This is why we need mandatory trial registration, so that we have a paper trail for abandoned trials and trials which fail to confirm an effect.

In the name of security Google has been pestering for my phone number for years, while their motives are much less about my security and more about their business reasons.

He's referring to the reasons the US/UK engineered the 1953 Iranian coup

For 1-2$ tops, sure. Without a keyboard and mouse, who's going to pay dozens of dollars for a game?

I use Linux (fedora/ubuntu), OS X (personal rMBP), and Windows (7 64bit ultimate at home, 32bit professional at work).

I have always wanted to "hate" windows, and "love" Linux, and in the past I have wanted to "love" mac os too.

in the past I have had plenty of reasons to hate windows, but by XP sp3, it was less, thoguh now that I am on 7, i actually HATE xp.

I was probably one of the few people that didn't hate Vista. Maybe because i used the 64bit version, I dont know, but it was stable if not particularly spectacular. It got the job done.

Windows 7 is a phenomenon in comparison. Together with the SSD, it just worked. Being able to send movies to my TV with a right click on the file, and without installing anything. Windows 7 just works, and although i do have a dual boot Ubuntu partition on my computer, i rarely use it. My chief annoyance is its inability to read any file systems on USB Mass Storage other than FAT/FAT32, and is the real remaining evilness of MS (forcing manufacturers of devices such as cameras to support FAT and pay their "tax" to MS)

OSX, is pretty, but not necessarily better than 7. It is not more easier either (keyboard shortcuts are more extreme). OSX is just different in my books. It too has some evilness such as the restriction on supporting TRIM only on Apple approved SSDs. It also has in some ways less application support (excluding BSD)

Linux is the OS i prefer to use for development, and also servers. However, I still spend way too much time configuring it than I have time for. When I was younger, and have time, it was fun. These days, I am married, a professional, and simply don't have time.

You can always do better, especially with the advantage of hindsight. Worrying about Fukushima's failure in retrospect is however the equivalent of picking faults in the security of a garden gate when there is no fence around the property at all.

If it was irresponsible to build a power plant without higher flood protection and keep the old design running for as long as they did, how much more irresponsible was neglecting tsunami protection for the half million people in the area that resulted in more than 15k deaths and 340k people getting displaced?. The parliamentary inquiry should have been focused on that, not driven by the people's irrational and overblown fear of the word "nuclear".

There has been a tsunami that killed over 10000 people and demolished multiple cities and dozens of chemical plants and factories. If this was a man-made disaster where the fuck was the planning to prevent it? Why are we still talking about the nuclear plant, where at most a couple of dozen people will die in the next hundred years?

Sure, we could have done more to prevent the damage in Fukushima, like build units from a newer generation (fukushima daichi's sister plant survived the same tsunami, but was slightly younger and thus had much less problems), have better oversight, regulation, emergency response etc. However, that is like asking what could have been done better about shark deaths in Nevada ("noone expected it to happen", "zomg, sharks!"), and totally ignoring deaths by drugs abuse, cancer, transportation accidents and cardiovascular causes in the meantime.

The point is, reinforcing Fukushima would have been a waste of money and effort, money and effort that would have been better spent on building better flood barriers to protect places where people actually live.

Absolutely. The UK sent people to Libya while Gaddafi was still in power in exchange for lucrative business opportunities.

All the IBM engineers will do is decrease the issue of traffic by a couple of percent, maybe raise efficiency by 10-20% here and there, but the real issue is cultural. Cars suck for a dense urban environment, you need people on bikes, carpooling and the most important thing: good public transportation.

Good public transportation means though forcing cars out from city centers by creating bus lanes, creating tram lines on previously car-only roads, building enough parking space at the edge of the city where people could switch over to public transport, etc.

Its funny you should say "not many legitimate competitors around". To an Apple "addict" the itunes store is the only big store. But in actual fact there are plenty of other stores (that are cheaper too)... including.... amazon.

There is also other considerations for closed vs open vs active noise cancellation
Closed (including in ears)
Pros:
- reduce background noise by actually blocking the air from the outside reaching into the cup. Ideal for listening to delicate sounds with treble and mid range in relatively noisier environments.
- Good bass response

Cons:
- due to closed nature, strong bass can "reverb" around the cup, as the closed nature does not allow excess pressure to "escape", causing treble to be lost, or the sound becoming distorted. At higher volumes/bass levels, the pressures induced can cause damage to the hearing system, and in some people can affect their ability to balance (they feel dizzy).
- loss of outside sound

Open backed:
Pros:
- "natural" sound as air is free to escape
- good dynamic range
- safer for activities where you need to hear outside sounds.
- perfect for quiet environments

Cons
- poor for loud environments
- definition is lost in loud environments.

Active noise cancelling:
ANC is theoretically the best solution, as it allows an opened headphone to still be able to isolate external sounds.However, this is very much an exact science, where electirics "add" a negative phased waveform of the outside noise at the same time and volume as its passing into the ear.

Unfortunately this requires:
- High quality microphones placed as close to the ear as possible to record the outside sounds, as if your ear is picking up the sounds with as little distortion as possible, in order to create an accurate "negative sound". IT is at the moment hard to create such a "perfect" microphone, let alone one small enough to fit on the earbuds as close to the ear.

- High quality, and fast electronics to process the incoming sound wave, invert it's phase, then mix into the music fast enough for the negative sound to reach the ear drum at the same time as the outside noise. If the sound is not exactly on the same "phase" it can reduce the effectiveness the the noise cancellation, and also induce a high pitched hiss. Its relatively easy to cancel out low pitched (up to 200hz) compared to higher pitched sounds (greater than 10,000 hz), hence why current technology only really manages to filter out low constant rumbles rather than high pitched sounds, and even voices.

- Volume matching also needs to be as close as possible. Too low, and the external noise is not negated sufficiently. too high and also the noise will not only be canceled, but reinserted in the opposite phase. In addition, if there the sound is delayed, and the volume is high, it creates horrible sounding artifacts.

- The headphones themselves need to re-produce the negative sounds well enough to cancel the noise.
- Batteries/power source!

In the case of ANC, it is a case of the more you pay, usually the better the quality. Those cheap no brand phones are likely to be appalling. Even the best are only good at reducing low rumbling noise (aircraft engines, etc) rather than general noise (traffic, people etc).

Oops, My mistake, ignore that post.

The story is about DEP and ASLR effectiveness at blocking exploits. IT has nothing to do with the title or the ATI/AMD aspect.

SMS has been working in pretty much everywhere BUT the USA pretty well. I remember back in 1999 sending messages to people abroad, and getting messages sent back.

Now here in the UK we have even had SMS on our landline (send and receive) for over 5 years..... most DECT cordless phones support the scheme well.

I think this short snippet from Rasmus is priceless:

The point of the question here is if anybody remembers why we decided not
to parse command line args for the cgi version? I could easily see it
being useful to be able to write a cgi script like:

    #!/usr/local/bin/php-cgi -d include_path=/path

and have it work both from the command line and from a web context.

As far as I can tell this wouldn't conflict with anything, but somebody at
some point must have had a reason for disallowing this.

Yeah, passing arguments with full shell expansion to the bloody binary from the unsecure web sounds like a brilliant idea! Who would want to disallow that?!

It was pretty funny so far, but then I've seen this:

13-01: Vulnerability discovered, used to pwn Nullcon Hackim 2012 scoreboard
13-01: We discuss the issue with Nullcon admins, find out it is a php 0day
17-01: We contact security@php.net with a full report and a suggested patch
01-02: We ask PHP to confirm receipt, state our intent to hand off the vulnerability to CERT if progress is not made
01-02: PHP forwards vulnerability report to PHP CGI maintainer
23-02: CERT acknowledges receipt of vulnerability and attempts to contact PHP.
05-04: We ask CERT for a status update
05-04: CERT responds saying that PHP is still working on a fix
20-04: We ask CERT to proceed with disclosure unless a patch is imminent
26-04: CERT prepares draft advisory.
02-05: CERT notifies us that PHP is testing a patch and would like more time. we agree.
03-05: Someone posts a mirror of the internal PHP bug to reddit /r/netsec /r/opensource and /r/technology. It was apparently accidentaly marked public.

The PHP security people sat on this 0day remote code exploit for four months, ignoring multiple attempts to get them to fix this serious vulnerability. That makes me feel angry, sometimes incompetence is just not funny anymore.