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Comment Re:Wait, what? (Score 2) 236

But those only work in FireFox. If you really want to increase your privacy, add those hostnames to your hosts file. Mine contains ~131k tracker/adserver hosts mapped to 0.0.0.0 (there's even about a dozen for facebook). This doesn't just drop the served mal-content, it prevents requests to those hosts at the system level for all browsers or other software.

As a consequence I rarely see any ads on the internet and my browser ad-blocking/privacy plugins have a very light workload.

Comment jQuery is not JavaScript (Score 1) 293

Stop trying to say that it is. It happens with Node, Angular, and other stuff to a lesser extent, but jQuery seems to be the de facto JS gap-filler that everyone insists is part of core JS skills.

But even worse are the feckless noobs who say they don't know JS, but know jQuery instead. That's like saying "I don't know English, but I know its verbs."

Comment Re:Waiting on the Raspi (Score 1) 133

Yeah, I don't get why every Win10 post has to mention rPi. I understand MS wants a seat on the IoT hype train, but I don't see how the current Win10 rPi strategy will get them that. Especially since what they showed last month was basically useless.

I don't want Windows on my Pi's, I don't understand why anyone would. Unless Win10 rPi ends up being a headless, SSH-enabled PowerShell environment. I understand the draw of PowerShell for Windows people (because they know nothing better), but it seems morbidly bloated, heavy, and verbose to me.

Submission + - Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account (seclists.org) 2

vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that the Sourceforge Nmap account was hijacked from him.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in pattern mirroring the much discussed the takeover of GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week Slashdot.

That happens after Sourceforge promises to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects. At this time, we present third party offers only with a few projects where it is explicitly approved by the project developer, or if the project is already bundling third party offers."

To their credit Fyodor states that "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files (as long as you don't click on the fake download buttons) and we haven't caught them trojaning Nmap the way they did with GIMP" but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html"

Submission + - SF Says AdWare Bundled with Gimp Is Intentional (google.com) 5

tresf writes: In response to a Google+ post from the Gimp project claiming that "[Sourceforge] is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP", Sourceforge had this response:

In cases where a project is no longer actively being maintained, SourceForge has in some cases established a mirror of releases that are hosted elsewhere. This was done for GIMP-Win.

Editor's note: Gimp is actively being maintained and the definition of "mirror" is quite misleading here as a modified binary is no longer a verbatim copy. Download statistics for Gimp on Windows show SourceForge as offering over 1,000 downloads per day of the Gimp software. In an official response to this incident, the official Gimp project team reminds users to use official download methods. Slashdotters may remember the last time news like this surfaced (2013) when the Gimp team decided to move downloads from SourceForge to their own FTP service.

Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page.

Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.

Comment Could, but not for most (Score 2) 170

Games could be prep for programming, but not for most of the very few who realize "Games are programs... I could write them, too".

Most of them will still lack logic, critical thinking, and math skills necessary for even most basic programming, let alone the often complex tasks required in modern games. Let's face it, we're not talking about simple games, we're talking about FPS games. Say "rendering engine", "frame buffer", "shader", or "vector" to them, and their eyes glaze over in sudden confusion and disinterest. The games they'd want to make don't give an accurate impression of what it takes to produce them, and the video card specs they obsess over are just numbers to them. Aside from that, there are many distinct roles involved with producing a game, which they could realize if they ever bothered to look at the game's credits.

Sure, there are "game programming" degrees available, but to me they sound pretty crap, with more focus on visuals than code. I know someone who got that degree from DeVry, and they didn't cover threading or networking. He came out as more of a digital artist than a programmer.

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