Whoosh!

Exactly. Only platforms that have UAC are affected. That's the joke.

All you folks still running Windows XP and being told it's a pile of insecure horseshit are vindicated!

There's surely a Nest joke in here somewhere...

I'm in the US and I certainly use it. I'm not an academic or associated with an institution, but have an education in physics and computer science. I maintain a keen interest in several academic topics, and sometimes when I find a paper I want to read and can't find it on an author's website or arxiv.org then Sci-Hub is my go-to. It's ludicrous to want to charge someone $20+ to read a paper, especially when, often times, the research was government-funded. I certainly couldn't afford to do it.

I genuinely hope if this keeps up Sci-Hub goes nuclear and just publishes a few torrents of all the papers. It'd be very Swartzian.

Fortunately, as it stands now in the US I can use the Fifth Amendment as a defense. Regardless, if you are apt to get in much more trouble for what you have in there you can do a few months for contempt standing on your head.

Suppose I use some third-party encryption that is made available anonymously or from another country, so there's no company to compel to reverse it. (Think TrueCrypt, or something from Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Now suppose I plead the fifth and refuse to decrypt it. What then? We start blocking any site that hosts such a thing? Burn books on cryptography? Ban people from running compilers? Code escrow of all source with the NSA on pain of death?

Sure, there's the obligatory XKCD wrench decryption, but otherwise... I'm not sure how this makes a lick of sense.

Fusion power, artificial general intelligence and unicode at Slashdot: three things that will always happen always twenty years in the future, no matter when asked.

(On the plus side it used to be four things, but "Duke Nukem Forever" was finally published so there is some real hope. On the downside, it was really disappointing when it finally came to be, so...)

I understand you have to pay if you don't want it built with the fascist module, for instance.

Not always. For instance, the server sitting in my floor at home -- looking at the vhosts logs I'll often see the same IP try the same skiddy exploit against several (or even every) domain's website hosted on the box before fail2ban drops them in the firewall rules. Since I don't have reverse DNS set up for any of these domains and some (but not all) of them are just third-level subs from domains I have hosted elsewhere it seems a bit more focused than a random scan at times.

I was about to say, it might help fend off at least a few of the random scans I get from China...

Never mind; figured it out. I just needed to run "sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-wily" to grab the kernel.

I have several Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS using the Ubuntu Server distribution. I did an update and tried to do a dist-upgrade / upgrade on a test one and there's nothing to install. Is there a lag until the server distro is updated?

We have a rack-mountable QNAP NAS device that our field support people back up files to when they are rebuilding a workstation. We used 3T Seagates from the compatibility list in it, and I had constant problems; we've replaced them with WD Reds, and the problems have gone away. Now in retrospect, seeing that Seagate drives report SMART events earlier, it makes sense that I had all the problems. The QNAP firmware drops and refuses to reattach any disk to an mdadm array that has SMART errors. Granted, if your data is very important you might want that warning. However, they should still have the data on an existing disk for a while, so I'd rather not be playing musical disks, so if the warnings come late it's all good.

"IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

Agreed. My wife has stopped emptying her purse and carry-on of tweezers, nail clippers, little bottles of make-up, etc. They always let her through because she's the little white woman flying first class, so she must not be dangerous.