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Comment systemd hatred (Score 4, Insightful) 403

I don't understand the blatent systemd pushing. Reasons for disliking it vary but don't really matter, because its adoption will force a *lot* of people who don't want it to either suffer through it or suffer through migration to another OS. That is reason enough not to adopt it. Trying to discredit people's reasons for disliking it is presumptuous, pointless, and rather stupid.

Comment Perl as an example of what, now? (Score 1) 581

Perl is hardly an example of improvement. Its widespread usage despite its fundamental flaws has given us a large body of software that is often entrenched and almost always a maintenance nightmare. I hope our OS distribution maintainers have the sense not to repeat that mistake with our init system.

Comment Apply to be Whitelisted (Score 1) 405

Facing a similar problem a couple of years ago, I discovered that yahoo provides email filters not only for its webmail users, but also for several other companies. They have a procedure for requesting an exemption from their filters. It took a couple of tries, but I eventually got my server accepted. Here's the form:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yah...

Comment Not only in politics (Score 2) 282

I've observed the same behavior in software development, particularly in the open source world. Some project maintainers are happy to have people helping by reporting the problems they find, while others will deny that a problem exists (and sometimes go as far as trying to discredit the reporter) if they don't happen to be affected/bothered by it. I guess inconvenient truths are hard for some people to accept.

Comment Against it! It has no benefits. (Score 1) 613

As far as I can tell, there has never been any statistically significant evidence that redefining time twice a year saves any energy, or has any other net benefit at all.

Meanwhile, it continually wastes the time of people who have to deal with the problems that it causes; moreso than ever since the world started depending on computers, and since international interactions have become common.

Just get rid of it, please. Forcibly playing games with people's clocks in the name of pretending that seasons don't exist is just stupid. Let businesses adopt winter hours if they want to align with daylight.

Comment Frighteningly Dangerous (Score 1) 165

So it's basically carte blanche for anyone with a job in in politics, law enforcement, or prosecution to destroy the life of anyone they choose, based on nothing more than conjecture. Does anyone else find this frightening? Would the dangers of this idea be more obvious if the words "computer users" or "hackers" were replaced with the word "people"?

Comment Alternatives (Score 1) 286

I ran into that same problem with Skype's latest release. Rather than giving Pulse a fourth chance to burn me, I decided it might be time to give WebRTC a try.

I'm so glad I did. OS-independent browser-to-browser video chat worked fine. I used Chromium on linux while my friend used Chrome on OSX. The latest Firefox release supposedly supports h.264, so it might work as well. Here are a couple of call set-up sites in case you'd like to try it for yourself:

https://opentokrtc.com/

https://vline.com/

Comment Re:OpenID and OAuth (Score 1) 549

So your answer is "trust the user".

No, my answer is that we are already trusting the user, a password authentication system cannot ever be more secure than that trust, and neither system can solve the problems upon which you based your assertion.

That's okay. I don't need to draw this out any further. I just wanted to unerstand how you came to your conclusion, and now I believe I do.

Comment Re:OpenID and OAuth (Score 1) 549

"Very few sites (even tiny web forums and such) are willing to trust arbitrary 3rd party."

Those sites wouldn't be trusting a third party; they would be trusting the user. Specifically, they would be trusting the user not to delegate his identity to an impostor-friendly provider, just as they are now trusting the user not to re-use his password on any site that will some day have a database leak or cleartext login form. Anyone who thinks his onsite auth buys him greater security than OpenID either has some magic way to force people into choosing unique passwords, or is sadly mistaken. I'll let you guess which is more likely. :)

I'm curious where you got the "very few" metric. Anecdotal evidence? A study with a large and diverse sample size? If you have some study results, I'd like to bookmark them. I guess it would just go to show that very few admins have a good understanding of overall security.

"There are other problems, like ensuring unique, non-spam/bot users, that can't be done with remote authentication"

Local password authentication can't solve those problems either. Bot and spam problems are solved by other means, like captchas and request rate throttles. Sane sites do this when an account is created, not every time a known-good user wants to log in. Some really careful sites take additional steps during login (like click/request/response timing), but those steps are invisible to the user and can be applied regardless of whether a local password is used.

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