Posts by richard?

For practical purposes this brings it into the water cooling range, which is a lot cheaper and more feasible than liquefied gases.

I guess the toxicity checks would come later - at the moment having crazy pressure and lasers firing is the bigger safety point!

Re: Prevent fraud ?

So you don't understand machine learning, and can't be bothered to Google it, but want someone to summarise the state of the art?

This technique has been used for ages in reCaptcha - which is (or was) used by ... Amazon.

Re: Yep.

Obvious quote - "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"

Thermic lancing it would undoubtably work quickly, and almost certainly destroy the contents so kind of pointless.

As they said in the article, the safe contains "sensitive equipment" - not much point in beating up the safe if it destroys the hardware token in the process.

It says unprivileged code, including Javascript, so no pre-pwnage required.

Re: pot

Intel produce products - I'm sure there are some cases where they've gone after competitors for patent infringement, probably some of them unfair or anti-competitive, but at least they're using the patents they have in things people buy.

That's fundamentally different to a firm which has never produced anything, has no intention of ever producing anything or setting up a reasonable licensing scheme (e.g. like ARM does), and doesn't even benefit the original patent author.

Re: Making a hash of it...?

I guess the chances of a hash collision are so much smaller than the collisions we already have with a combination of name + types that it isn't a priority to worry about.

The second point is probably an advantage - no unexpected changes, the references must be _deliberately_ updated; it also allows parallel testing and stuff in a real environment, and you since you can uniquely identify a function you can easily see if the old one is being used.

Wow, could you have put more incorrect statements into one comment?

It is a problem with their website if they are losing orders. The customer may not always be right, but losing an order through a technical problem is always wrong.

Credit cards do frequently have four digit years, and if the site asks for "year" it is perfectly reasonable to put in four digits.

Autofill programs may fail, but it is the dev's problem since that's the platform they're working on. And it's a perfectly testable scenario, so no excuses it's just poor coding.

If you've ever looked at any research on loss of capture through UX issues you would know that the percentages lost can be staggering, even at payment stage. You do not want to give people time to get pissed off, think about if they really want it, or look at the total price again.

Re: Set up to fail

I agree they should protect the keys...

But I have no sympathy for someone who thought it was OK to publish any of their company's stuff on GitHub without asking and receiving clear permission.

His employment contract will certainly have had the usual clauses about company ownership of his work, confidentiality etc. Even without the keys he broke his contract and trade secret laws, it's just unfortunate the keys made it a lot worse which is on the company.

If he leaves publicly, there is basically zero chance of some sort of clandestine rendition that bypasses the courts. And if the US does get him legally, then fine, that's the point of having laws and courts, and the recent Laurie Love case showed it.

So what exactly is the US going to do?

Re: Spec.

The trouble is that if the company goes bust, maybe because of these requirements, nobody wins - and it's already far to easy to just claim bankruptcy to avoid responsibilities.

Mandatory escrow of all supporting code and IP rights would make more sense - any company buying the rights would have to think twice about shutting stuff down if the code then became public. Half of these platforms already have most of the "support" run by some community which could take ownership.

Maybe add in joint ownership / first rights to any relevant hardware, IP addresses, domains etc as well, so there's a viable transition period.

Re: At some point I might resign from my job

But your job is paid - the only thing she received for the Linux work was kudos and publicity.

So when she quit, she followed the same pattern. Much as Torvalds does himself - don't say much, but if necessary say it in a way to get maximum exposure.

Re: I don't understand this at all.

I was thinking the same thing.

For confidential email, why would anyone trust their email provider and not use encrypted email?

Of course, it is virtually impossible to hide the source and destination in email, since that's needed for delivery and having a two way conversation, but even that is fixed by encrypted online form - just use it from a web cafe, and provide a unique private ID to have a secure two-way discussion.

Of course she would need to ensure the encrypted data is only opened on her own PC in her own secure environment.

The blog owner can still be subpoenaed for information but that's just normal law exactly as it should be; I'd imagine PJ would be able to handle it, and have lots of support if it happened.

Re: Doesn't it miss the point somewhat?

But the point is also that a team of end-spectrum nerds is frequently not the most productive. Deep technical skills good, ability to apply to real world problems or timelines not so much.

Unless you're a pure technology company, having an IT person who can work with reality is pretty important, and the gender balance in many non-IT functions is equal or at least not so imbalanced.

Re: Is it just me?

I think the point is that anything you put on the company network / email belongs to the company as per contract and reasonable sense. This seems to be a case where they're trying to get hold of a copy from externally because they deleted their own copy.

Perhaps they could argue that the copy is theirs due to intellectual property rights, same as a photocopy would be, but in that case I'd think he could just delete the mails as it isn't his responsibility to keep them.

Re: Crashplan FTW

Bullshit implies they claimed something untrue. They claim unlimited backup, and throttling the upload speed doesn't make this untrue although you could argue it makes it less useful.

As I said originally, for most home users who have a lots of unchanging data such as video and photos, I don't think it would cause a problem or invalidate the point of their offering.

If you need to store more that 200GB and have a large amount of change then it would - take your pick.