It doesn't say they spontaneously reported to him. I read that as "someone on my staff asked Amazon.com and they informed him or her that..."

Or just accept that in English, spelling doesn't have to be tied to pronunciation. Also, vowels are overrated.

Which I have indeed read, and so it's probably my source. Certainly the quote's source, less certainly the example.

Back when intercontinental leased lines were all the rage, it was the case that a nightly financial data transfer from (I believe) a stock exchange trading floor was cheaper and faster done by loading the data onto tape and flying someone by Concorde from the UK to the US, than to transmit the data over the network.

That's both anecdotal and marred by my own recollection of the story, but it supports the "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes on the highway" saying.

When you put applications on the SD card, their binary directories are isolated from each other, yes. (Through encrypted loop-mounts, I believe)

But the actual data on the sdcard is completely open to all applications. It's basically a large dumping ground for data.

The issue of this exploit is that you never need to grant anything permission to become vulnerable, whereas a rouge app does need to be given permission to be installed, and (I believe) permission to access data on the SD card.

Unless you count the "Benevolent Dictator For Life" role in some large and fork-resistant open-source projects.

"Benevolent Dictator For Life" has some examples of such.

I say "fork-resistant" not because they've actively blocked being forked, but because when forks do happen, they rarely survive as independent projects, either dying or rolling back into the mainline.

I'd count GCC as one of the latter, because although egcc did become the main-line, we didn't see (that I understand, anyway) a wholesale supplanting of project management and control the way we did with X.org forking from XFree86.

I honestly have no idea whom Apache was forked from, or the circumstances thereof.

Dear Moderators,

I'd like to request substantive support for the parent post.

Games development can have great advantages over non-games development (irrespective of cubicles) but it's posts like the grandparent that can scare people away from an otherwise fulfilling career.

Sure, you probably end up trading in potential salary, but if you find the right studio and right team for you, it's worth the pay cut.

Regards, from someone who took a $15k/year pay cut to join the games industry almost half a decade ago, and is still thrilled to be making video games for a living.

I've been told that the Tier 1 RvR was the most fun of the lot. And the Empire area worked better than the Dwarven area for Tier 1 RvR. So it's probably the best choice of something to make free to play.

On the other hand, I personally quite enjoyed Tier 2 and Tier 3 keep sieges in both attack and defense, although the boss fights at the end tended to drag on a bit. Quite hard to find more than one group an evening that'd do it though, and once the populations got unbalanced, there was often no keeps available to be taken for days at a stretch.

This was pretty much the basis of WinNY. Also worth reading up on Share which was its successor, and appears to be built around the same principles.

It's 100% reliable for sites in a vulnerable configuration (ie. the sites the attack targets).

They presumably mean this to distinguish from attacks which require some level of luck or coincidence (eg. triggering a race condition) to exploit.

Or for attacks which require a certain state to be achieved but which there's no useful upper bound on when that state might be achieved due to the actions of the attack, eg. a purely passive attack.

So in short, they're saying that the attack is able to drive it's own progress towards its goal, and (I guess) always makes some small amount of progress on every iteration.

From reading the article, I believe what he means is power redundancy.

Specifically, right now, if the burglar cuts power to the home or business, the 48V (or so...) on the line lets the alarm system ring home and tell the company the power's out.

If only the were to put some kind of battery backup option for the ONT...

ONT battery backup information

The citizens of Australia will let you know, as soon as we work out what it means.

Funnily enough, The Daily WTF has a posting up about why passing your test cases isn't always sufficient.

Role-based Canary

So's the rest of software development, if you're doing it right.

That obviously depends on your local jurisdiction. Where I come from, personal imports below a certain amount legally bypass local tariffs and taxes, and above a certain amount, it seems to be at the discretion of customs as to whether you pay or not.

Be wary of anyone who misdeclares value or nature of goods when shipping to you, that would (probably) interfere with any shipping-related insurance claim you make.