* Posts by JohnFen

5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015

Tinfoil-hat search engine DuckDuckGo gifts more options, dark theme and other toys for the 0.43%

JohnFen

"The only thing that a website may need to know is your browser version"

They don't even need to know that. No website should be making decisions based on what browser/version is being reported. If the site is doing tricky things, it should test for functionality rather than try to assume it based on make and model.

Otherwise, I'm with you. I really think that browsers should tell webservers pretty much nothing at all. Or, at the very least, allow users to disable such reporting.

JohnFen

Re: Go

I've found that the result for my tech-related searches are no worse in DDG than with Google.

But that's damning with faint praise, because the quality of search results I get from Google tend to be on the poor side.

Microsoft Teams: The good, the bad, and the ugly

JohnFen

Re: Not bad, just a bit rough

It took a bit of time, but I did manage to get all of those popups disabled, so it can be done. Now, I just keep the Teams toolbar icon enabled and I can see if something needs my attention because the little green dot turns red.

JohnFen

Re: Finally made sharpoint useable

"explaining to people that its not just chat and calls, but really a front end to all of office 365"

And it's really bad at being that as well.

JohnFen

Re: Not bad, just a bit rough

"It's single fecking window"

Of all of the things that makes me hate Teams (and there's a lot), this is in my top 3.

JohnFen

Re: Microsofties

"my office386 password is HaTeOrifac3"

You'd better change it now.

JohnFen

Re: Not bad, just a bit rough

I've noticed that the people here who are pleased with Teams are talking about the conferencing stuff (using it as SfB). My employer doesn't use that functionality.

I wonder if that's why I'm seeing positive comments when the Teams that I know is a dumpster fire -- I'm using a different functionality set.

JohnFen

Not to mention the largely nonexistent documentation for it. Want to find out how to do something that should be obvious? Good luck getting that information from Microsoft.

JohnFen

Re: Not bad, just a bit rough

"While it has plenty of rough edges the benefits far outweigh the problems overall."

I disagree. Teams is straight-up terrible. I truly wish that my employer didn't require its use -- I'd prefer using just straight-up SMS.

JohnFen

Hate hate hate

God, how I hate Teams. That my employer requires us to use it makes me irritated by my employer as well.

WeWork's Meetup slaps RSVP fees on events ‒ then tells everyone not to panic amid backlash

JohnFen

How does Meetup do this? There are probably people who browse though the Meetup site, but most don't -- so organizers still have to find their audience on their own, just as they would if they weren't using Meetup.

JohnFen

Escaped my notice

Somehow, I was unaware that WeWork had purchased Meetup. I'm glad this was mentioned, because now I know to avoid using Meetup.

I can't believe you've done this: Cisco.com asks visitors to explain to IT why they have broken the website

JohnFen

Re: Sadly, this wording is still common

Surely, important websites routinely check their logs and have automated alerts get sent when serious errors (such as those that cause 500 HTML codes) get logged.

OK, I almost made it through that without laughing. In any case, they should. It isn't acceptable (or reliable) to put the responsibility for this sort of monitoring on the users.

JohnFen

Sadly, this wording is still common

"Please contact the server administrator, it-webmasters.cisco.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error."

While I understand what it's trying to get at, this is one of the more stupid ways to words this for a number of reasons.

First, contacting the webmaster to inform them that the error happened and what time is pointless -- that information is already in the webserver logs.

Second, 500 is an internal server error. The odds are vanishingly tiny that it was triggered by anything a user has done. To put the onus on users to report anything about this is stupid.

That's even leaving out the fact that El Reg already mentioned: the wording of the message can easily be interpreted by users as meaning "you have done something wrong that caused this, tell us what it was".

Google unplugs AMP, hooks it into OpenJS Foundation after critics turn up the volume

JohnFen

Re: Still using JS?

It depends on what sites you care about, probably. I mostly run with JS disabled, and there are few websites that I care about that break without JS.

JohnFen

My main problem with AMP

My main problem with AMP isn't that it's clearly a power grab by Google (although that's a serious problem as well).

It's that I seriously hate AMP pages, and they're getting harder to avoid. The proposal to make your browser lie to you about the URL you're resolving will only make the situation much worse.

Having AMP be in a foundation will not make AMP more acceptable.

Apple insists it's totally not doing that thing it wasn't accused of: We're not handing over Safari URLs to Tencent – just people's IP addresses

JohnFen

Re: "The privacy community, he said, has mostly come to terms with the privacy trade-off"

"Clearly it doesn't include myself or the many privacy advocates I associate with."

I work in the computer security field myself, and it doesn't include me or literally any of my colleagues as far as I'm aware.

JohnFen

Re: Exactly

"Let's lock up all the advertisers on the web first"

We can but dream.

From Libra to leave-ya: eBay, Visa, Stripe, PayPal, others flee Facebook's crypto-coin

JohnFen

Good

Let's hope that this is the beginning of the end of this nonsense. The last thing society needs is for Facebook to expand their already overbearing desire to spy on all the things.

You rang? Windows 10 gets ever cosier with Android, unleashes Calls on Insiders

JohnFen

Re: Once more puppets - raise your right hands

I don't know about you, but MS, Google, et. al., makes exactly zero decisions about any of that. You don't have to let them, either.

Europe publishes 5G risk assessment; America scrawls ‘Huawei’ on the side of a nuke and goes for a ride

JohnFen

Re: Don't Let 5G in the UK, it will fry you, or the chocolate in your pocket and honey bees too.

This is nonsense.

In my opinion, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to avoid 5G -- but this is not one of them.

JohnFen

Re: Question

Yes.

I've been learning as much as I can about 5G, and the more I learn about it, the more confident I am that this is something that I simply Do Not Want.

JohnFen

Still not seeing it

I'm still not seeing how Huawei poses a greater security threat than US companies*. US companies, after all, have a long history of providing the US government the same amount of cooperation as what Huawei is being accused of.

*Not just the US, of course

Microsoft, GitHub staff tell Satya Nadella: It's time to ice ICE, baby. Rip up those tech contracts

JohnFen

Re: Everything under control

Could it be that the point isn't to solve the issue, but to avoid being a part of evil actions?

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

JohnFen

Re: "Outside the digital world, none of us would accept the proposition that"

"For instance they arent (yet) allowed to request/demand the keys to everyones house, in case they later need to pop in, with or without a warrant"

They're allowed to request it (in the US, anyway). The cops can request anything they like. What they aren't allowed to do is compel it.

Surprise! Copying crummy code from Stack Overflow leads to vulnerable GitHub jobs

JohnFen

Re: The root of this issue is how people are using SO

"when people are told by their managers, "just make it work, I don't care how.""

You know, I've been a developer for a very long time, and I'm pretty sure that I have never once had a manager tell me anything like that. If they did, I'd take it as a loud message that I shouldn't be working there. There are lots of companies who don't engage in that degree of unprofessionalism.

JohnFen

Re: Dumb community

"You just don't try to plan every minute detail up front, frequently evaluate progress against milestones, and be prepared to change plans quickly if something isn't working."

So, just like pre-Agile development methodologies, then.

JohnFen

Re: "the researchers developed a Chrome extension"

Privacy risks are security risks --- just a particular subset of them.

JohnFen

Re: student use

"“I don’t know, and nobody on stackoverflow seems to know” as an answer."

But that's a terrible answer. The combination of your knowledge and SO is nowhere near comprehensive, even if you're limiting your search to the net.

I do sometimes bring code I found on SO to design meetings, properly credited, but only when I'm presenting a list of different approaches to a given problem. SO is never the only source for these lists.

JohnFen

Re: Dumb community

SO these days seems primarily geared toward providing students answers to exam questions.

JohnFen

Re: Let me see if I understand...

"In theory upvoting and downvoting do that"

I would expect up/downvoting to provide an indication of the correctness of the answer, not an indication that the code presented is ready to use as is. In fact, it should be obvious to all devs that such code is not ready to use as is, since it's pared down to make it easy to follow the actual solution and does not include all of the scaffolding that is necessary in production code.

JohnFen

You think?

Copy-pasting code from SO (or any other site) might have a downside? What a shocker.

That so many devs do this is alarming, and doesn't speak well of the current state of the software industry.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

JohnFen

Re: "It just moves the ... question from the app to the app store"

Yes, I'm 99% sure that's what Google was objecting to. It looks to me like a bit of an unsavory move... splitting what should be one app into multiple ones with no good technical or usability reasons for doing so.

On the other hand, the end result in terms of revenue isn't much different than offering one app with additional in-app purchases to buy support for whatever models you want support for, so Google's objection (if that's what it is) is on weak ground.

The real problem here, though, is that Google isn't saying why they took this action. This is a pattern with Google (and others) that is egregiously bad. But then, we're talking about Google, so what more could we expect?

JohnFen

Re: Absolutely not...

"No! I absolutely cannot understand."

It's very easy to understand. Google's interest is purely in maximizing profit. One way to maximize profit is to minimize costs. Avoiding actually talking to people allows you to avoid a lot of expense.

JohnFen

Re: Too late

This sort of thing (losing important functionality) is one of the main reasons why I do allow anything to update automatically, and I don't update anything until I am confident that the update doesn't break anything I care about.

JohnFen

"Google's reaction is over the top, unfair and harsh"

I agree. Nothing I said implied otherwise.

However, developers that use the app store know (or should know) by now that doing so is risky and the rug can be pulled out from under them at any time. While I'm sympathetic to these developers, and I think that Google isn't doing right by them, I also think that there's a certain measure of "they should have seen that this was a possibility and planned for it".

JohnFen

"No setup needed, for Joe Public, not tech freaks like us."

Having a separate app for each make doesn't really make setup easier for Joe Public. It just moves the "what make are you using" question from the app to the appstore. Joe Public must still identify what they want to control.

JohnFen

A good business lesson

Any business that depends on a single vendor for survival is a business that is in extreme risk.

Teardown nerds return to the Fold with word of warning: Samsung kit still 'alarmingly fragile'

JohnFen

It sounds like an improvement

It sounds like they've improved the device to the point where it could properly be considered a beta, but there is a lot more work to be done to make it a reasonable consumer product.

After 72 hours of recurring outages, you'd be forgiven for wanting to slightly tweak the first syllable of Bitbucket

JohnFen

Re: Plausuble Deniability

I was speaking about my own uses. There's no point in fingerpointing when it's your own stuff, because you're the only one who cares.

Having stuff in the cloud means that I am at the mercy of the provider and have exactly zero control over what's happening, and I can't fix stuff when it goes wrong. That's too dangerous of a situation for me be comfortable with.

JohnFen

Re: The "Cloud" is great until it's not

"server goes down mysteriously and needs to be troubleshooted for days"

But you'd have replaced that server with a spare very quickly, so those days don't represent downtime.

JohnFen

This is why

This is another example of why I avoid stuff like this like the plague. Anything mission-critical has to be on machines that I actually have access to and control over.

FBI softens stance on ransomware: it's (sort of) okay to pay off crims to get your data back

JohnFen

It's an old dilemma

Do you take a hit in order to further the greater good (or at least in order to avoid increasing the harm to society), or do you take the dog-eat-dog approach and cover your own ass even when doing so increases the harm to everybody else?

While my personal ethics fall strongly on the "take the hit" side, I do also recognize that others may think otherwise.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

JohnFen
Coat

Re: "avoiding registry bloat"

Just like the registry itself.

JohnFen

UWP?

That's me out, then.

Google Maps gets Incognito fig leaf: We'll give you vague peace of mind if you hold off those privacy laws

JohnFen

What made me stop using Google Maps

It was that "personalization" that drove me away from Google Maps, because it drove home the fact that Google was deeply interested in my location, and was sharing it with advertisers (directly or indirectly, it doesn't matter).

This incognito mode thing is woefully insufficient in my view. While my trust in Google is precisely zero these days, even if that weren't the case, this wouldn't be enough to get me to use it again.

Happy fifth birthday, Windows Insiders! We'd bake a cake, but it might explode without warning

JohnFen

Re: "cut down on the borkage"

Not around here. Macbooks are not commonly seen among tech entrepreneurs (of any age) in my part of the woods. As with iPhones (which are also rare here), I suspect that how common they are is dependent on the local culture.

JohnFen

Re: WORST idea MS ever had

"You half-ass do it, pretend to test it, then push it out and let the users suffer through the real testing."

Welcome to the wonderful world of Agile.

(Before Agile proponents jump on me, I'm talking about how it's commonly put into practice, not the platonic ideal.)

Landmark US net neutrality decision reveals that both sides won and lost out

JohnFen

Re: I wish the Internet wasn't so thoroughly controlled by the US

"I've known far too many companies in the US that have been ready to do the bidding of whoever is in charge."

This.

The independence of business in the US is often cited, and equally often overstated. As near as I can see, the US isn't much different than other nations in this regard.

Astronaut Tim Peake reminds everyone about the time Excel mangled his contact list on stage at Microsoft AI event

JohnFen

Re: AI bollocks

"explain to the American's what ANPR was (they have a different name for it)"

Where I live in the US, this is called ANPR. I've also seen it referred to as ALPR (automatic license plate recognition) a lot as well, though.