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Comment Re:Ho-lee-crap (Score 3, Informative) 275

It wasn't long ago that South Korea wasn't so advanced, and Daewoo was corrupt.

The national identity has been trying to raise standards in everything, but it still has horrible reminders of its recent past. The Sewoul disaster where hundreds died needlessly, the subway crash where 200 people died, the recent collapse of a sidewalk grate where 16 concert goers just... died.

By "national identity" I mean the health, safety and anticorruption standards are considered part of the national identity and distinct from the standards of many neighbouring countries.

In the past 20 years Korea has been rebuilding everything and has good standards. These stories are making the country obsessive over safety and quality, but there's still junk from the recent past, or people who are wrapped in nepotism and corruption who shouldn't be responsible for anything involving public safety, but can't be removed.

As long as the ship builders are not part of that past, then it's a boon for the country and another milestone for Korea's advancement.

Comment Re:Hardly surprising (Score 1) 249

haha, sorry to hit a nerve.

I'm speaking from the marketer's perspective, and totally hypothetically. I'm pretty sure I've got what you're saying: you want nothing to do with them because they've already violated your trust.

They're already keeping a profile on you. It's probably renewing with your IP and cookies and not actually linked to your identity. You're already contributing to your profile by blocking ads. You've said to them that their medium is so offensive and useless to you that you're doing everything in your power to avoid it.

They know there are lots of people who do this. Right now your search results are tainted with SEO crap and reviews are stacked with shills. The advertisers are trashing your information sources to try to sell you stuff. The only reason you would buy anything from them would be because you couldn't find the information you were looking for and took a shot at thier product out of frustration.

It's only a matter of time before the ad blockers stop working. Many ads are already included as part of the content and are difficult to filter. Some sites detect adblockers and refuse to show their content. It's not technically complex to circumvent all adblockers. Don't serve the ads from the CDN, but instead have the server embed it in the CMS, and randomize some of the content.

I'm just suggesting that they may have never lost your trust if they gave you good content about their products rather than limiting themselves to car-commercial and magazine-like mindless impressions.

Comment Re:Hardly surprising (Score 3, Interesting) 249

IMHO, this should be part of your profile. When it comes time for you to purchase something, instead of getting some flashy ad in your face, you would get a pile of specs veted by a third party.

If the product doesn't stand up to comparison in the specs, then they shouldn't bother advertising to you. If the product does stand up, it's an easy sell and well worth the effort for them to send you the ad.

Instead... sadly, they send you crap and you fight to tell them that you're not interested in their jingle, bluster or shiny copy.

Comment Re:Headline does not match subject (Score 4, Interesting) 34

You get administrative rights, it's in the Checkpoint report in the article: http://www.checkpoint.com/blog...

Analysis by Check Point security researchers revealed how this particular vulnerability could be exploited by attackers:
1.The bug enables unknown users to gain administrative privileges
2.By using these admin credentials, attackers can then view and edit private and undisclosed bug details. Software bug tracking data is typically closely guarded as it exposes software vulnerabilities and known issues
3.Furthermore, this access allows attackers to exploit design weaknesses, or even irreversibly destroy bug data, slowing down development

And have info about their disclosure:

September 29th – Vulnerability discovered and verified by Check Point security researchers
September 30th – Report submitted to the Bugzilla team
September 30th – Acknowledgement and confirmation of vulnerability and severity received by Mozilla
September 30th – Bugzilla team privately shared preliminary patch with prominent Bugzilla installations
October 6th – Security advisory and final patch released

The Checkpoint article is a lot more professional than the Krebs article No jabs at FOSS either.

This looks like a major company which uses FOSS (IIRC, SPLAT is a Linux-based-platform) made a contribution in discovering a vulnerability in common software.

Comment Hospitality (Score 1) 278

This shit is why I strongly prefer AirBnB or other alternative forms of hospitality.

I was at a hotel in London and found out that "Free wifi" meant it was freely available to reach the paid gateway. Sleezery seems to be in all large chains in large cities. You would think the high premium on staying there, and the economy of scale of the size of the hotel would mean that it's easier to provide good service to guests.

By contrast, with AirBnB you'll probably get secure, unrestricted residential wifi, or even an ethernet jack to plug into. Sure you might not, and you might not get a clean place. But there's no guarantee of cleanliness at the Mariott either, and you're certain not to get a free Internet connection.

Comment Videos... (Score 2) 97

"Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job"

Access request procedures change very fast and are tedious to contribute updates to.

Videos have a high friction to update. Out of date docmentation is worse than no documentation at all.

Wikis have a low friction to update. Even the new hire can fix things as they execute the procedures.

I don't know why people would use videos, but then I also think that videos are terrible learning tools. But then, maybe it's just me, there are some strong visual learners out there.

Comment Re:Curved Phones (Score 3, Informative) 421

It's a contradiction I guess. A really good design looks obvious.

...and a company which purports to support creativity, and feels so strongly about rounded rectangles that they introduce them as a graphic primitive on early systems (per Isaacson?), sues another company for daring to use rounded rectangles.

I hope they get sued for infringing on Samsung's design. Samsung went out of their way to find a way to make something equally effective, distinct non-obvious but obvious looking. Now Apple seems to think their screen size and aspects of design are obvious.

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