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Comment The line between citation and advertisement (Score 1) 33

I happened to be aware of the existence of a extension made by someone else that offers domain-level opt-in consent to run script in a particular web browser. I cited the extension's title and author and deliberately left out any URL. I thought that would have been adequate to imply lack of conflict of interest. A user has implied to me that it is not. What means of citing a source would have been adequate?

Comment Fan as CPU spike monitor (Score 1) 33

?) it’s handed a lightweight JavaScript proof-of-work challenge—solve this trivial SHA-256 puzzle before proceeding. [...] There’s no crypto mining, no wallet enrichment

Yet. Because Anubis is free software, and because its hash happens to be the same as the proof of work of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, someone could modify Anubis to tie the SHA-256 puzzle to the Bitcoin block that a mining pool is working on.

no WASM blobs firing up your GPU

Until someone writes a browser extension to offload solving the hashcash to WebGPU.

Most users won’t know their machine is doing extra work unless they’re monitoring CPU spikes or poking around in dev tools.

Laptops tend to have an always-on CPU spike monitor: the exhaust fan. So do phones and tablets: they get warm. So do older, less expensive, or small-form-factor desktop computers: they get stuck on the interstitial for up to a minute.

Anubis is a fantastic tool, but I think we can strengthen it by baking in the principle of informed consent.

This already exists. Use an extension to make script-in-the-browser opt-in per domain, such as the Firefox extension "Javascript Control" by Erwan Ameil.

Comment Remember Coinhive? (Score 1) 33

Apparently no one else thought to use this solution for this problem until Xe Iaso came along.

I seem to remember a service called Coinhive that offered a script to make the viewer's device mine the cryptocurrency Monero in the background. I forget if it had an option to hide the article until a particular amount was mined. (Coinhive shut down when too many intruders started installing its script on other people's websites.)

Comment Re: "far too small to generate any lift"?? (Score 4, Interesting) 106

That's how I read it. It should say it has no thrust.

A typical jet turbofan airframe has two engines that each have a generator shaft taking turbine energy and making electrical current. It then has a whole 'nother turbine engine used on the ground and in some other flight legs called the APU; this exhausts out the tail cone usually, and can start engines or provide extra hydraulic power if needed, but is slow to start just like the main engines.

For power loss emergencies, a small spring-loaded fan pops into action super fast, called a Ram Air Turbine or RAT. It can only make enough electrical power to reboot key systems like engine FADECs or avionics, often only on one electrical channel instead of all channels. It's only a turbine, not a thrust-producing fan. It's a pinwheel toy in comparison to the APU and even the APU cannot produce significant thrust.

Comment US used to have 40 percent tax on the richest (Score 1) 249

Why and what does a "balanced budget" look like?

In a balanced budget, taxation exceeds spending, like it did at the end of the Clinton administration and just before George W. Bush went to war. The highest federal income tax bracket at the time was about 40 percent. What broke the budget was a misguided attempt to stimulate private business by cutting income tax on the richest American taxpayers.

Comment Receipt bug in early Steam (Score 1) 47

I sorta think of it as the "always online" issue, which in the past I thought was absolutely unacceptable for a single player game, and now I mostly don't care because I'm always online anyways.

That created a problem for dial-up users and laptop users back in the day. That was solved in two ways. First, Valve fixed the bug in early Steam that was causing it to fail to store purchase receipts for offline mode. (Users at the time were experiencing this as a need to be online for switching to offline mode to work.) Second, the home Internet market as a whole phased out dial-up, and even in areas not served by fiber, cable, or DSL, dial-up users largely switched to satellite Internet.

Comment Games that get delisted after a couple years (Score 1) 47

if i really want a game i wait until the price seems reasonable and affordable even if that means waiting for years

Unless it's something like DuckTales Remastered that gets delisted from Steam after a couple years on the market. This particular game was an adaptation of a Disney product identity, and Capcom's license from Disney had expired.

Comment Hard for users to trust a private CA (Score 1) 26

Other than that new versions of mainstream operating systems and web browsers make it harder for the owner of a device to trust the root certificate of a particular private CA. I seem to remember, for example, that iOS and Android put a scary warning on the lock screen if one or more user-trusted root certificates is installed, and Android application developers have to opt into user-trusted root certificates through a "Network Security Config".

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