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Comment: Redneck Interwebs (Score 1) 128

Their argument is stupid and pointless.

There are plenty of people who only enjoy watching honey booboo that have the interwebs, unfortunately the rest of us have to suffer the side effects of stupid management.

I'm really baffled how shows like 24 stay on the air for years, and shows like The Agency, Jericho, and Terra Nova get canceled?

I'm sick of the real catty housewives of the next urban location. I'm tired of Dodgy the bountiful hunter, and every lame "re-enacted" reality shows like Operacion Repo.

Funny thing, one of the biggest offenders was called "Real TV", but there was too much reality and they went to "truTV".

Reality happens in real life, there isn't anything "real" on TV, it's either streamed with factual errors and no supporting information, "produced", or "re-enacted", nobody show "reality" because it wouldn't be salacious or dramatic enough.

Comment: Parallax Propeller (Score 5, Informative) 103

by Y2K is bogus (#41578455) Attached to: Parallella: an Open Multi-Core CPU Architecture

The Parallax Propeller is a great multi-core chip to get started with. The chip is $7.95 and has 8 cores running at 80Mhz. You can pickup the Quickstart board at Radio Shack for $40, including an overpriced RS USB cable (they normally retail for $25).

The Parallax Propeller is a much more economical way of getting started with multi-core programming. Parallax offers the PropTool, which provides SPIN and PASM language support. For C development you can get SimpleIDE which is a great IDE to get started with C programming on the Propeller, which uses a port of GCC.

Comment: Re:Ugh, Ruby (Score 4, Funny) 362

by Y2K is bogus (#41290353) Attached to: One Company's Week-Long Interview Process

Bravo! You have made the beginning of my day!

The title of my next newsletter:

Ruby: A language designed by programmers for non-programmers

Then followed by these illustrious titles:

Ruby: Non-programming for Programmers
Ruby: Unprogramming what you've learned about Programming
Ruby: Lobotomy required
Ruby: Brainfuck for the masses

Comment: Apple's receipt verification is broken too (Score 4, Interesting) 142

by Y2K is bogus (#40642311) Attached to: Russian Hacker Sidesteps Apple iOS In-App Purchases

I just reviewed the documentation for the receipt verification, and that process is broken too.

To summarize, you forward an opaque token to the appstore and verfiy success using a simple clear text status flag. This is fundamentally broken because the client doesn't authenticate the source of either piece of data. The original hack in this article is based on a Man In the Middle attack, their receipt verification system is vulnerable to exactly the same type of attack.

The lack of cryptographic hashing and authentication on the client side is a complete failure of Apple's API design. The first step should be message signing and authentication to ensure the server is who the server says they are. Apple is relying on SSL certificates for this role, which I feel is inadequate. The SSL Certificate Authority system has been broken for a long time and reliance upon them to assure authenticity is a Bad Idea(tm).

The concept of centralized CAs is good in theory, but recent events have proven that CAs are easily corrupted by economic, political, and technical means.

Comment: Anti-competitive (Score 0) 121

by Y2K is bogus (#40290653) Attached to: Meebo Discontinuing All Services Except for Meebo Bar

I'm sorry, but any way to slice it, that's just a straight up anti-competitive move.

I don't use Meebo, or much care about it, but Google is *clearly* using their might and cash to eliminate services. I can't decide whether it's Google trying to squash tools that marginalize the difference between competing products, thus eliminating any advantages one IM protocol has over another, or they are just trying to remove products from the landscape and further promote the mono-culture they have pushed so very hard.

Android is an utter pile of garbage, having used both Blackberry and Danger, it is a sorry second, but because Google has pushed it so hard, we live in a mono-culture of Android vs iDevice. It's been years, and Android still can't do things in a sane and successful manner, they seem to feel that going against intuition is the best way to innovate. Eliminating well understood UI concepts and relying on quirky interfaces. Apple just confounds me with the "let's take everything out that could possibly add power or confuse", and thus you are left with the "dumb" smart device.

Why does everyone agree with me when I complain about my phone, but we don't have the tools available to make our own good phones? I WANT SEND and END BUTTONS!

I'm excited to find out that Motorola has a semi-native Debian distro hiding under Android on their phones, which is only exposed via webtop. At least it's something?!

Sorry for the OT Rant, but I can't help but go on a tangent once in a while.

Comment: Perhaps he's on to /something/, perhaps not (Score 3, Interesting) 1034

by Y2K is bogus (#40112875) Attached to: Are Porn and Video Games Ruining a Generation?

I wonder if the neighbor's kids have ever gotten laid.

Them kids just sit in their rooms and play games, smoke weed, and play some more. There is some sort of employment they are involved with, but it doesn't look real stable or regular, certainly not a 9-5 job.

That said, I blame their mom. They are over privileged and simply have to pitch a fit to get what they want, whether it's a new computer part or a car to replace the last POS they bought.

I don't think it was games that did it, I think their mother's lack of parenting and failure to instill drive in them is to blame. Dad is whipped, so he's not much of an influence.

Teach kids right from wrong, learn them some work ethic, and give them opportunity to succeed, that's what I think is lacking.

Comment: FAIL?!? (Score 4, Insightful) 713

by Y2K is bogus (#39983755) Attached to: Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

When I read the article I felt like the world at large has failed. With the resurgence of the DIY genre, why do the young ones have to be ignorant of history? It seems like the intention is to forget all that came before, so nobody can have an original idea. The irony is that many great, original, ideas are a rehash of some previous idea because it was the best way to do something.

As someone who grew up using floppies, building computers, learning to program, and finally leaving that arena to explore a career in one of the oldest professions, metalworking, I have a particular spot for history and nostalgia.

Just because every 14 year old kid has an ARM A5 processor strapped to them doesn't mean the lessons that were learned in the 80's, innovating computers and electronics, aren't just as applicable today.

I feel it takes an appreciation for the classical trades and the way things *were* done, to truly appreciate what we have -- and apply the hard won principles of yesteryear to tomorrow.

Sure, those icons stand for concepts that we rarely use today, but many of them were "obsolete" when they were invented. Further, what would we replace them with, what are the analogues today that people will unmistakebly associate those actions with? What, two fingers making a V? How about a curly swipey gesture?

The world is full of things past and present, let's not throw them away because the "future" beckons "futuristic" notions.

Technology

+ - First-grader without hands wins penmanship award->

Submitted by
InstructaZine
InstructaZine writes "By all accounts, Annie Clark, 7, a first-grader at Wilson Christian Academy in West Mifflin, is a hard-working and determined student who makes a point of learning from her mistakes and strives for perfection in her work.
So on the surface, it should come as no surprise that she won a national handwriting award from the Zaner-Bloser language arts and reading company. That is, of course, if you didn’t know that she was born with no hands.
On Wednesday, Annie received one of two national handwriting awards the Zaner-Bloser firm offered for the first time this year to disabled students. The other went to a student in Eastlake, Ohio, who has a visual impairment."

Link to Original Source
EU

+ - Drone drops GPS, navigation by vision alone.->

Submitted by
garymortimer
garymortimer writes "This technology, developed in the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at ETH Zurich, has two weighty advantages compared with GPS-based flying robots. First, it works both in the open air and in enclosed spaces. The second is that the flying robots can navigate where GPS fails; for example, due to the density of buildings. The camera-based technology allows for a more accurate positioning of the aircraft than is possible with GPS, explains the project coordinator, Davide Scaramuzza. Depending on the environment, GPS errors can be as great as 70 metres — much too imprecise when several flying robots are in close proximity to each other in the air."
Link to Original Source
Privacy

+ - FBI compromises another remailer->

Submitted by
betterunixthanunix
betterunixthanunix writes "Another remailer has been compromised by the FBI, who made a forensic image of the hard disc of a remailer located in Austria. The remailer operator has reissued the remailer keys, but warns that messages previously sent through the remailer could be decrypted. The operator also warns that law enforcement agents had an opportunity to install a back door, and that a complete rebuild of the system will take some time."
Link to Original Source

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