There have been several reports of Bitcoin users that use online wallets and exchanges, even over https, getting MITM attacked when using Tor. They visit the wallet site, get bad certificates but continue anyway, and poof, their Bitcoins in the service are gone and their passwords are known by the attacker. With recent SSL vulnerabilities or clever redirection, the cert errors could be avoided also. For other sites, users can be piped through a "universal phisher" to steal any credentials.

Clearly Tor users are under attack by exit nodes, many of them running automated tools against many web destinations.

If you want a significantly modernized UI that hasn't been designed for dummies, have a look at KDE Plasma 5. Kubuntu was simultaneously released in 14.10 flavor, and there are tech preview ISOs available now with the new desktop. It has a new wallpaper, also.

It works as designed, however it works against the interest of the user. A perfect example is the unmovable and unremovable search button next to the start button that opens Bing search. Just like on Windows phones with a physical search button made useless because it cannot be configured to do anything but open Bing, this is just another operating system iteration that does what Microsoft wants, users be damned.

The best reply and what every user actually wants: "be Windows 7 after I disable all the bloat and UI garbage, libraries, and homegroup cruft you put on that OS".

Centurylink (which in this territory acquired Qwest, which was the local baby bell USWest after the AT&T breakup) does their own slimy anti-competitive tricks with their monopoly.

While DSL providers were required to allow third-party ISPs as a choice to customers (where the copper is Centurylink but the ISP is your choice), they limited the third party ISPs to 7mbps connections while rolling out their own ISP service at 30mbps. Whereas the ISPs provide professional and business class service, Centurylink's service is of course crummy PPPoE dialup with constant dropping and changing IP address, making it pretty much useless for anything except looking at web pages and impossible to use with most off the shelf network hardware.

They are hardly the ones to be speaking about preventing competition.

Anyone else notice its starting to look more like XKCD?

Windows 8 has already made itself incompatible with most non-x64 processors anyway. It requires SSE2, PAE, and NX bit, which are features that CPUs, say a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz or a Pentium 4 HT 571 3.8GHz, do not offer. Doesn't matter that you have 8GB of RAM and an SSD in them. Believe me, these CPUs are fine for just about any office task.

Windows 8 runs on crap tablet hardware but won't run on CPUs that can run MFLOPS around them due to a few CPU features.

This has been happening for many years in computer monitors and televisions also. There will be an initial version sold for a few months that gets the reviews, and then the specs are changed - completely different LCD panels made by different manufacturers are substituted silently, often with different technology. Anecdotally early versions of an Acer monitor having a MPVA panel, and then the exact same model then shipping with TN panels that pale in performance compared to the original. With monitors, you are buying an AO Optronics panel in a box labeled Samsung, so when the same model gets you something inferior to both specifications and original reviews, it borders on fraud.

The problem is, neither ZFS or Btrfs would have stopped an arbitrary bit inside an arbitrary file from becoming corrupt....

I think you should have a look at this 10 year old blog post: https://blogs.oracle.com/elowe...
ZFS can use single and double-parity (like RAID5 with two parity drives, but no failure if power is pulled during writing). In addition, it has bit scrubbing where all data is verified regularly.

And these scumbags even register and hold for ransom domain names put into their domain search tool. That's right - search to see if a domain is available using the Godaddy site, and it will be registered by Godady themselves or "partners", and sold off to the highest bidder, or suddenly have a $500 asking price. http://www.billhartzer.com/pag...

The linked article, which I did read, seems to have no thesis. It meanders from "C compilers can be subverted" to "see if people leave their purses out to judge if a neighborhood is safe". It is as if a high schooler had to write a paper on trust, and cut a paragraph out of each of the top 20 web search results.

The open source driver needs to be good; the latest version of the ATI proprietary driver has dropped support for relatively new cards - anything before HD 5000 series. This means that cards that include very good h.264 decoding engines such as the AMD Radeon HD 3850 256MB reviewed can no longer use the latest driver. In Ubuntu 14.04 this also means that trying the older last-supporting driver version no longer works, one would need to downgrade the x server version used in the distro.

This is one of the few cases where hardware on Linux becomes "obsolete" far sooner than it should because of lacking manufacturer's driver support (as opposed to many hardware devices like gameports, scanners, and printers that lost their Windows support in Vista but continue working on Linux). This will make me more wary not of Linux, but of the manufacturers that pull such shenanigans.

You can get an almost identically-specified Windows 8.1 Nokia Lumia 520 for $59.99, no contract. The only thing it's missing is a camera flash and a front-facing camera for video chats (Skype still works, it just points the wrong way.)

The latest developer rev of Windows Phone has word flow keyboard, which turns touch-screen typing from painfully intolerable to pretty cool.

Even Blackberry, giving it's Playbooks away to developers, couldn't get the adoption jump-started, so I don't know how an overpriced Firefox phone will succeed, although I would hope it would. Every other smartphone except for Blackberry wants to own your personal data and your life in their cloud and profit from everything sold in their store.