Probably out of embarrassment. It may be called the Airlander but Flying Buttcrack

would be a better name. If that thing was flesh-coloured instead of white it'd be on porn sites.

I was rather shocked when I first ran Firefox on Android, I was expecting,well, Firefox, but what I got was some massively dumbed-down piece of junk that was worse than a range of no-name Android-only browsers from vendors I'd never heard of before. I eventually went with one of them, and at one point submitted a bug report. Within a few hours I had a reply, and a fix. It was everything Firefox should be, but isn't.

I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.3, but none of my mobile devices runs it, and desktop is only hanging on because of all the plugins (of which, admittedly, about half are installed just to undo all the crap they've done to the browser in the last few years).

Still, at least they're hard at work on Firefox OS, which is what the market has been crying out for.

If the next step involves me stroking your magic wand, I'm outta here...

Oh gawd, this obviously means that Firefox will have to make the same change in their Chrome-clone browser. I dread it every time Google makes a change because I know it'll be in the next release of Chromefox...

It does seem pretty straightforward, I mean, they're Italian, a few guys carrying violin cases turn up, badabing, badabang (mostly badabang), problem solved.

You can't. The title should have read "MIT Publishes Paper Discussing Alleged Integer Overflow Debugger That You'll Never Be Able to Get Your Hands On".

(Incidentally, this isn't the first paper on a tool like this. None of the tools have ever been released for general use, although you can occasionally find buggy, research-prototype level code somewhere. I played with one a year or two ago, after several hours of rewriting their code to try and get it working on something other than the one specific configuration of some old Linux distro they tried it with I gave up).

At least part of the fault lies in the TLS standard and standards process itself. While TLS includes extensive processes for adding new mechanisms of all types to the protocol (and dear God has there been a mountain of crap shovelled in there over the years), there's no procedure whatsoever for taking things out (apart from the very ad-hoc "ZOMG THE SKY IS FALLING TELL EVERYONE NOT TO USE THIS ANY MORE" approach). So the single biggest step towards fixing these problems (there's many of them) is to build in some way of removing these ancient, flaw-riddled mechanisms.

You'd think that after President Clark did that with the planetary defense grid, any new deployments would have safety interlocks to prevent it from happening again.

Check your spam folder for many messages from providers who'd be more than happy to register a .cn for you. They'll also sell you bulletproof hosting if you need it.

So the last sentence in the summary should have read "We've heard time and time again how insecure passwords are, and Microsoft is aiming to replace them with a password-equivalent where you can never change your password when it's compromised, you leave copies of it on everything you touch (or look at), and which can be defeated with a bit of gelatin or a printout of a photo".

Yay, Microsoft!

While I don't agree with the OP, it does seem to be gratuitous bashing of Cruz. AFAIK what he's pointing out is that NASA was chartered to explore space (the NOAA, not NASA, was chartered to do climate research), and yet in my entire lifetime, apart from the 1970s-era Space Shuttle, the only thing of note they've managed to do in this area is launch a few remote/robot probes. Holy fsck, this is an organisation with an $18 billion/year budget that's done basically nothing to further getting mankind into space since the Apollo program ended over forty years ago. They've been busy dicking around with various expensive toys for the last several decades, cancelling one pie-in-the-sky project after another, and presumably will be relying on some of their huge budget to eventually rent room on Russian, or Chinese, or Indian, or whoever else gets there, missions to the moon or Mars.

Looked at another way, if some pro-science senator came along and told them to get their s**t together, would there be such an outcry?

Installing Window Blinds and Start8 as a one-off doesn't seem terribly cumbersome, and then you have the UI that Microsoft should have given you in the first place (best ever response to this was taking my laptop in to Microsoft and having a MS person staring over my shoulder and eventually asking "what is that and where can I get it too").

Exactly (no mod points left, sorry). Auditing OpenSSL makes about as much sense as auditing Windows 95, we already know it's broken beyond repair, and any further effort expended on it is just throwing good money after bad. Focus on something that's worth going with, like LibreSSL, or something that was never OpenSSL to begin with.

Same here. I have an Atmos clock, which is entirely mechanical. You're supposed to get it serviced every 30 years (mine has just gone in for its second service, the first in the time I've owned it). The standard models are meant to run for about 400 years, the fancier ones like the du Millenaire are calibrated out to 3000 AD, although I'm not sure whether civilisation will still be around then if something goes wrong.

I'll bet the $10,000 Apple watch will be a piece of expensive inanimate jewellery long before my clock goes in for its third servicing.

Had an interesting discussion about this with some fellow geeks over steak recently, one of them proposed firing the bottom 80% of all your developers. Reason: Not only are they not contributing much that's useful, they are in fact a negative input on productivity since the other 20% who are useful have to go round cleaning up the mess they make.

I'm not sure if it's 80% (I'd say maybe 50%), but I know too many situations like this, where the clueless/incompetent are not only not doing anything useful but actively preventing the competent from getting their work done.

(The problem, which was pointed out at the time, is identifying who the incompetent 50% are. Many of them are where they are today because they know how to manipulate the system, rather than because they're any good at what they do).