Uhg! It was so much better then. Almost 20 years and I still haven't learned to preview posts!

I remember when /. was so hard up for bandwidth I ended up hosting images.slashdot.org at the ISP I was working for. That's back when it was just Malda, a T1 line, and the community. I was so much better then.

Well, a T-rex was a large meat eater ... so I'm thinking bear or wolf might be better guesses.

And I gather as a rule large meat eaters don't make for good eating.

As an Atlantan, I'll tell you that while black people are common, black software engineers are still pretty rare. Of the three black people [in technical roles] I work with, two are actual immigrants from Africa and the third is a QA person, not a developer. I think black engineers are more common in other fields, such as civil engineering.

Also, the historically black colleges around here, such as Morehouse and Spelman, are excellent places to look if you want to hire a doctor, lawyer or businessperson, but if they even offer computer science as a major they're certainly not well-known for it.

Nevertheless, I'll certainly agree with the idea that Google should open a development office in Atlanta! (Or that they should allow full-time telecommuting, like the other responder suggested.)

I would argue that a failure to catch an un-enumerated exception is neither correctness, nor keeping it running.

However, I've heard the argument about the elegance and beauty of letting it crash because it's a real defect which should be identified ... I just disagree that an ungraceful failure is the way to do it.

I hope the people writing self-driving cars don't have the idiotic mindset that if they haven't enumerated the error it should be allowed to fail spectacularly.

The reality is, in the real world when software doesn't fail gracefully, some smug idiot of a developer who said you shouldn't catch things you didn't anticipate isn't there to clean up his mess. So his damned "correctness" becomes an aesthetic thing which is useless.

That's just defective by design, because either your design is 100% perfect and infallible, or it's pretty and elegant but is a crash waiting to happen.

Reality seldom conforms to the pre-planned expectations of the guys who built the product.

"Correctness" isn't correct if it can't account for incomplete correctness. It's lazy and ideological.

LOL ... it gets better and better.

Of the zillions of places where Microsoft parses URLs, across all their platforms and products, you can completely hose the install of something with 8 characters.

One wonders if there are any other places which will keel over and die by simply putting that in.

The mind reels with incredulity and glee.

Shadenfreude, it's not just for breakfast any more!!

That such problems as basic as incorrectly typed URLs could break Skype is beyond understanding.

I don't think it's beyond understanding. Not even a little.

Microsoft has always been pioneers of the "let's try to embed 'smarts' in stuff to make it cooler and friendlier to use" kind of thing.

Autorun on media, for instance has caused a lot of problems with things like viruses and rootkits.

Hell, Microsoft pioneered the technology which meant you could get a virus without opening the attachment of an email -- and up until then people had been saying "no, you can't get a virus simply from clicking on the email unless you run the attachment". Then Microsoft went straight to running the attachment and proved them wrong.

Microsoft tries so hard to coat the world in eye candy and do things for the user that they often go straight to the "well, you clearly want me to run that".

So in this case it probably went "ZOMG, teh URL" and jumped to running some code.

I have found over the years Microsoft's zeal to have dynamic, flashy content often means they create things which make for terrible robustness.

Like their widgets and live desktop stuff they've now had to deprecate on no less than three different platforms that I'm aware of because it was a giant security hole.

They put in a feature which says "wow, we'll just run this stuff because it's awesome", only to run smack into the wall of "but it's also dangerous".

Crashing is one thing.

Parsing input data sufficiently badly as to require an uninstall? That's pretty epic.

Good job guys!!

I'm not even sure I've heard of an error condition which required a full uninstall.

I predict many people will be sending that string today. I also predict someone will attempt to charge the people sending it with criminal hacking.

Keep up the good work.

You know, it probably still shows up in a lot of searches.

There's quite possibly people out there who have known it long enough that they still trust it.

If you're following this stuff, you know about it. But it's surprising how long it can take from when a company starts being shady and when everybody stops trusting them.

From the sounds of it, Sourceforge will be able to coast on their reputation for some time before they go away, if at all.

And what's worse is FAR too many politicians are willing to follow along with them and say "well, as long as you're doing it for profit that's OK".

It really is time to stop pretending that anything corporations do must be good, and start putting real checks and balances on what they can do to us and our information.

But, of course, since they all give massive amounts of money to the politicians, and many of the politicians are also greedy bastards who have huge stakes in large corporations, they're never going to do that.

So the asshole company who acts like a bank except where there are regulations they ignore, is going to be the asshole company who gives itself and its asshole affiliates the right to call or spam you because they say so?

I'm sorry, but what the hell are these clowns thinking?

The sheer arrogance of that is mind boggling. And this whole shit of "see, we have terms of service, we can do anything we want" is just crap.

Tell you what, PayPal, our terms of service say we can tar and feather you before the castration and lynching.

Once again, I am reminded of the many reasons why I would never deal with this company. A bunch of shady, self-entitled weasels.

i second the 'huh?' from the other poster. Apple did grant the USB consortium some patents, but they were not involved with the design of the USB C connector at all. It was developed by a committee, with some fairly major contributions from Google.

So, in other words, these models were specifically made for and distributed by an ISP, and were not off-the-shelf models. The backdoors were there for the ISP managers.

Well, I trust my ISPs router ... well, not at all, actually.

Because I assume my ISP is either incompetent or dishonest, I don't really care which, I simply don't trust them. And I sure as fuck don't trust them with access to my actual network. I want a layer of security between me and their shit, because I assume their stuff is trivially hacked.

My wife and I each have our offices set up where our own router is getting DHCP from the ISPs router, and then firewalling everything from it. We each have our own locked down wifi, and entirely separate networks. I'm pondering a third router to provide the guest wifi.

Other than disabling the ISPs wifi and using our own, I wouldn't even know the SSID or the password for the ISPs crap. I assume they haven't turned it on without asking, but I never check -- come to think of it, I'd have to find out how.

My parents and my in-laws have routers we've bought them to sit behind the crap the ISP provides. Because I know for a fact that in both cases the ISP provides a router with default wifi SSID and passwords which are published in the docs they give you.

Because it's printed in the "how to" for every damned subscriber, and you can't change it, you can pretty much imagine that if you find an SSID of the right name you can connect to it, and probably have management access to it.

For 99% of network users out there, these vulnerabilities are of no practical concern.

But the problem is so many households trust that the wide open, back doored, well known remote-admin credentialed, shitty routers they've been provided with give them any form of security.

Which means for the overwhelming majority of home users who aren't tech savvy and paranoid, these vulnerabilities are absolutely of practical concern ... because their PCs are directly plugged into the ISPs router, or they're using wifi from the ISPs router.

I'm betting a lot of home users figure they have the router from the ISP, so they don't need anything else.

That these are ISP models doesn't diminish the number of people who could be impacted ... it greatly magnifies it. Because most people who don't know better (and a few who do) connect their PC directly to the ISPs router.

Honestly, go talk to a random neighbor .. see if they have anything between them and their ISPs router. My best is they don't.

Almost certainly the case on three grounds.

(1) Getting a serious fusion effort off the ground is fabulously expensive. Even if you have some kind of whizbang micro-reactor concept you need a small army of physicists, engineers and highly skilled fabricators. People who don't come cheap.

(2) Running out of cash is what most startups do.

(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.