So if you are an ISP providing a secondary DNS service, you're happy to create accounts with ssh/rsync access for 10 000 customers who all have more lax security than you do?

Sure. You give them all a shell account with access to their own zone files, and you require them to provide a public key for authentication (no passwords to attack). Then, you have a separate process that watches for changes and updates the official zone files that the daemon reads. Clearly, a daemon that has write access to all of the zone files is inherently less safe than a series of ssh accounts, each with access to only a single user's files, coupled with a daemon that has only read-only access to copies of the original zone files.

Actually, it's not that simple. The DNS compression scheme is horrendous, although that can be easily isolated. Most of the complexity of DNS servers come from the 1) caching, recursive logic for client-side servers, 2) automating zone transfers, 2) various schemes for avoiding DoS attacks. Dedicated servers like NSD and unbound, which either server a zone _or_ implement recursive lookups for clients, can be a little simpler.

I've never understood why DNS servers bother with zone transfers. These days, it would take an average admin three minutes to toss together something involving a cron job, rsync, and ssh that would do the same job without adding all that extra code and the extra attack surface that comes along with it. Heck, with access to platform-specific file system event APIs, you could probably come up with something that worked a lot better, up to and including near-instantaneous updates. That entire feature just seems like pure bloat, and that's coming from somebody who actually uses zone transfers....

Wow. They've really opened up filesystem access since I last looked. So much for same origin policies....

Swift isn't going to make it so "anybody can write apps." That is something that's been tried for decades, with things like drag-and-drop programming. SQL was originally intended for non-programmers. It doesn't work, because the difficulty of programming isn't the syntax. The difficulty of programming is logic.

While true, the danger exists that making the syntax easier will encourage more people who don't understand logic to try to write code anyway, usually with disastrous results. Maybe it's the UNIX greybeard in me, but I've always seen the complexity of language as sort of a "you must be this tall to ride" bar, limiting the amount of damage that clueless people can cause.

And it isn't just that the software that new programmers create is usually bad. It also clogs the marketplace with low-quality apps. The more bad apps people write, the harder it will be for well-written new apps to gain footing, because they'll start out with several times as many poorly written apps ahead of them in their sales ranking.

But the biggest problem with making it easier to write code is that every step down that path requires ever-increasing resources. Right now, it takes about an order of magnitude more effort to write a beginning programming guide than to write a programming guide for experienced programmers, even for a moderately complex technology. And that's if you assume that people understand basic logic, control flow, etc. If you go one step beyond that and try to make it practical for non-programmers to write code, you'll spend two or three years writing a good, solid introductory textbook. And I have yet to see any evidence suggesting that any significant percentage of those folks will be able to write decent code even after reading such a book.

The kernel is stable not just because it has to be, but also because it scares people away until they are reasonably competent at programming. The web is filled with bad code because it doesn't. IMO, apps should be more like the former than the latter. Just my $0.02.

Neither of those provides any mechanism for downsampling an image before uploading it. In fact, from a same-origin security model perspective, JS code isn't even supposed to be able to access the image data before uploading it, though I think they've left some holes where devs can get around that....

As another noted on the Red Site:

"We'll know everything* about you and we'll be snitching (including your BitLocker key) whenever and/or to anyone we think is in our interest to. Starting Aug 15"[1]

In particular, this is more than a little disturbing.

"But Microsoftâ(TM)s updated privacy policy is not only bad news for privacy. Your free speech rights can also be violated on an ad hoc basis as the company warns:

In particular, âoeWe will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary toâ, for example, âoeprotect their customersâ or âoeenforce the terms governing
the use of the servicesâ."

As with all things Microsoft, use at your own risk. Only now, the risks to you personally are higher than ever before.

[1]https://soylentnews.org/breakingnews/comments.pl?sid=8667&cid=215390#commentwrap

So is a web browser, which is exactly my point.

That's why I don't want every random site creating its own app. When I said those words, it was in the context of a general-purpose mobile app, not a niche app for a single small website.

Web browsers on mobile devices don't provide facilities for downsampling the images, though, which makes standalone apps rather useful for sites that rely on photo uploading over slow cellular connections.

Sure there is. That's exactly what RSS [wikipedia.org] was made to do. Not only can you visit a site, get a feed, and add it yourself, but there are also applications that curate and categorize popular RSS feeds so that you can search for and add them without having to visit the websites first.

The problem is that RSS is one-directional. If I want to post, I still have to go back to a browser window and use whatever random, horrible, non-mobile-friendly interface the site designers came up with. And posting is usually the part where a native app would be beneficial; the reading part is easy by comparison....

And despite what you say, the facebook app is pretty much standard on every user's smart phone, and the app only shows content from facebook ...

... and is used exclusively by people who have accounts on the site. That's a completely different usage model than just going to a website and browsing it, which is to say that you didn't really contradict my main point with that example.

Facebook is also a bit of an exception because of the sheer amount of time that many people spend on it, the potential benefits of tighter integration with the operating system (background notifications), etc.

But for every exception, there are a thousand non-exceptions. Even though I have the FB app installed, I wouldn't really consider installing a Slashdot app; the way I interact with the site is completely different, with my FB interaction being a lot more active, and involving a lot more photo uploads and other such activities that web browsers do pretty badly in the mobile world.

During your rant, I couldn't help but think, 'But they DO have a standardized app for accessing all the websites', and it's called the browser!

The problem is, mobile devices don't handle web forums very well. Web designers don't design their themes with mobile devices in mind, resulting in text that's too small to read, text entry fields that are too wide for the screen, etc. That's not true for every site, but it is pretty common.

An actual native app, by contrast, is likely to be designed by people who actually understand the platform and its limitations, its screen size, etc. So potentially, if done properly, it can produce a much better user experience than a browser is likely to produce (though a browser could produce a similarly good experience if all the web designers took the time to design their sites properly for mobile devices... and I want a pony...).

Not really. My TV takes uncompressed data. Once an encoder is available, the only things that matter these days are whether the following things support the codec:

• Chrome
• Safari
• Firefox
• iOS
• Android
• YouTube
• to a lesser extent, OS X, Windows, and Internet Explorer

If you cover those, all other clients of the codecs are lost in the noise, so it is probably safe to use it on your own site for your own content.

It doesn't really matter at all whether the codec used to encode the content for delivery is the same as the codec used to encode it during production. In fact, I would seriously hope that 100% of video production is being done with a higher quality codec than the low-bitrate crap that is being used to deliver content over the 'net. Therefore, whether Mitsubishi et al choose to support a codec or not is mostly irrelevant.

In practice, only three companies actually need to work together to make such a patent-free codec happen: Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Firefox would quickly adopt any patent-free codec that those three got behind. That makes the entire rest of the industry pretty much completely irrelevant. Those three companies could mandate a transition to a new, patent-free codec, and the entire world would practically trip over themselves to make it happen.

So no, those industrial giants aren't really a problem. In fact, they aren't even relevant in the grand scheme of codecs except to the extent that the big three graciously allow them to be.

It is truly an epic fail to believe that some random visitor to your website is going to want to install your app just to read a piece of content—particularly if that user got there through a Google search. Yet for some reason, just about every forum out there pops up one of these idiotic app interstitials when I try to view some random post on their site. I didn't go there because I want to be a regular visitor to the site, which means I sure as h*** don't want to install their app just to read the tiny piece of content that may or may not even contain the information I need to do whatever I'm trying to get done.

The right time to ask a user to install an app is when the user creates an account on the site. Up until that point, the user is probably an infrequent visitor and is unlikely to want to install the app. Even at that point, the user may not want to install the app, but at least there's some nonzero possibility that he or she might.

Of course, the real train wreck is that there's no standard for making websites' contents available for app use, which would allow a user to install one reader that can read content on any of the dozen sites that he or she might be interested in. There's really no chance of me installing an app that only lets me read content from one website, because A. it is unlikely to be much better than viewing the website (because probably the same people designed it), and B. I already have more apps than I can deal with anyway. But if every website I visit standardized on a feed scheme, along with a common authentication system and a common reply system, I could see myself installing a single app that worked with all of them.

Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...

Better: Work together with like-minded companies to create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free.

Obligatory xkcd.