything else that it could be a better classical annealer than standard processors (though it's only ~1000 bits, so it probably can't outperform any conventional processor sold today with billions of bits).

That route is getting harder with application signing becoming more prevalent on Windows and OS X.

But ths change will prevent bad extensions pulled in by malware installed by other means.... On systems that require application signing, that should do some good (otherwise I'd expect malware to just switch from sideloading extensions to sideloading a modified version of Firefox).

Mozilla has said that this requirement is set by one flag at build time, so building a version without this requirement should not be any more difficult than just compiling Firefox I have never done that, but I think it's slightly non-trivial. The hardest part though would be distributing the fork though, so a Linux distribution like Debian mentioned this change as others have mentioned would be one way to build a popular fork without this requirement.

I think they want to encourage wider adoption of the Beta version, so they treat it similarly to the Release. The logic seems pretty questionable to me though. If you can install a Beta version of Firefox, you should be able to avoid consenting to allow malware to run on your computer (this change is primarily targeted at extensions installed by some user action -- like something silently side-loaded by an application installer).

The -signed label was a one time effect to update existing extensions to signed versions (since AMO didn't want to arbitrarily bump the version numbers of all its hosted extensions). Future updates do not have this label.

If your extension has been fully reviewed by AMO, you can upload beta versions that only have to pass the automated signing review to be posted to AMO.

I have been looking into both of these technologies recently.

Attic has the most attractive feature set of the backup management tools I have looked at (deduplication and compression, support for remote repos, built in encryption, ability to mount repo as a FUSE file system), with the main downsides being that it is fairly new (and so just doesn't have as much testing as some of the older options) and its development model is not ideal. It is solely maintained by the original developer as a personal project and so when he is busy development stops. Recently, a handful of active community contributors started a fork (https://borgbackup.github.io/) because of this. The original developer still seems committed to working on Attic when time permits, but I'd prefer to see a team of capable developers maintaining something I was relying for the integrity of my data.

CrashPlan was the most attractive offsite backup solution because its price was competitive (similar to several other options, ~$6/month to backup one computer with no data size limit) and it provided cross-platform support for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I also like that it has a few different encryption options, including the option to generate your own encryption key that you do not share with CrashPlan.

I am curious about your decision to encrypt your data before uploading with CrashPlan. Are you trying to avoid storing any unencrypted data on your NAS because it is more exposed to the internet? Or do you not trust CrashPlan with your data? I would think that using CrashPlan with a custom key would be fairly secure. If you don't trust CrashPlan in that case, you probably shouldn't install it on your machine at all. The CEO of CrashPlan has commented on double encrypting data (http://superuser.com/a/589686).

What is the restore process like when combining Attic and CrashPlan? I don't think CrashPlan has any file system mount option, so you would need to restore an entire Attic repo to recover any files from it, correct? I guess this is okay since you have the NAS to restore from for individual file backup and you only need to restore from CrashPlan in the case of catastrophic failure (the NAS dies entirely) when you would need to do a full restore.

My current backup solution is an rsync script backing up to a remote machine I own. I previously used Bitcasa for offsite backup but was unhappy with the service and with the way the company kept changing its business model (shifted away from consumer cloud storage to a business / app market). I'd like to replace my rsync script with something more sophisticated like Attic and use another offsite option like CrashPlan.

Whether or not the allegations are true (as most people are questioning here), this article is really poorly researched. There's no indication that any attempt was made to get Roberts' side of the story or to check with any other security researcher about the plausibility of the accusations.

Several people have suggested that Roberts' goal is to raise awareness about airplane safety, so perhaps he actually wanted the article published like this even if inaccurate, though it still reflects poorly on the author.

AdBlock Plus is published under a GPLv3 license, so it is open source even if it doesn't have your preferred default settings. AdBlock Edge is a fork of AdBlock Plus that just disables the acceptable ads preference.

Personally, I don't use AdBlock Plus, but I think it is silly to criticize it for allowing some ads. Even in the first version it had a preference for allowing Google text ads -- the developers have always presented it as a tool for blocking annoying ads, not as a means for blocking all ads. That said, it is very easy to subscribe to another filter list in AdBlock Plus that blocks all ads.

Reading the source code, I find this:

function recordInstall() { if (utils.prefs('install_recorded')) { return; }

sendReq('install'); }

So the if statement that the OP highlights does not actually phone every time it is called like the OP claims, but only on the first install. The message that the add-on sends to ghostery.com includes the Ghostrank preference, the version of Ghostery, the OS, and the Firefox version (Android or desktop). That said, it does appear that the add-on phones home on each upgrade, and I don't see anything in the Ghostery Privacy Policy about this (it only discusses GhostRank).

The OP seems to move around a lot. You'd think having a Comcast alternative would be on the must-have list for a new home by now. I guess he is moving into 20+ mile radii with no ISP other than Comcast?

I'd put in Rigetti Computing in the same category as D-Wave (I'll let you decide how dubious it is).

He has contributed to and helped maintain some really cool projects. However, the title of this post is misleading. He is not the creator of dialog or lynx.

I also discovered the Superfish app fairly quickly (I use NoScript in Firefox and noticed best-deals-products.com being blocked everywhere). I decided to reinstall Windows from Microsoft because I no longer trusted the Lenovo OEM version. It was actually pretty straightforward to download the installer from Microsoft [1] and the drivers from Lenovo (wireless didn't work until I installed the driver so definitely don't do this without an ethernet connection or a USB drive with the drivers). I generally followed this guide [2] (it was written before Microsoft let you download the installer for free so ignore the part about buying the media). This is easier to do when the computer is still new and you haven't taken the time to set it up how you like though....

[1]: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-re... [2]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/flushi...