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Comment Useless without knowing what the passwords protect (Score 1) 97

This information is useless without knowing what the passwords were chosen to protect.

Let's face it: the password to my netflix account is not very important to me. If it's hacked I suffer a minor inconvenience at worst. What would be inconvenient for me would be if netflix forced me to do 2FA or some other complicated thing in order to use their service. That inconvenience would drive me toward cancellation.

The password to my bank account IS very important to me. I picked a much better one there. And of course the password to my primary email box is critical, so I chose a careful password there.

Submission + - NTP Solicits Donations 2

ewhac writes: Coming on the heels of FFmpeg having to cope with slop bug reports from Google (without attendant fixes), the Network Time Foundation, the stewards of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and reference software implementation that keeps billions of computers' internal clocks set to the correct date and time, is having a donation drive. Depending on which page you look at (ntp.org or nwtime.org), the Foundation's goal is to raise a king's ransom of... $11,000.00. Yes, eleven thousand dollars.

Comment Re:Corporate policy (Score 1) 113

...This is my embarrassed face.

I had previously assumed you were speaking of allocating $1M across all projects used by Google. In fact, you were speaking of giving $1M to each such project.

One would wonder what sorts of strings would be attached to such largesse. Still, that would indeed be game-changing and amazing.

Comment Re:Corporate policy (Score 1) 113

Google could create a new corporate policy to provide a minimum of $1M/year to any open source project it uses.

That would be real innovation.

While acknowledging your noble intentions, no, it wouldn't be innovation. It would be cheaping out.

In the San Francisco bay area, $1.0E+06/year gets you maybe five skilled engineers. Set against the quantity of Open Source projects used by such organizations -- FFmpeg, GStreamer, OpenSSL, ssh, rsync, gcc, gdb, coreutils, nanopb, Samba, Lua, Python, Perl, Git, Vim/Neovim, Yocto, ImageMagick, Blender, the Pipewire framework, the Linux kernel, the Debian packaging system, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc... -- five engineers is miserly.

Comment Re:Isn't this the idea? (Score 4, Insightful) 113

Google appears to have understaken the expense of spinning up an ocean-boiling slop machine to automagically generate plausible bug reports, and then casually fire off an email to the maintainers.

Note that Google has not undertaken the expense of assigning an engineer to also write a fix.

That they are not doing that is a conscious, management-approved choice.

...Y'know how Google relishes in closing bug reports with "WONTFIX - Working as designed?" I think FFmpeg should close slop reports from Google with, "WONTFIX - Unfunded."

Comment Clearly, This Was Mozilla's Most Pressing Issue (Score 3, Interesting) 69

"Hey, everyone! Don't pay any attention to those Japanese translators who'd been volunteering their time and expertise for the last 20 years that we just insensitively and comprehensively shit on... Look! New mascot logo! Giz cash..."

(Narrator: New revenues did not materialize.)

Comment Re:...arrival of a "fairground ride" (Score 1) 20

Actually, this is also why I stopped using Waze. Coming back from Heathrow once, I could have just taken the M4 and South Circular, but Waze claimed it would save me more than seven minutes on 25-35 minute journey, so I thought I'd give it a go. It took me through Hounslow and the back streets of Isleworth before crossing the A316 bridge in to Richmond. It ended up taking at least 15 minutes longer than the easy route and a vast amount more effort, in the dark. Much of that extra time was either reversing in to a gap between parked cars to let somebody by, or waiting for an oncoming car to do the same for me.

This has been one of my biggest frustrations with Waze for years - it has no understanding of how difficult a road is to drive. It'll happily send you off an easy, fast, well-lit motorway onto a difficult, narrow, unlit B road if it thinks it can save two minutes on a two-hour trip.

The stupid thing is that in the UK, road types already hint at how easy or hard they are to drive. Motorways (M roads) are the easiest, then A roads, then B roads. You could even go further by looking at the number of digits - single-digit routes tend to be simpler than three-digit ones. Sure, there would be exceptions (like the M25 compared to the M6), but overall it would make routing far more sensible than what Waze does now.

Comment Re:The plot was never the point for Tron movies (Score 1) 51

The original Tron was fantastic... if you were an '80s computer geek. If your experience with computers starts in the '90s or later, it's hard to relate.

Tron Legacy went all metaphysical. Metaphysics is where science fiction goes to die, and die it did. Tron Ares is a fitting sequel to Tron Legacy, which is to say: hot garbage with nifty special effects.

Comment They'd better tread cautiously. (Score 3, Insightful) 41

Not sure what Intel contributes that they could change to closed source without harming themselves. Closed source doesn't make it into the Linux kernel and with very few exceptions doesn't make it into the Linux distros. I can think of few Intel product lines where that wouldn't be destructive to their market share.

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