OK Brits, any other vowels you feel like tossing in there?!
Ever hear the expression "yesterday's news"?
That was a brand of cat litter I used about 20 years ago, it was made out of recycled newspaper and I always liked the name. Looks like they still make it, I wonder how long before it gets discontinued due to a lack of raw materials.
MM's, the good old days!
Yes, NSA is now arguing that metadata should be private. Go figure.
On 10 October 1994, Opera CTO Hakon Lie posted a proposal for Cascading HTML style sheets.
How come?
Sorry, someone had to do it.
"Ebola is scary. It's a deadly disease. But we know how to stop it."
Full stop, that's it. Quit worrying. For better or for worse, the United States is not eastern Africa. We cannot and will not have a massive epidemic here. A coworker of mine died from H1N1 "swine flu" a few years back. RIP Dusty. Swine flu was a valid health concern, it was something to be alarmed about and take extraordinary precautions against. Ebola is not.
Media's doing what media does, hyping and scaring to rake in eyeballs and sell their advertisements.
And adding to the list, Windows does it as well. It's called Network Connection Status Indicator.
NCSI is designed to respond to changes in network conditions, and examines the status of a network connection in a variety of ways. First it uses an active probe to determine the status. For example, in an active probe NCSI tests connectivity by trying to reach http://www.msftncsi.com/ a simple Web site that exists only to support the functionality of NCSI. Eventually, as other programs begin generating Internet traffic, NCSI switches to a passive monitoring process that assumes responsibility for detecting changes to the network status.
Every time a network configuration event occurs (meaning that something has changed in the network configuration), the NCSI process performs several tests to identify the network's connectivity status. The first step NCSI performs is a DNS query for www.msftncsi.com. The second step is and HTTP get request for http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.t.... This file is a plain-text file and contains only the text "Microsoft NCSI." Last it will perform a DNS query for dns.msftncsi.com.
The URLs used by NCSI can be changed via Group Policy, i.e. you can have it check for the presence of some local server, so that it doesn't bug the shit out of users on a network without external connectivity. Several weeks ago, Microsoft was having global DNS troubles, and many users reported seeing the "trouble" icon in the tray even though their internet connection was working just fine; the problem was that msftncsi.com wasn't resolving. Whoops.
You think a fake Facebook account is bad, how about having a cop take over your ID and use it to become a stripper! In 2003, Ohio law enforcement agents "appropriated" a woman's drivers license and SSN, and assigned them to an undercover officer who went to work as a stripper for 3 months as part of a sting operation on strip clubs. And the victim in that case hadn't been arrested for (nor consented to) a damn thing.
Pointing to a 2002 change in Ohio's law aimed at fighting identity theft, [the prosecutor] said police are allowed to assume anyone's identity as long as it's part of an investigation.
Fucking outrageous. Law enforcement in the US is out of control and has been so for quite some time.
I can't help but think that there's more to this story. I hate Comcast and it's fun to rail on them, but there's no proof yet that they've done anything horrible here. What appears to have happened is that a customer used his position (or knowledge he gained through his position) at work to escalate his own personal billing issue to someone at Comcast who had zero to do with the situation, and it backfired. Until or unless the recording of the phone call is made public, nobody really knows what went down and everything else is useless speculation.
There are plenty of 100% legitimate, proven reasons to hate Comcast. This might not be one of them.
Presumably this is about searching with a warrent.
Which is fine. They can still get a warrant. If they think John Doe is a suspect in a kidnapping, they can go swear an affidavit before a judge and get a warrant to search John Doe's stuff, including his phone. Nothing has changed there. If John Doe isn't too cooperative, that may present an inconvenience, but it's not one that didn't already exist back before Apple or Google announced their intent to encrypt things. Where, or even whether, encryption happens has zero to do with warrants.
So why would the government suddenly be upset if nothing has changed with regards to warrants?
Because lately they aren't getting warrants.
They've become accustomed to going on all sorts of extrajudicial fishing expeditions, whether that's digging through troves of data illegally intercepted by the NSA, or seizing and offloading the contents of peoples' phones without any legal basis, etc. What rustles their jimmies is that now they'll have to actually get a warrant for John Doe and his phone, as opposed to just sending some dubious administrative subpoena over to Apple.
DuckDuckGo doesn't save search history
According to whom, and what reason do you have to trust them? I'm not sure where you are, but for me, duckduckgo.com resolves to an IP on Amazon AWS and is hosted in the United States. These days I have no choice but to operate under the assumption that any server in the US is logging everything, whether by choice or under force of some secret court order from the US government. Giant providers like Amazon in particular. Unlike Lavabit, they can't afford to just shut everything down when presented with a dubious government demand.
In the meantime you might look at QuickEdit mode for the command prompt, if you haven't already. I've spent so much time in PuTTY over the years that I've grown accustomed to right-click being paste when I'm in a shell. This also works in cmd if you set it to use QuickEdit mode (having to hit Enter to copy a selection is just plain unintuitive, though).
It's not really a feature of Windows if you have to use a third-party utility, is it? That's like saying Napster has been a feature of Windows since 2000.
Pants are optional, but recommended for you.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.