Yeah. Autism Speaks is not exactly a good source for information.

It's possible there are other versions. But that's not my point. The version that has been discovered and documented runs on Windows, a fact that is probably deliberately not made clear in the articles.

To discover this is a Windows-only virus? That was the first thing that crossed my mind, what platform(s) are vulnerable? It sure as hell isn't clearly stated in any of the articles I read, you have to dive into the details of the Symantec white paper to notice that all the attack vectors were specific to Windows.

And how much does the tech journalism community and the security products & services industry, from Ars to The Verge, to Symantec, get paid to hide the fact this is Yet Another Windows (only) vulnerability?

I have no idea. I have never seen him write a thing that was actually of interest or value, but so far as I can tell, anything he writes is automatically approved by Slashdot. He's guaranteed front-page placement. What is going on here? Who is he, and why does Slashdot owe him this?

I contacted Senator Warner's office about this, and frankly was blown off. That being said, I think we need a -law- that requires the Telcos to work out how to make Caller ID unforgeable. I've been challenged to 'show the RFCs and related standards that would support this,' but since the industry has shown no interest in solving the technical problems, I reluctantly believe that it'll take legal action (either law, regulation or legal liability) to force the issue.

On a related note, I also asked about the impact of all those CallerID violations I've filed over the years, and got no response back from that. In both cases, I was forwarded a letter from the FCC that basically quoted from their website.

This is a language that of course was designed very differently from the common C based languages in wide use today, and one for which there is a very large amount of publicly available code (but not on GitHub.) I've seen studies from large volumes of Ada code, both with respect to error rates and with respect to development and maintenance costs, that show a significant advantage for that language.

My personal mileage varies significantly. I still prefer Ada, which is a language that you'd probably characterize as having a lot of "boilerplate". An experience Ada programmer learns how to use that to his advantage in several ways:
    1. When you're on a large or long-lived project, readability of code (even your own, years later) is more important than writeability,
    2. The compiler checks consistency, and as you get better with the language you learn how to maximize what the compiler can check. (This is particularly true for strong typing, where in my experience the bugs caught by typechecking are caught on scalar types. You're a lot more likely to add 'count-of-apples' to 'count-of-oranges' than you are to actually try to add apples and oranges.) Thus as a designer, I'd concentrate on the algorithm, logic flow, etc, and let the compiler check things like parameter names/types. When the compiler and I both agreed that the program was right, it usually was correct.
    3. Syntactic error recovery. This is a big deal when first learning a language, and later when doing significant changes (e.g. refactoring). On a lot of compilers, a single syntax error made all the subsequent error messages both numerous and confusing/worthless (usually because the compiler made an incorrect assumption.) Ada compilers, particularly the hand-craft GNAT parser, got really good at providing meaningful error messages for the rest of the compilation after detecting (and recovering from) a syntax error.
    4. Better optimization. The more info the compiler can get and depend on, the better job the optimizer can do, mostly by limiting the assumptions about how data or control flow is used.

"boilerplate" can be your best friend, when you and the compilation system take advantage of it.

A lot of the mail I get that goes into quarantine or marked as spam comes from outsourced senders, where Domain.com uses some 3rd party to send mail on behalf of it. This can be ISPs, companies like Constantcontact.com or God-only-knows what else. Of course, the company who bought this service probably doesn't know or want to understand what the problem is, and the company that's doing the outsourcing has no real incentive to make sure their hosts (including SPF, etc) are configured properly.

Similarly, the Internet has done nothing for science or human knowledge, since so much of the work of pushing it and promoting it has been done for profit.

This isn't people dying so rich people can have fun. This is rich people funding the fundamental research that will make space travel practical in time.

HyperCard combined three aspects: (1) A easy-to-assemble set of graphical/user interface components; (2) a simple (simplistic) database; (3) a quirky programming language.

Possibly VB with Access provides a similar set of functions.

We should be able to produce something that allows end users to do some development for themselves, while acknowledging this is not a production-quality tool, but no matter what, people will take prototyping systems and try to deploy them to production usage.

I've used it for several different things, including catalog/library "decks", user interface mock-up with a bit of back-end semantics (for a system configuration function, to understand user requirements and usage models), and a potential front-end controller to a very simple 'robot'.

So, on the one hand, it's sort of a spammy/advertisey thing to begin with.

On the other hand, I'm also not entirely convinced that the code coverage tool really solves the problem, because a given line of code can have different effects under different circumstances.

If you read in an address from a text stream, and then write to the memory location denoted, that's just one line of code executing that dereferences the pointer, but good luck determining what it does on all future invocations based on watching it execute once. Similarly, consider a straightforward loop like "for (i = 1; i len; ++i) a[i] = 0;" where every line will be hit if len is at least 1, but the effect of executing the code is, to put it mildly, somewhat variable.

While "only 5% of my disk" is now many times larger than it used to be, so are the things I'm moving around, so "95% full" is just as bad now as it used to be.

Basically, once we got past quotas measured in single or double-digit numbers of kilobytes, this stopped changing for me. 95% full on a 100MB disk and 95% full on a 500GB disk work the same for me.

People who didn't learn to code by the time they were 7 have never been able to program as adults. It sure is lucky a supply of people taught to code by ancient alien astronauts was supplied to us so we could bootstrap the procedure, because no one in the history of our species has learned new skills past age 7.

I got refunds from AT&T for these, and they let me set a thing on my account to prevent them.

Never had it happen with any provider but AT&T.

I am impressed, I thought I had seen some bad legal advice before, but this is spectacular.

I am sure the vexatious litigants of the world greatly appreciate your suggestion that their victims lose on technicalities because they didn't correctly understand the legal process.