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Comment Re:Oh Boy! (Score 1) 120

by Tackhead (#45784611) Attached to: E-Books That Read You

Given the current state of internet-focused writing, with the brutal drive to churn out as much clickbait 'content' as possible as fast as possible, with a side of SEO fuckery, I suspect that adding analytics capabilities to books will... perhaps not... be the most helpful development in literature.

ONE CLEVER TRICK TO SHOW HOW SHALL I LOVE THEE, NEW PARADIGM; LET ME COUNT THE 5 WAYS

1. I can think of no way in which this could possibly compromise the quality of the TITS literary experience.
2. Let us not forget that we are at the forefront BREASTS of a new publishing paradigm.
3. Electronic distribution promises to free BOOBS authors from the shackles of the traditional publishing industry.
4. It's an agile and disruptive way of making JUGS money through the process of creative destruction.

(below the jump)

5. The end.

Submission + - Whatever happened to Sanford "Spamford" Wallace? (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Tackhead
Tackhead writes: People of a certain age — the age before email filters were effective, may remember a few mid-90s buzzwords like "bulletproof hosting" and "double opt-in." People may remember that Hormel itself conceded that although "SPAM" referred to their potted meat product, the term "spam" could refer to unsolicited commercial email. People may also remember AGIS, Cyberpromo, Sanford "Spam King" Wallace and Walt Rines. Ten years after a 2003 retrospective on Rines and Wallace, Ars Technica reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Comment Re:Offshore hosting. Game, set, and match. (Score 4, Insightful) 208

by Tackhead (#45551861) Attached to: UK Gov't Plans To Censor "Extremist" Websites Via Orders To ISPs

er, that's why they are getting ISPs to block the routes to the sites, rather than taking the sites down.

They already forced ISPs to do it for child porn, then the courts enforced blocks on "pirate" sites because the child porn filters proved that it was technically possible, next step (previously announced, due to come in soon) they are forcing every UK ISP to implement porn (_legal_ porn) filters.

And now it's "block stuff that isn't porn/child-porn/illegal-under-copyright-law, but we don't like it anyway". No surprise.

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid=14107454

And the punchline is we're still surprised every time the ratchet turns tighter. Every. Fucking. Time.

Comment Re:Donkey Kong Anyone? (Score 1) 283

by Tackhead (#45436013) Attached to: In an arcade with only the following games ...

The third annual Kong Off will run this Friday through Monday.

Lots of places to play even if you're not competing.

Denver, CO: The 1-Up (official Kong-off location)
New Hampshire: Funspot
Portland, OR: Ground Kontrol
Vegas: Pinball Hall of Fame (might not have Donkey Kong, but it sure is fun.)
SF Bay Area: Pacific Pinball and High Scores, and many more smaller spots.

Who's missing from this list? Where's your town's reboot of the vintage arcade?

Comment Re:They printed off assembler (Score 1) 211

by Tackhead (#45410877) Attached to: Apple II DOS Source Code Released

I remember that. For whatever reason 3d0g would get me out of it. I was just a kid and had no idea what to do with the gibberish that the assembler would spit out at me. I just knew how to get out and back to my prompt.

CALL -151: Think "65536-151" - jump to $FF69, which was the monitor ROM entry point.

3D0G: 0x3D0, "Go": Run the code that DOS put at location $03D0. I believe it was a 4C BF 9D, as in, JMP $9DBF, which was the DOS 3.3 entry point/warm start routine.

Damn, I'm old. After a long and convoluted ride through the IT world, I got to retire early because I spent my early teenage years messing around with that sort of thing. It was pure luck that I got my hands on the right machine at the right time, developed a love of computing at a time when home computers were regarded as nothing more than means to store recipes (mom), do taxes (dad), or play games (kids).

Anyways. Thanks, Apple guyz, for putting a disassembler into ROM. It's only been in the past few years that I realized just how much of an impact that comparatively minor technical decision had on my life.
Cellphones

Leaked Manual Reveals Details On Google's Nexus 5 177

Posted by timothy from the leaked-with-big-old-air-quotes dept.
Features of Google's next Nexus phone have finally been outed, along with confirmation that the phone will be built by LG, as a result of a leaked service manual draft; here are some of the details as described at TechCrunch: "The new Nexus will likely be available in 16 or 32GB variants, and will feature an LTE radio and an 8-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization (there’s no mention of that crazy Nikon tech, though). NFC, wireless charging, and that lovely little notification light are back, too, but don’t expect a huge boost in longevity — it’s going to pack a sealed 2,300mAh battery, up slightly from the 2100mAh cell that powered last year’s Nexus 4. That spec sheet should sound familiar to people who took notice of what happened with the Nexus 4. Just as that device was built from the foundation laid by the LG Optimus G, the Nexus 5 (or whatever it’s going to be called) seems like a mildly revamped version of LG’s G2."

Submission + - (Ex-)CIA analyst writes insider study of Counterterrorism Center

Submitted by guanxi
guanxi writes: (Spoiler: It turns our their jobs are even more bureaucratic as most of ours; in fact, some ask if the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is too large to function efffectively.) CIA analyst and sociology Ph.D. candidate Bridget Nolan suggested to her superiors that she write her dissertation on her workplace. They said no; she said yes; Bridget won. She had to quit the CIA, but now her study is in the public domain. Imagine a workplace where "ordinary conversations ... involve a kind of competitive one-upsmanship, "in which intelligence officers ‘out-correct’ and ‘out-logic’ each other in the course of routine conversation to the point where any increased accuracy in what has been said no longer seems meaningful." Maybe that doesn't take much imagination.

Comment Re:2015: Terminator2 robots created to kill previo (Score 1) 149

by Tackhead (#45036295) Attached to: Unmanned 'Terminator' Robots Kill Jellyfish

This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?

You're looking for Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story Watchbird , via Project Gutenberg. There was a TV adaptation in 2007's Season 1, Episode 6, Masters of Science Fiction.

Great read.

Submission + - Zero Days Are Not the Bugs You're Looking For (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: The use of exploits against zero days, or unpatched vulnerabilities, is nothing new. Attackers have been looking for and using new bugs for as long as there has been software to exploit. What’s changed in recent years is the scale of zero day exploit use and the kind of attackers using them. It used to be mainly individual attackers and some high-end cybercrime groups. But now, zero days are being used by governments, intelligence agencies and state-sponsored attack teams. In the hands of these groups, zero days represent a major threat to the targeted organizations, most of whom can’t keep pace with the patches coming out for known bugs, let alone defend against attacks on zero days.
“There’s no red button you can push to make this go away. This is going to go on and on and on,” Andreas Lindh of I Secure n Sweden said in a talk at Virus Bulletin 2013 here Wednesday. “We need to get our priorities straight. What I’m suggesting is that we get back to basics rather than buying more tools. The tools we have work pretty well when you use them correctly. We actually have really good tools. We need to start focusing on what matters, what really matters.”

Lindh said that the old concept of defense in depth, which has been ridiculed in some corners in recent years, still holds up in most cases if organizations implement their technology correctly and don’t sit back and expect miracles. One key to succeeding more often than not against high-level attackers, he said, is to harden the software we all depend on through the use of technologies such as ASLR and DEP, which prevent many common memory corruption attacks. The number of ways that attackers can get into systems has decreased in the last few years, Lindh said.

Submission + - Voyager 1 May Be Caught Inside an Interstellar Flux Transfer Event (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Last month, NASA declared that Earth's most distant probe had finally left the Solar System. But the announcement may now turn out to be premature. It was prompted by a dramatic increase in the density of plasma in the region of space the spacecraft is now in. However, there has been no change in the local magnetic field, which is what astrophysicists would expect if Voyager had entered interstellar space. Instead, space scientists think the probe may be caught inside a magnetic portal known as an interstellar flux transfer event. This occurs when the magnetic fields from two different objects briefly become connected through a tube-like magnetic structure. This process happens between the Earth and Sun’s magnetic field about every eight minutes, so similar events are expected between the Sun's field and the interstellar field. This magnetic tube would allow particles in from outside the Solar System, increasing the density of plasma, while maintaining the same magnetic field. If so, Voyager 1 hasn't yet left the Solar System after all.

Comment Re:Constructive Criticism (Score 1) 1191

by Tackhead (#45011911) Attached to: Come Try Out Slashdot's New Design (In Beta)

I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.

Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to, and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.

12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.

This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere. Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.

Thank you, /., for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time), but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website.

Good luck in your future endeavors.

Signing off, Tackhead (#54550)
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.

(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)

Comment Re:You've broken comments; BADLY (Score 1) 69

by Tackhead (#45011857) Attached to: You're Invited: Take a Look At Slashdot's New Beta

So what's the plan going forward? I've had a couple of hours to cool down and formulate my objections more objectively.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to, and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.

12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.

This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere. Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.

Thank you for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time), but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website. Good luck in your future endeavors, but if there's no D1/D2 preservation, I'm afraid I won't be riding this train to wherever it's going.

Signing off,
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.

(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)

Submission + - Dice Ruins Slashdot (slashdot.org) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to modernize Slashdot, Dice has removed everything that made Slashdot unique and worthwhile and has turned it into a generic blog site. User feedback has been unanimously negative, but this is to no avail, and users will have to head elsewhere for insightful and entertaining commentary on tech news.

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