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Piracy

Rightscorp's New Plan: Hijack Browsers Until Infingers Pay Up 376

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the guilty-until-proven-guilty dept.
A few weeks ago, Rightscorp announced plans to have ISPs disconnect repeat copyright infringers. mpicpp (3454017) wrote in with news that Rightscorp announced during their latest earnings call further plans to require ISPs to block all web access (using a proxy system similar to hotel / college campus wifi logins) until users admit guilt and pay a settlement fine (replacing the current system of ISPs merely forwarding notices to users). Quoting TorrentFreak: [Rightscorp] says 75,000 cases have been settled so far with copyright holders picking up $10 from each. ... What is clear is that Rightscorp is determined to go after "Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cable Vision and one more" in order to "get all of them compliant" (i.e forwarding settlement demands). The company predicts that more details on the strategy will develop in the fall, but comments from COO & CTO Robert Steele hint on how that might be achieved. ... "[What] we really want to do is move away from termination and move to what's called a hard redirect, like, when you go into a hotel and you have to put your room number in order to get past the browser and get on to browsing the web." The idea that mere allegations from an anti-piracy company could bring a complete halt to an entire household or business Internet connection until a fine is paid is less like a "piracy speeding ticket" and more like a "piracy wheel clamp", one that costs $20 to have removed.
Businesses

Microsoft's Windows 8 App Store Is Full of Scamware 188

Posted by samzenpus from the needs-a-cleaning dept.
Deathspawner writes Windows 8 brought a lot to the table, with one of its most major features being its app store. However, it's not a feature that Microsoft seems too intent on keeping clean. As it is today, the store is completely littered with misleading apps and outright scamware. The unfortunate thing is that to find any of it, all you have to do is simply open the store and peruse the main sections. Not so surprisingly, no Microsoft software seems to be affected by this, but many open-source apps can be found at the store from unofficial sources that have a cost, or will lead the user to download a third-party installer. It's only a matter of time before malware sneaks its way in, if it's not there already.
Facebook

Facebook Tests "Satire" Tag To Avoid Confusion On News Feed 131

Posted by samzenpus from the I-can't-tell-up-from-down dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In an attempt to keep you from having to explain to your crazy relatives that despite what they read, Vice President Biden *didn't* get a grow light delivered to the White House under a fake name, Facebook is testing a "satire" tag on news feeds. A Facebook representative issued the following statement to Ars Technica: "We are running a small test which shows the text '[Satire]' in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed. This is because we received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units."
Power

Is Storage Necessary For Renewable Energy? 442

Posted by samzenpus from the on-the-fly dept.
mdsolar writes Physicist and energy expert Amory Lovins, chief scientist at The Rocky Mountain Institute, recently released a video in which he claims that renewable energy can meet all of our energy needs without the need for a fossil fuel or nuclear baseload generation. There's nothing unusual about that — many people have made that claim — but he also suggests that this can be done without a lot of grid-level storage. Instead, Lovins describes a "choreography" between supply and demand, using predictive computer models models to anticipate production and consumption, and intelligent routing to deliver power where it's needed. This "energy dance," combined with advances in energy efficiency, will allow us to meet all of our energy needs without sacrificing reliability.

Comment Re:Defining subsets of C++ (Score 1) 427

by DickBreath (#47673569) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Bjarne Stroustrup About Programming and C++
While I personally like to deeply understand the languages I program in, I don't think it should be necessary for an average programmer to have to understand the entire language specification in order to use the language.

If you can't just grab some code online and expect it to work on your compiler, then this is a major design fail in the language.

I can understand a language having unspecified aspects, poorly specified aspects, or things that are well specified to act in a compiler defined manner. However those should be extremely obscure features that an average programmer, and average code would never use.

Even better, don't have any compiler dependent behavior in a language. Compiler extensions should be okay -- and they, by design, should cause a compile time error on a different compiler -- or alternately have a way of being ignored so you can stack compiler specific blocks together in a single source file. Although having a source file that only supports a specific list of compilers also seems like a bad idea.

I'm glad it is not an issue in the languages I use.

Comment Re:Why is C++ such an utter pile of shit? (Score 3, Funny) 427

by DickBreath (#47672115) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Bjarne Stroustrup About Programming and C++
There are optimizations you can use to improve your experience with C and C++.

Just insert these into your header files for both time and space improvements in your compiled code.

#define struct union; // uses less memory
#define while if; // makes code run faster

Now how can you say bad things about a language that is so easily improved?

Comment Re:How do you feel about the haters? (Score 2) 427

by DickBreath (#47672085) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Bjarne Stroustrup About Programming and C++
> . . . all of this passion only exists because people are using ${SOMETHING}.

I feel passionate about SCO (in a strongly negative way), but not because they are important, popular, or their products widely used. I feel passionate about Clojure (in a positive way) despite that it is not presently one of the top programming languages. How many people use something can be irrelevant to the legitimate reasons people feel passionately about it.

Comment Re:Thanks Edward. (Score 5, Insightful) 207

Blaming Snowden for NSA abuses is like blaming Al Gore for Global Warming.

It is shooting the messenger.

If that messenger didn't tell us, some other messenger would have sooner or later. It was inevitable.

People only keep secrets (like global warming) when they feel it is their patriotic duty to do so for love of country. When they see widespread abuse, contrary to the values of a democracy, little or no oversight, and their peers feel the same way, it is inevitable that somebody is going to blow the whistle about global warming. If it hadn't been Snowden, it would have been someone else, eventually. This was never going to stay secret forever.
Security

Study: Firmware Plagued By Poor Encryption and Backdoors 141

Posted by Soulskill from the how-the-sausage-is-made dept.
itwbennett writes: The first large-scale analysis of firmware has revealed poor security practices that could present opportunities for hackers probing the Internet of Things. Researchers with Eurecom, a technology-focused graduate school in France, developed a web crawler that plucked more than 30,000 firmware images from the websites of manufacturers including Siemens, Xerox, Bosch, Philips, D-Link, Samsung, LG and Belkin. In one instance, the researchers found a Linux kernel that was 10 years out of date bundled in a recently released firmware image. They also uncovered 41 digital certificates in firmware that were self-signed and contained a private RSA encryption key and 326 instances of terms that could indicate the presence of a backdoor.
Government

Floridian (and Southern) Governmental Regulations Are Unfriendly To Solar Power 306

Posted by timothy from the texas-seems-ok-about-this dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a story in the LA Times: "Few places in the country are so warm and bright as Mary Wilkerson's property on the beach near St. Petersburg, Fla., a city once noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 768-day stretch of sunny days. But while Florida advertises itself as the Sunshine State, power company executives and regulators have worked successfully to keep most Floridians from using that sunshine to generate their own power. Wilkerson discovered the paradox when she set out to harness sunlight into electricity for the vintage cottages she rents out at Indian Rocks Beach. She would have had an easier time installing solar panels, she found, if she had put the homes on a flatbed and transported them to chilly Massachusetts. While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business."

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