It has sucked so much lately, with so many security issues, that anything that requires Java has been replaced with something more modern. Just say no to Java!

The first three seconds of the (longer) trailer of the first season lost me with:

LOADHIGH A:/SYS/BIOS

PRINT /D:LPT1 /A:/SYS/BIOS

What the hell is this? TI-RTOS? Nope. CP/M, or its bastardized cousin, PC/DOS? Nope. Sorry - with a name like "Halt and Catch Fire", I'd have expected something better than stupid TV writer gibberish.

It obviously CAN be put back in to service. To put it back in to service in a desirable manner, a lot of work would need to be done. They've decided it's too much work, which is different from saying it cannot be done.

So long as you're just using FiOS for Internet, use your own NAT router (If you're using them for TV, you'll need MoCA for the STBs). Call them up and say this:

I want to switch my ONT from MoCA to ethernet. Please release the hardware lease on my equipment, too. I'm about to connect my new equipment.

That's all you need to do :)

People fetishize PC hardware. Do you NEED to play Crysis at 4K at 90 FPS? No. But people get enjoyment out of trying to get more and more performance. The problem here is that the author is lumping the fetishists in with the regular game players.

Let the fetishists spend their money. Let the rest of the world play at 1080 resolution at 30 FPS.

Oh - Macs don't have three year old hardware. Don't be daft.

Wordpress is designed to be insecure.

There are two simple rules which apply to many things in multi-user computing and, therefore, also to CGI:

Don't allow execution where you can write.
Don't allow writing where you can execute.

Wordpress fails this miserably, which is why Wordpress is the top phishing hosting platform on the planet. They've said that they don't want to change this because they prefer ease to end users over doing things properly. This is a horrible idea because people don't update when things are working, particularly if they know so little that they require this "ease".

In the opinion of many people who AREN'T Wordpress developers, you don't make something both simple AND insecure - you stick with secure, and if that's too complicated for some people, then that should be their problem. Don't foist that insecurity on everyone because of the inabilities of some people.

The solution is simple: set permissions to comply with those two rules. When it's time to install a plugin or do an update from within Wordpress, change the permissions to insecure, Do the update / install the plugin, then set the permissions back.

Do you think the Wordpress people would do this? Hell, no! This is how they push people to pay to host on wordpress.com! "Oh, you're not smart enough to keep your own site secure, so pay to have us do it."

"The researchers note the text (PDF)."

That link was NOT a PDF. Please don't assume that everyone wants to use their browser to read things. That's deceptive. The proper link is:

http://fc16.ifca.ai/preproceed...

Microsoft has smart people, and they say that Autoplay is a FEATURE. Anyone who says otherwise is dumb. Where's your multibillion dollar company to prove you know what you're talking about? Macros that move along with Microsoft Office documents? FEATURE, people. FEATURE.

Seriously, though, mainstream OSes should've had this protection ages ago. The BSDs can be compiled to only recognize certain devices on USB, and, if desired, only the first of each kind (so the keyboard that was recognized at boot can't be "replaced" with a device that appears to be the exact same keyboard).

Come on... Of all the news sites out there, people on this site should be better at using the proper capitalization. They're making 8 gigaBIT chips which will be seen in 128 gigaBYTE DIMMs

I guess you folks didn't get the memo - the Internet doesn't like Flash. But even at a laptop which has Flash, the video still doesn't load.

Would you like help hosting the video?

If the OS and / or applications can't handle a leap second, then it should be fixed. Nothing should ever be changed to make up for the shortcomings of bad code.

Just keep standard UNIX mail spool files locally, if you're worried about it.

Also, a mail server is not physical if it runs under a hypervisor, unless you physically have the box that runs both in your possession. You'll all see - hypervisors will be shown to be manipulated by cloud providers and/or TLA agencies to extract data from virtual machines without the virtual machines' admins knowing anything about it.

GNU, BSD, Linux, et cetera became ubiquitous because they all offer lots of choices. Minimal, text-only OS? Sure. Fancy GUI with special effects? Sure. Headless? Sure. A single, simple ethernet connection to the world? Sure. A multi-interface, multi-homed, routing, NAT and firewall setup? Sure.

Try to take away people's choices, and you're going to piss people off. I don't even run GNU/Linux, but I'm pissed about the mess that is being made to open source software. Now we're going to have to come up with a label for software that depends on systemd, like "systemd encumbered", because it won't be compilable on any other operating system.

Come on - people here should know better. It's 2015 and the "Oooh! Linux sounds cool, so let's use that word for everything!" fad should be over now.

Everything open source is NOT Linux. Linux is a friggin' kernel. This is open source software. It coincidentally gets used with GNU/Linux often. BUT IT'S OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE.

Repeat after me: open source does not mean Linux. Linux does not mean open source.

Assume that everything MIGHT be insecure. Your Internet connection is wide open. Your upstream routers may be controlled by governments. Hard drives might have malicious firmware payloads. Typical PC hardware might have a BIOS that does nefarious things and may have intentional back doors. Your OS and the software you run might have had backdoors introduced.

I personally don't trust anything with the word "cloud". It just means that a ton of people are responsible for it, so if anything goes wrong, there's no specific person to blame. The NSA could and probably does have people working at any given "cloud" provider.

Virtual server hosting is also completely insecure. Hypervisors can be manipulated without you knowing, so even if your OS is 100% secure (obviously nothing is, but for argument's sake), people can read your OS' memory and access your data without you knowing.

If you want to try to keep your data secure, you need your own hardware. Using something completely different helps - a hard drive infected with some form of firmware Trojan won't do any harm to an UltraSPARC or PowerPC machine, for instance. Next, you need to use a minimal OS without the proverbial kitchen sink, which rules out most GNU/Linux distros since they want to include everything. Try a nice BSD where you can compile the entire OS yourself from a local copy of the source tree. Then, compile the OS itself again on the newly compiled and running OS. This reduces the chance that any given toolchain has been compromised. Make sure it's stable and colocate it somewhere that has excellent privacy laws.

Encrypt everything.

While someone could pull a drive (or drives) from your machine and can image them, it's hard to fake uptime on non-mainstream machines, so you'll definitely notice if someone is playing with the hardware.

Don't log in to it from a Windows machine or from any machines you don't control.

If some state actor wanted to spend virtually limitless resources, there's nothing they can't fake, but you can feel pretty secure knowing that your data is most likely safe unless someone cares so much about your data that they're willing to spend a heck of a lot of money and resources.