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Comment Avast and Abaft, maties, heave! (Score 1) 231

I'm sure there's a Kernel of Truth in this article and if I found it I'd run it on my old Laptop Of Doom. But if Avast told me the sun was shining I'd have to take a walk to the nearest window before believing it. Seriously. This just reads like exaggerated marketing FUD for their Android app.

Submission + - Peak Copper: The end begins in 30 years (sciencemag.org)

goombah99 writes: If electrons are the lifeblood of a modern economy, copper makes up its blood vessels. In cables, wires, and contacts, copper is at the core of the electrical distribution system, from power stations to delicate electronics. As consumption has risen exponentially—reaching 17 million metric tons in 2012—miners have met the world's demand for 10,000 years. But that might soon change. A group of resource specialists has taken the first shot at projecting how much more copper miners will wring from the planet. Results of their model, described this month, show that production peaks by about midcentury even if copper is more abundant than most geologists believe. That would drive prices sky-high, trigger increased recycling, and force inferior substitutes for copper on the marketplace.

Submission + - Linksys Routers Exploited by "TheMoon" (sans.edu)

UnderAttack writes: A vulnerability in many Linksys routers, allowing for unauthenticated code execution, is used to mass-exploit various Linksys routers right now. Infected routers will start scanning for vulnerable systems themselves, leading to a very fast spread of this "worm".

Submission + - Slashdot Beta: Because They Hate You 3

boolithium writes: People on here are missing the point of the Beta roll out. The elimination of the existing user base is not a side effect, it is a feature. Slashdot as a brand has value, but as a site has limited commercial appeal. The users are the kids at the lunch table, where not even the foreign exchange students want to sit. Nobody ever got laid from installing NetBSD.

Once they are finished with their nerd cleansing, they can build a new Slashdot. A sexier Slashdot. A Slashdot the kids can dance to.

They aren't ignoring you. They are exterminating you.

Submission + - Applied Crypto Hardening with BetterCrypto.org (bettercrypto.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Good open source cryptography is essential to security. Correctly implementing this is often a complex riddle. This project aims to provide an open source guide to applied crypto hardening.

Comment Re:Unity was Canonical's suicide note (Score 1) 685

What Arrogant Bastard said. This was more like vandalism than an "upgrade". My best-working systems are the ones that have been left alone, and the ones that were "upgraded" have given me nothing but frustration and a poor user experience since. As many have said, offering a new UI is fine; throwing it in everyones faces was childish and extremely ill-considered. Major Fail, Ubuntu.

Comment Re:Maybe a punishment? (Score 1) 14

I agree; the treatment given this person could easily have been insulting treatment of a pariah rather than acceptance of a gay person. Assuming we understand the message and motive just because we see the action is an insupportable connection in this case. It is indeed very interesting but does not lend itself to a definite conclusion about the attitudes of the people who conducted the burial. Let's say for example... maybe he killed a woman, and her body was unrecoverable for some reason, but they knew who had done it. The family told him they were going to have a burial for her whether she could be recovered or not, and he was invited to stand in for her. ;) No doubt there are hundreds of other possible scenarios.

Comment Satisfying the Victim/Customer, Chinese Style (Score 1) 347

I got my education on this issue early on, in the 80's. I was running a popular BBS and had a boner for one of those new-fangled ripping-fast 1200 baud modems. I just knew my life would be better if I could get one, but couldn't afford the prices. Then I went to a computer show and saw it in its plain white box: a Genuine "Hi-Fidelity" brand 1200 baud internal modem for no more than 80 or 90 bucks. Well Now! I went home that night and slipped it into an ISA slot on my Wells-American 12MHz '286 and It Worked! I was thrilled, until I started trying to tie it into the BBS software. Everything ran without a complaint, until it was time for the modem to actually behave as it was being told to do; setting for auto-answer, how many rings to wait before answering, setting a particular baud rate, anything of that sort that went beyond ATDT or ATA (dial a number or answer a call) just didn't seem to be working out.

I stayed up for hours into the night trying to figure out what I could possibly be doing wrong, issuing Hayes commands from a terminal, seeing them accepted and tearing my hair out while the system acted as if I had done none of the "right" things to make everything work. Around 2 or 3am with the beer and my patience running out, I sat down in front of the terminal and typed "ATFUCKYOU" and hit . The damnable thing answered back "OK" and I realized I had been had.

It would answer "OK" to -any- string as long as it had an AT in front of it. Us round-eye devils wanted Hayes command set compatibility and they'd give it to us... on their terms, and run away with the money. It was an expensive (in 1984 or so dollars) lesson in the psychology of Chinese technology vendors that I have never forgotten. Don't trust them, don't trust even what you see unless you can confirm it all the way to the end of the test chain, and then don't assume the next one out of the box is going to act anything like the one you just tested.

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