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* Posts by Chakra

12 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2013

What next for the F-35 after Turkey's threats to turn its back on NATO?

Chakra

Not going to end well for Turkey

Erdogan is selling Turkey long term future for his own personal political gain, I am shocked! Taking allies of convenience to another level. Geographic pressures have made Russia and Turkey at best strategic competitors and more frequently enemies in open conflict. Imperial Russia national pastime was making Ottomans their @#$@. Whenever the Czar was bored, Russia carved up another former Ottoman province, or clandestinely supported their fellow orthodox Christians insurgencies.

Does Erdogan really think Putin will support him when it really matter. When Greece a fellow orthodox Christian nation kicks up storm in the Aegean in the future, where do you think Putin and Russian public sympathy will tilt to? At best Russia will withdraw all logistical support for all those expensive Russian equipment and claim neutrality kneecapping Turkey's ability to defend itself, at worst the Russian black fleet will mobilize and tie up a huge portion of Turkey airforce and navy to indirectly help the Greeks.

Nato should call his bluff and give him the middle finger or Turkey on the whole. Judging from the polls, Turkey doesn't like the West very much, so we should mutually go our separate ways.

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Tired of Windows 10 phoning home? Maybe the special Chinese govt version is for you

Chakra
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Re: It still phones home

I agree with you with how they tend to stick to Chinese sites obviously b/c they are Chinese centric sites catered to their interest. However, I disagree that they aren't as advert ridden muck or worse than Western sites. OMG, my sister in law from mainland China would always run into trouble with labtop and I would sometimes help her with her computer. I swear 90 percent of her problems were malware b/c of the shaddy ads pasted everywhere on the mainstream Chinese websites she always frequents, the usual crap entertainment news and other stuff. You could find pirated stuff on the Chinese equivalent of Yahoo news posted prominently, so it is not surprising that the websites could care less if their third party ad company sneak malware into the ads.

Now she only uses Macs in part b/c of those issues. She generally avoids the websites that criticize the Chinese Government even in passing, it's just makes her uncomfortable even though the government had wronged her immediate family directly on more than one occasion(people in jail etc etc). Chinese expats can be pretty sensitive and nationalistic for the most part. I am not judging or really care, but meeting other Chinese students at the graduate level and you notice that her attitude politically is typical mainland for Chinese born and Western University educated elite you see at universities in the US. You really can't avoid observing it especially when something happens like the Beijing Olympics a while back.

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Windows 10 growth flattens out to 30 per cent per week

Chakra
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Re: Curves

I would have been part of that part in the later months, but now I am a wait and see mode. The data collection and onerous EULA terms also makes me nervous. I have a feeling that I might just wait until a couple months before the promotion ends to install W10 just to see how it plays out. MS hasn't really been forthcoming with clarifications.

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Mozilla takes Windows 8-friendly Firefox out back ... two shots heard

Chakra

One and half odd years of work....for nothing

6 months after Windows 8 released, anybody that wasn't a MS shrill could have told you that Metro was going nowhere.

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New Flash vuln exploited (again). Adobe posts emergency fix (again)

Chakra

Chinese State espionage + Flash = Fail

Lets see...codes implies Chines speakers + considerable resources + foreign policy websites(not the usual money stealing banking scams). So basically Chinese state espionage. Combined with Flash equals fail.

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NSA using Firefox flaw to snoop on Tor users

Chakra

Some criticial inaccuracies about Firefox

The exploit they used wasn't zero day. It was targeting users with outdated firefox based Tor Browsers. The vulnerabilities were already fixed in the latest Mozilla patches at the time of the exploits.

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Opera debuts Chromium-luvvin' desktop browser Next 15

Chakra
Meh

Nothing unique move along

"craftsmanship, 17 years of hands-on experience and a passion for the web," not seeing that at all. I am seeing a reskinned Chromium version 28 to be exact. Just look at the user agents. I was even able to install Chrome extensions on it. It has been a couple of months since the announcement to move to webkit, I kinda expected more from Opera.

AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/28.0.1500.20 (Opera Next)

vs

AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/27.0.1453.94 (Chrome)

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China's internet security giant Qihoo planning global domination

Chakra
Mushroom

Don't use even if they are technically good

This company tactics are borderline malware tactics including crippling all other browser on targeted machine except its own, and straight out fraud using the IE logo on its browser to trick people. The Qihoo antivirus has been getting good technical results on the AV review sites, but you gotta ask yourself why in the world would you entrust your security software to such a shaddy company?

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Google forks WebKit, promises faster, leaner Chrome engine

Chakra

Not biggest fan of anything Google but this is good

Especially the statement regarding their intentions to retire vendor specific prefixes in favor to Mozilla's and the W3C approach by keeping them under the experimental flag. The prefix situation especially on mobile was the most pressing for fans of alternate engines like gecko. If Chrome stayed with webkit it would have gotten worse.

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Pwn2Own: IE10, Firefox, Chrome, Reader, Java hacks land $500k

Chakra
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FAIL

You should judge based on active attacks

Just counting the number of vulnerabilities is a lazy way to judge the security of a product. You should count how many days something has been actively exploited.

"If we count just the critical zero-days, there were at least 89 non-overlapping days (about three months) between the beginning of 2011 and Sept. 2012 in which IE zero-day vulnerabilities were actively being exploited. That number is almost certainly conservative.."

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/10/in-a-zero-day-world-its-active-attacks-that-matter/

The last known active exploit for Firefox was in 2010 for the Noble peace prize which was patched in a day. Chrome has no known history of an active exploit in the wild.

Of course this quote was earlier Windows and Windows 8 is a different especially IE in win32 vs IE in winRT, but the point is Microsoft security record is probably the worst out of all the major browsers, slow to respond to threats and issue patches in part b/c of the whole patch Tuesday nonsense to pamper to lazy control freak IT workers.

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Adobe squashes TWO critical Flash vulnerabilities with emergency patches

Chakra

Where the Sandbox?

Wasn't the Vista/Seven exclusive sandbox or protected mode supposed to mitigate exposures like this? The fact that they list the exploits on Mac, Linux who don't have protected mode means the sandbox should have done it job right?

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Rid yourself of Adobe: New Firefox 19.0 gets JAVASCRIPT PDF viewer

Chakra
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Re: Am I the only person...

You should seriously try SumatraPDF. Really small (5 megs) and simple by a fault. The option menu only a total of 7 options, including such bloated options in the "Advanced" section like "automatically check for updates" and "remember opened files," :-).

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