DidgetMaster writes: Hard drive costs now hover around $20 per terabyte (TB). Drives bigger than 20TB are now available. Fast SSDs are more expensive, but the average user can now afford these in TB capacities as well. Yet, we are still using antiquated file systems that were designed decades ago when the biggest drives were much less than a single gigabyte (GB). Their oversized file records and slow directory traversal search algorithms make finding files on volumes that can hold more than 100 million files a nightmare. Rather than flexible tagging systems that could make searches quick and easy, they have things like "extended attributes" that are painfully slow to search on. Indexing services can be built on top of them, but these are not an integral part of the file system so they can be bypassed and become out of sync with the file system itself.

It is time to replace file systems with something better. A local object store that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files and find things in seconds based on file type and/or tags attached is possible. File systems are usually free and come with your operating system, so there seems to be little incentive for someone to build a new system from scratch, but just like we needed the internet to come along and change everything we need a better data storage manager.

See Didgets for an example of what is possible. In a Substack article, Didgets developer Andy Lawrence argues his system solves many of the problems associated with the antiquated file systems still in use today. "With Didgets, each record is only 64 bytes which means a table with 200 million records is less than 13GB total, which is much more manageable," writes Lawrence. Didgets also has "a small field in its metadata record that tells whether the file is a photo or a document or a video or some other type," helping to dramatically speed up searches.

Do you think it's time to replace file systems with an alternative system, such as Didgets? Why or why not?

Long-time Slashdot reader olddoc and his wife have three frequently-used credit cards, stored at many online businesses for easy checkout.

"In the past 6 months we have received fraud notices from the card companies three times." Typically there is a $1 charge in a far away location. Once there was a charge for thousands of dollars at a bar. The card companies seem to pick up the fact that they are fraudulent even though once it was described as "chip present".

What can we do to cut down the number of times we have to update all our ongoing bills with a new card number?
The original submission acknowledges that "We have never lost money to fraud, just time." But is the problem storing the card numbers with online businesses? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K argues "Never ever do this. Never ever have your card stored at an online business even if it's more inconvenient to enter it every time. You NEVER know how your number is stored, it can be stored in a database that's not secure enough or it can be stored in an encrypted cookie on your computer in which case that cookie might be read and decrypted by just about any web site out there if they have figured out how to access cookies for another site. There are a lot of ways that your card details can leak."

That comment also concedes it's possible someone's using a card-number generator to target the same range of credit card numbers. But is there a better solution?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. How can you keep your credit card numbers from being stolen?

t0qer writes: So, I recently got an email that my [free edition G Suite subscription] will be going away soon (July 2022) and I'll have to subscribe for $6 per user per month. My domain is just my family last name and I have a few accounts for my immediate wife and kids. I'm not really sure if that's worth spending the money on for hosted email. I do use other parts of the suite (Drive, Sheets, and Docs) but I can happily use other products for that.

Just wondering if any /.'ers are in the same boat and what they're thinking of moving to? As a recap, Google announced in mid-January that all "G Suite Legacy Free Edition" (now formally called Google Workspace) users will be required to start paying for Workspace this year. This decision generated a ton of backlash, even prompting a potential class-action lawsuit. Now, the company appears to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement by allowing legacy G Suite users the ability to migrate to free accounts. They're also "promising a data-migration option (including your content purchases) to a consumer account before the shutdown hits," reports Ars Technica.

Still, it may be time to switch to a different service... Some alternatives include Office 365 Business, Zoho Workplace, Bitrix24, and Rackspace. Do you have a favorite?

`Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: If you're doing any web page programming for money, then I'm pretty sure you're paid to support Edge, too. Probably even required to test it. So this question is really directed to the relative amateur programmers among us.

As I think about the topic from my overly philosophic perspective, I even considered asking "Do you feel pressured or even blackmailed to support MS Edge?"
The original submission tells the story of a homegrown app involving "moderately complicated data structures embedded in JavaScript files that are loaded on the fly..." that might grow into an 800K re-write. "Since it's mostly for my own use, I don't care at all about Edge, but it got me to thinking and led to this question." So do others uses Edge to test their web pages? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K has already answered, "I don't. If I test I avoid the quite erratic variations that Javascript can create as much as possible and resort to HTML and CSS Validators."

How about the rest of you? Use the comments to share your own thoughts, opinions, and experiences.

Do you test your web pages with Microsoft Edge?

A technical question occurred to Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen when filling out forms online. "Are the programmers responsible for them stupid, incompetent, lazy, or all rolled into one?"

They provided two real-world examples that inspired the question:

- "I made up a company name that happened to contain a digit. When I submitted the information I got a big fat error diagnostic about this box, to the effect that numerals are not allowed in a company name. So you know, people â" no digits allowed in your company's name, or else!"

- "In a free text box limited to 1,000 characters (already stupid, arguably) the caption explicitly banned the following characters in the "free text" because they can interfere with the correct processing of input..."

~!@#$%^&*()|'

This prompted a response from UnknownSoldier (Slashdot reader #67,820), who shared the humorous "Murphy's Computer Law" aphorisms from 1984, calling them "sadly still appropriate" and referring to one in particular: "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over." In general Web programmers tend to be extremely lazy (undisciplined.) They don't value correctness because that would take "work". I'm not just singling out web programmers here, look at how many programmers fuck up the TRIVIAL example of FizzBuzz.

For example, here are two examples where incompetent programmers make tons of assumptions.

* Falsehoods programmers believe about names
* Falsehoods programmers believe about time

As they say the devil is in the details, or edge case, as it may be. Programming is littered with edge cases so bad programmers "stick their head in the sand and ignore the problem hoping it will go away."

Doing it right costs time, money, and skill. Management is partially to blame. Bad programmers are to blame. Schools are to blame. There are many factors why we end up with shit software like the use case you just described.

And now you know why old programmers become grumpy. Modern software is slow, bloated, with layers of abstraction piled upon abstraction, library upon library. You spend more time "decoding" code and reverse engineering what was done because no one ever took the time to comment it properly for the next guy.

Use these examples of "stupid shit" to be a better programmer.
Agree? Disagree? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Why do programmers make so many mistakes?

theodp writes: Slashdot has surveyed personal New Year's resolutions in the past. So this year, how about coming up with a list of New Year's resolutions you'd like to see tech companies keep in 2022?

As for me, I'd like to see the tech giants resolve to making their desktop software work in the Cloud (and not just for Business), include a programming language with their desktop and mobile OS, provide the capability to share 'meaningful' file names, and allow developers to cap their Cloud charges. Is that too much to ask for in 2022?

What are some books that you read this year that you enjoyed reading? Doesn't have to be those that released this year -- though if possible, mention any recently published books.

Further reading: Ask Slashdot: What's a 2021 Movie or TV Show That You Enjoyed Watching?

An anonymous reader writes: Given the widespread understanding that sophisticated hackers are regularly using zero-day vulnerabilities to break into high-value systems, why is it that when I search for "zero day" on Australia's most popular job search engine only one "real" job comes up? Is the security of the Internet totally dependent on dedicated hobbyists, part-time showboats, and people willing to take meagre bug bounties (on average paying $3,650 for a critical vulnerability) instead of selling their findings (sometimes for millions of dollars) to dubious buyers?
Are they all in-house security people hunting for zero-days as part of their regular responsibilities? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Where are all the jobs preventing zero-day exploits?

An anonymous reader writes: Haven't seen discussion on movie and TV shows recommendations on Slashdot of late. Could the fellow readers share some movies and TV shows and documentaries from this year that they really liked watching?

Long-time Slashdot reader Pieroxy is working on a new open source project, a web-based version of the system-monitoring software Conky.

The ultimate goal is send the data to an HTML interface "to find some use for the old iPads/tablets/laptops we all have lying around. You can put them next to your screen and have your metrics displayed there...!"

There's just one problem: "I had to come up with a way for users to format a number." I needed a small string the user could write to describe exactly what they want to do with their number. Some examples can be: write it as a 3-digit number suffixed by SI prefixes when the numbers are too big or too small, display a timestamp as HH:MM string, or just the day of week, eventually cut to the first three characters, do the same with a timestamp in milliseconds, or nanoseconds, display a nice string out of a number of seconds to express a duration ("3h 12mn 17s"), pad the number with spaces so that all numbers are aligned (left or right), force a fixed number of digits after the decimal point, etc.

In other words, I was looking for a "universal" way of formatting numbers and failed to find any kind of standard online.

Do Slashdot readers know of such a thing or should I create my own?

A few months ago PC Magazine explained eSIMs: You almost certainly have a SIM card: a thumbnail-sized chip that sits in your mobile phone, telling it which carrier and what phone number you use. Now those SIMs are going digital (or "e") and moving your information to a reprogrammable, embedded chip.

A SIM card is a "subscriber identity module." Required in all GSM, LTE, and 5G devices, it's a chip that holds your customer ID and details of how your phone can connect to its mobile network... An eSIM takes the circuitry of a SIM, solders it directly to a device's board, and makes it remotely reprogrammable through software... There are some minor consumer downsides, though. With eSIMs, it's harder to switch one plan between devices — you can't just swap the physical card around — and they can make it harder for you to temporarily remove your SIM if you don't want to be tracked by a carrier.

Google's Pixels have had eSIMs since 2017, and Apple's iPhones have had them since 2018...
Now let's see how long-time Slashdot reader shanen feels about them: Shopping for a new smartphone due to premature battery swelling of a cheapie, but surprised to find out I can't just plug the SIM into a new phone. There ain't no SIM here, but rather the dying phone has an eSIM.... Quick research indicated it's only software, so my obvious question is "How secure can an eSIM be?" (The obvious search results also fail to produce "fresh" results.)

But the black hats have already had a couple of years to work on the problem, and it seems intrinsically difficult to do anything securely if you're only using software. My probably obsolete understanding is that part of the basis of SIM security is that you'd have to destroy the SIM to save its data, but is there an actual security expert in the house?

Related question based on my surprise. How would you even know if you're using an eSIM? Especially since it appears to be possible to use an eSIM on a phone with a SIM.
Share your own thoughts and opinions in the comments.

How secure is an eSIM?

tiltowait writes: My organization has an acceptable use policy which forbids sending out spam. Every few months, however, the central IT office exempts itself from this rule by delivering deceptive e-mails to all employees as a test of their ability to ignore phishing scams. For those who simply delete the messages, they are a small annoyance, comparable to the overhead of having to regularly change passwords -- also done largely unnecessarily, perhaps even to the point of being another bad practice. As someone working in a departmental systems office, I can also attest that these campaigns generate a fair amount of workload from inquiries about their legitimacy. Aside from the "gotcha" angle, which perpetuates some ill will amongst staff, I can't help but think that these exercises are of questionable net value, especially with other countermeasures, such as MFA and Safelinks, already in place. Is it worth spreading misinformation to experiment on your colleagues in such a fashion?

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Over the past ten years, Firefox market share has decreased substantially and the web browser has lost its appeal and coolness. Seeing that, someone at Mozilla probably decided that the best way to entice people back is by changing its UI, thus Firefox has already seen quite a huge number of changes despite other major web browsers staying relatively the same in terms of their visuals; i.e. Google Chrome and Apple Safari look almost the same as they did a decade ago. The most substantial redesign, which is being prepared for the next release, called Proton, promises to drive most power users away because it's broken on a number of levels and makes using the browser a very unpleasant experience.

So, what has changed:
- The compact density option for the address bar is now gone, and not only that, the title bar is now a lot taller than before. Overall, vertically, the title bar and address bar now take almost a dozen pixels more than previous Firefox releases, which steals very precious vertical space.
- The floating tabs. The active tab is now totally disconnected from the active web page and it looks out of place.
- The inactive tabs now completely lack a delimiter between them; and in the case of websites lacking a favicon, all inactive tabs look like one, which makes understanding what's open and what to click very difficult and time consuming.
- Mozilla has removed icons from menus, which makes navigating them slower and more difficult. Human beings can easily recognize and memorize icons, and now instead you have to read 20 menu items and try to understand what you actually need to click. Just to illustrate it, check how Firefox 88 looks and what is up and coming.

It surely looks like whatever UX studies Mozilla has done were either not run properly, or the data being collected was not properly understood. Mozilla has disabled feedback for Firefox, they've made it abundantly clear that you cannot leave comments in their Bugzilla, and considering they want to deprecate userChrome.css, it makes it impossible to restore the semblance of a good web browser experience. The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?

"Everyone has that story," writes Slashdot reader alaskana98: You know, the one where you spilled a Big Gulp-sized cup of sugary Coke all over your laptop and it somehow still works to this day — although the space bar is permanently glued in place.

Or that time you left your iPhone out in a pouring thunderstorm, stuck it in a bag of rice and after a few days it miraculously turned back on. Yes, we've all been there, maybe cried a little and then went on with life — a little wiser for the wear.

So, fellow Slashdotters, what's your worst tale of hardware horrors?
The original submission has already drawn some interesting tales from long-time Slashdot readers, including two thunderstorm hardware horror stories. And there's also the user who remembers how "In the mid 1980s I blew up a $75,000 laser by not turning the cooling water on before firing it up."

But what's your story? Share your own tale in the comments.

What's your worst damaged hardware horror story?

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) wants to build a personal network-attached storage solution, maybe using a multiple-disk array (e.g., a RAID). But unfortunately, "My hardware pool is very shallow." I eBay'd a desktop chassis, whose motherboard claims (I discovered, on arrival) RAID capabilities. There, I have a significant choice — to use the on-board RAID, or do it entirely in software (e.g. OpenMediaVault)?

I'm domestic — a handful of terabytes — but I expect the answer to change as one goes through the petabytes into the exabytes. What do the dotters of the slash think?
Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is a hardware RAID better than a software RAID?

"I am curious as to what other Slashdotters use for backing up of home machines," asks long-time Slashdot reader serviscope_minor: I moved away from the "bunch of disks with some off site" method. I found most of the methods generally had one or more of the following problems: poor Linux support, weak security (e.g. leaking file names), outrageously expensive, hard to set up, tied to a single storage supplier I don't fully trust, entirely proprietary (which makes me doubt long term stability), lack of file history, reputation for slowness, and so on.

My current solution is Unixy: separate tools for separate jobs. Borg for backups to a local machine. Rclone for uploading to business cloud storage, versioned cloud storage to provide resistance against bitrot and other corruption.
They're interested in "what other Slashdotters use," as well as "why and what your experience has been given more than superficial testing." So share you own thoughts in the comments.

What do you use for backups at home?

After their house was vandalized, long-time Slashdot reader lsllll needs some help finding a battery-powered, wifi-enabled camera that can dump motion-detected videos to a local server: There are some nice cameras out there that'll work for nearly 5 months off a rechargeable battery. You can even pair them with a solar panel which would keep them constantly topped off. But none of them offer anything other than local storage (free on SD card) or in the cloud (subscription).

Obviously, being a programmer and a sysadmin, I realize that the effort to dump a video to a cloud service and opening a connection to a local FTP/SMB server require the same bandwidth, battery usage. So this decision to not support local FTP/SMB servers must be intentional and the way everything is going nowadays: juice the customers for as much money as you can after they've purchased your product.

The question is, are the any cameras out there that run on rechargeable batteries, support WiFi, and dump videos to a local server?
Share your suggestions in the comments!

Long-term Slashdot reader couchslug believes that "Howls of anguish from betrayed CentOS 8 users highlight the value of its long support cycles..." Earlier this month it was announced that at the end of 2021, the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS 8, "will no longer be maintained," though CentOS 7 "will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024."

This leads Slashdot reader couchslug to an interesting question. "Should competitors like Ubuntu and SUSE offer truly long-term-support versions to seize that (obviously large and thus important to widespread adoption) user base?" As distros become more refined, how important are changes vs. stability for users running tens, thousands and hundreds of thousands of servers, or who just want stability and security over change for its own sake...? Why do you think distro leadership are so eager for distro life cycles? Boredom, progress or what mix of both?

What sayeth the hive mind and what distros do you use to achieve your goals?
The original submission argues that "Distro-hopping is fun but people with work to do and a fixed task set have different needs." But what do Slashdot's readers thinks? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

And how long do you think a vendor should support a distro?

What are some good movies and TV shows that you watched this year? You do not have to narrow down your selection to titles that came out this year, but feel free to give one a shotout.

Long-time Slashdot reader t0qer has a question: why haven't we gone to an open source, Public Key Infrastructure-based voting system? "I'm fairly well versed in PKI technology, and quoting this site, it would take traditional computers 300 trillion years to break RSA-2048 for a single vote." SSL.com has a pretty interesting piece on using Public Key Infrastructure in voting. There's also a GitHub project that leverages PKI and IBM blockchain technology...

It just seems like paper at this point has outlived its secureness. A closed sourced voting system doesn't really seem like the kind of thing Slashdot would really get behind.
SSL's article points out that the technology seems to exist already. Nearly half the population of Estonia already votes online, and four U.S. states (Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and North Dakota) already have web portals that allow for absentee voting. (And West Virginia has a mobile voting app that uses blockchain technology.) [L]uckily, the groundwork for securing the practice of remote, online voting is already there. We have been conducting many delicate transactions online for some time — the secure transfer of information has been a cornerstone for many industries that have successfully shifted online such as personal banking and investing, and those methods of securing and authenticating information can be employed in voting as well. For years, people have suggested that the use of blockchain technology could be used to secure elections and increase voter turnout.
Share your own thoughts in the comments. Why haven't we implemented Public Key Infrastructure voting?