There are basically only three decoders that cover most of the market: Microsoft's DirectShow filter, libavcodec / libavformat, and QuickTime. Hardware decode doesn't help much, because you still have the same software path as everyone else doing the de-encapsulation and file parsing, which is where the exploitable bugs often show up. If you have vulnerabilities in each of these then it's not generally hard to hide them all in the same file, as the codecs aim to be resilient to corrupted data so will usually just drop a frame or two for the exploits aimed at the other implementations.

Oh, and libavcodec / libavformat are used in Android (and in a lot of iOS apps, as AVFoundation doesn't always expose useful APIs), as well as in desktop browsers, so they're a pretty good target to aim for.

How does that prevent Facebook from building a profile of you? The only way to avoid that is block all Facebook like buttons, never visit the Facebook site, and make sure that your account has no friends.

People who think a fake name on Facebook protects them from any of the privacy invasion really haven't been paying attention to the last decade of data mining. The reason Facebook no longer cares if you register with a fake name is that they've been able, with very high accuracy, to get your real name and address without your providing it for a few years.

I had a lot of sympathy for people on Facebook 4-5 years ago. After several years of repeated stories in the mainstream press about privacy violations, anyone who still has an account is guilty of wilful stupidity.

What secure OS do you run where the video codecs have had a full security review? Google found (and fixed) around 300 exploitable holes in libavcodec / libavformat in the last year. Do you want to bet that they found them all? Do you always run video codecs in an unprivileged process?

And yet the contents of the tweet made it into the Slashdot summary, quoting from the Huffington Post article. It's no doubt now been posted by other news outlets. How many people do you think would have seen some idiot's tweet, verses the number that will now see it quoted in the news?

Surely we should start with ping and then add Pong?

Huh? I guess that's true if you go back to the ancient greek Olympics (although the winners would rarely actually join the army). The modern olympics had competitions including poetry and sculpture when it began.

Hansard proceedings are now online. I wonder if this gives us grounds to sue all of the MPs that voted for this particular bit of legislation.

They only give you the free copy for the photo of the cover for public domain books. If you want to read these, install FBReader (which has a nice search interface for various online collections) and don't waste time with this app. To get copies of in-copyright books, you need to deface the copyright page. If you can do that in a book shop without having to buy the book, then you live somewhere with very tolerant shopkeepers...

I already have an app that catalogues the books I own by reading the bar code (which contains the ISBN in most cases). It takes a couple of seconds on my cheap phone (Moto G) to scan each bar code - it takes longer to look them up in a DB. Why would I want to use an app that relies on being able to recognise a cover, which is both more computationally expensive and less reliable (several of the books I own have had a dozen or so different covers for different printings - try looking at all of the covers an Agatha Christie novel has had over the years sometime)?

Ah, so I have to deface my books and take two pictures (one of the copyright page, one of the cover)? No thanks.

The ear follows the rules Nyquist created about sample rates (i.e. there are hairs in your ear that are turned to hear 40 kHz but you can't hear that high). There is no reason the eye can't be doing the same thing.

They are using an ethernet solution over fiber so the next steps above 10 are 40 and 100 gig. This is what you can do when you roll out a data network and not an overgrown cable tv network like all the xPON and FTTH, FTTP networks we keep hearing about.

This paper was published at ISCA in June and on Soylent News earlier today (or possibly yesterday). Why is it suddenly being circulated six months after publication? Someone trying to promote ECC memory?