wsha

ddar sounds like it could be really useful. However, it looks like the last functional change to code base on GitHub was a year and a half ago. What do you think the future of the project is? For something like backups, I wouldn't want to invest into a tool that has no prospect of support.

I thought the exact same thing. When reading this, I was reminded of similar rants I have seen about Wikipedia.

As a casual user of both sites, I have had pretty much only positive experiences. I use both sites are starting points for ideas not the final truth on a subject[1]. When one invests a lot of time into something, one usually becomes emotionally involved and that can lead to conflict in these massively collaborative projects. The only time I post to either site is when I am looking for an answer and can't find it -- if the question is not posted I'll post it myself or if I figure it out later I'll go back and post the answer (or edit the page in the case of Wikipedia). My usage is pretty sparse, but I have never experienced moderators lashing out at me in any unfair way.

[1]: Especially with Wikipedia I tend mainly to use it as an aggregation of links to other more trustworthy sources. With SO, I test the answer myself before blindly using it.

Not sure what to make of this, but, when my MBP died (could not even boot), I was so fed up with Apple that I bought a Lenovo...with Superfish on it. We'll see how the repair goes. Maybe I'll be crawling back to OS X now (though I wiped out the Lenovo installed Windows long ago). This move goes a long way towards repairing the good will towards Apple that I had lost.

Indeed, I use and appreciate freefillableforms.com. Sorry, I should have clarified that I was talking about the state government tax filing process not having a free electronic submission process (at least for the three states I have filed in recently).

Superfish really creeped me out last November when I got a new Lenovo laptop. I first noticed it when using Firefox with NoScript. A script from best-deals-products.com was being blocked on every site that I went to (I never unblocked it so I can't confirm the statement about Firefox not being affected). It took me a while searching around to figure out it was the Superfish program. Rather than uninstall the program, I nuked the disk and installed the vanilla Windows from Microsoft.

I bought the Lenovo because I was really annoyed with Apple when my MBP died just after the 3 years of AppleCare I payed for expired on my 2011 model (notorious for failing: https://mbp2011.org/, I guess I can't win with laptop vendors). It was my first time working with OEM Windows in a while (laptop before the MBP was a Dell in 2005) and I was surprised at how much more bloatware vendors thought they could stuff into a new laptop compared to the past. Next time I guess I will either go back to Apple or get something that comes with Linux installed just to avoid the Windows bloatware.

Actually, the point of this change is that there is no opt out. The main target of this change is to prevent grayware from silently sideloading bad add-ons onto users' systems. Up to this point, such grayware could hide behind the argument that some user action implied consent to the add-on installation. With this new change, that is no longer possible. It is almost as easy for such grayware to silently modify the Firefox binary directly, so from a security standpoint this change does not really contribute much. However, such modification to the Firefox binary (or a similar action) is much more obviously malware than side loading an extension is. So Mozilla is trying to gain leverage against bad actors who are trying to pose as legitimate actors. The problem with an opt-out is that grayware could silently activate the opt-out and claim that such an action was implied by the installation of the grayware.

That said, Mozilla has also said that they will release an unbranded version of Firefox that does not include the add-on signing restriction but is otherwise identical. Hopefully, that "identical" promise holds true and users who do not want to deal with the signing restriction can use this unbranded version.

Interesting point. For the past few years, I have printed out my return and mailed it in because that is free and e-filing costs money. I do it partly because it is cheaper but also partly because I find it sad that e-filing is not easier and more cost effective for the government to handle than a paper submission (if it is, it is sad that the government is not incentivizing it through cost). Maybe the government just prints the e-filed return out and adds it to the stack of mailed in returns to be processed. It seems like there would be big gains in efficiency if the government had a standard digital submission protocol, if they could get past the initial cost to develop it and could handle the security issues it would entail.

PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD, so there's likely not much difference between something can run one vs. the other, especially if you want to set up a desktop environment (basically what PC-BSD provides).