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Comment Re:Not this shit again (Score 2) 834

Also, dev sabotages a game design contest for women, calling TFYC transphobic and exploitative, and creates her own "contest" with no date nor location defined, where she endlessly asks for donations to fund it, going all straight to her bank account.

Dev and her PR manager doxx TFYC while making the wild accusations, despite their efforts to ask her what was wrong with their contest; TFYC receives death threats. Dev denies having any involvement with her PR manager, and blames her for doxxing.

Dev then tries to bribe TFYC to not mention what she has been doing.

Few people would consider this behavior ethical or moral. But as I said, her character is of no concern to us; but it triggered chain of events that left a lot of people shocked; it's the context to explain what matters.

Comment Re:Not this shit again (Score 5, Informative) 834

The timeline is the single most important piece of information of this whole ordeal.

You don't even have to read too far into it to see what's really going on - when people started calling out on ZQ's lack of ethics and morals, she called in favors to shape the story so she appears to be a victim instead of a sociopath, and the whole thing snowballed into the shitstorm most people saw as "gamergate": the flood of articles and opinion pieces pushed by ZQ's friends trying to convince the uninformed they are fighting against trolls that are oppressing women, when in fact people are condemning journalistic corruption and malpractice.

The question is, who will denounce corrupt journalists? Not the journalist themselves, as it turned out.

It didn't help that a bunch of SJW jumped in to "fight for women's rights" without having a clue as to what was going on (other than ZQ's side of the story), and it became self-sustaining; their quixotic efforts were criticized by the community, and they pushed back, claiming that denying "gamergate = misogyny" validates their fight against misogyny. At this point their discourse is not even about the original issues, it's about how they are themselves becoming victims of criticism just because they are fighting for "the right cause". They keep tilting at windmills.

Comment Re:~$7500 per transaction? (Score 1) 69

Sounds like they replace the barcode to redirect the payment to an account they own, so they are really stealing the whole amount. Funny thing is, after you enter the code (by scanning or typing) you get a confirmation screen (either on the ATM or on the online system) with the name of the receiving entity; it's hard to imagine the bank would allow somebody to create an account with a name that looks like an utility company or something like that.

I agree, the average amount seems way too high; things at that range are usually paid with credit cards, cheques, or direct transfers between bank accounts. I'm really curious to find out what kinds of transactions average at 100 times the typical boleto value. Was every victim buying a 65" 3D 4k LED TV over the internet?

Comment Blame the banks (Score 4, Insightful) 69

From TFA:

In Brazil, when banking customers access their online banking site for the first time, they are often asked to install a security plugin. [,,,] However, the Boleto malware [,,,] searches for specific versions of client side security plug-ins detects their shared libraries and patches them in real-time to dodge security.

I've closed my account in 3 different banks for pulling this bullshit. So it turned out the "security plugin" is full of security holes; worse than that, they are educating their users that they need to install/update software every time they access their bank online, so most accept plugin installation confirmations right away.

The fact that it attacks boletos is a minor detail, it's a traceable and reversible money transfer once suspicious activity is identified.

Comment Re:Bad marketing (Score 2) 127

Nintendo's marketing after the Wii was not effective.

I agree with this statement, but for a different reason. I have a Wii U and a 3DS, and none of the competitors'. Google knows that very well due to searches and through the websites I visit. Yet, I only see ads for the other systems, and PC games (my gaming laptop is more than 3 years old, so every "recent" game has to be on lowest settings to be playable... so I don't play on it).

Maybe they are too full of themselves and think they don't need to make the effort? Maybe they don't really understand how to use the internet? My theory is that they didn't learn how to grow. The industry grew, the competitors came from companies that already knew how to grow, yet Nintendo still works centralizing everying in Kyoto with little human resources to manage a global market. Their strategy of disruption from the DS/Wii era went tot heir heads, now they think they can do it again on a whim (like their new "Quality of Life" strategy... heck, let me sync my Fit Meter with my phone or my 3DS, and make my data available on the web) whenever they get cornered.

Space

Astronomers Discover Largest Structure In the Universe 143

KentuckyFC writes "Until now, the largest known structure in the Universe was the Huge-LQG (Large Quasar Group), a cluster of 73 quasars stretching over a distance of 4 billion light years. Now astronomers say they've spotted something even bigger in data from gamma ray bursts, the final explosions of energy released by stars as they die and the universe's most energetic events. Astronomers have measured the distance to 283 of these bursts and mapped their position in the universe. This throws up a surprise. At a distance of ten billion light years, there are more gamma ray bursts than expected if they were evenly distributed throughout the universe. This implies the existence of a structure at this distance that is about ten billion light years across and so dwarfs the Huge-LQG. What's odd about the discovery is that the Cosmological principle--one of the fundamental tenets of cosmology--holds that the distribution of matter in the universe will appear uniform if viewed at a large enough scale. And yet, structures clearly emerge at every scale astronomers can see. The new discovery doesn't disprove the principle but it does provide some interesting food for thought for theorists."

Comment Re:OK, before somebody else points it out... (Score 2) 470

There are actually 3 categories:

  • Implementation Defined: the implementation (compiler, standard library, execution environment) has to document what happens. Code relying on this is not portable.
  • Unspecified: the implementation can choose to do what makes sense, and not tell you. Even reverse-engineering and relying on what you found out, is unreliable. The actual address returned by malloc is unspecified; is it aligned? Does it always grow in value if nothing was free-ed? You shouldn't even care about this detail, so the standard leaves it unspecified.
  • Undefined Behaviour: you wrote something that doesn't make sense, if you get lucky the compiler/standard library/operating system will react in a sensible way, but the standard says it's not the implementation's fault you get something wrong as a result. Things like reading variables before initializing them.

Diagnosing UB can be too demanding from the implementation, so the standard doesn't even require it. How would you diagnose incorrect usage of realloc? Add run-time checks? Write a special rule in the compiler so it knows about realloc? Extend the language with metadata? What if realloc is hidden behind a user-defined function? At some point you have to stop, otherwise you could even solve the halting problem.

Comment Re:OpenCL (Score 1) 66

The gpuocelot project has been able to run CUDA in non-NVIDIA hardware for some time now, including x86 CPUs and AMD GPUs.

Too bad the CUDA compiler often segfaults on ordinary C++ libraries even when they are host-only (in which case nvcc is supposed to just forward it to GCC). Hopefully the LLVM-based compiler for OpenCL 2.0 won't be as buggy.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Federal Judge Rejects State Secrets Claims: EFF Case To Proceed 146

The EFF has been attempting to sue the government over illegal surveillance since the Bush administration, and, despite repeated attempts to have the case dismissed because of State Secrets, a federal judge has now ruled that the case must go forward in public court, throwing out the government's State Secrets argument. From the order: Having thoroughly considered the parties' papers, Defendants' public and classified declarations, the relevant legal authority and the parties' arguments, the Court GRANTS the Jewel Plaintiffs' motion for partial summary adjudication by rejecting the state secrets defense as having been displaced by the statutory procedure prescribed in 50 U.S.C. 1806(f) of FISA. In both related cases, the Court GRANTS Defendants' motions to dismiss Plaintiffs' statutory claims on the basis of sovereign immunity. The Court further finds that the parties have not addressed the viability of the only potentially remaining claims, the Jewel Plaintiffs' constitutional claims under the Fourth and First Amendments and the claim for violation of separation of powers and the Shubert Plaintiffs' fourth cause of action for violation of the Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, the Court RESERVES ruling on Defendants' motion for summary judgment on the remaining, non-statutory claims." Although some statutory claims were dismissed, the core Constitutional questions will be litigated.

Comment Re:Easy (Score 2) 332

This. If it's your job to go and fix his mess, do it without complaining. And document all the effort you put into it, to avoid being labeled as someone that just rewrites code without adding anything.

If you are not responsible for cleaning after the senior, then don't do it, let it all rot until somebody (your boss, or even your colleague) makes the decision it's time to clean the mess.

Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."

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