Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:How about distributing timezone info through DN (Score 1) 405

You query for a location+timestamp and you get a timezone rule back that includes a timestamp range it is valid for.
This information you cache locally, and before making more DNS queries you check of you have locally cached info for that location for which the requested timestamp is within a previously returned timestamp range.
That does not sound too difficult. It is much like the operation of the existing library, which uses a static table instead of DNS queries but still needs to have
separate information for different timestamp ranges.

Comment Re:BBC time == UK time - whats the problem? (Score 1) 487

Of course this is true when you see a clock in the picture, but when I tune to the BBC and press the info button on my remote, I still see the overlaid clock in local time.
And when I press the EPG button to see their schedule, I see the schedule expressed in my local time. So "the nine o'clock news" airs at 22:00.

This is possible because this data is all transmitted relative to UTC and my receiver translates it to local time. And it only works because I cared to set
the timezone for my receiver when it went through its initial setup wizard.

What they probably are worried about is the viewers/users who do not have things like this correctly set.
After all, when your PC clock is not correct and you are on internet, you must have done something wrong. Probably set the timezone incorrectly.
(home versions of windows are by default synchronizing their clock to time.windows.com and Apple stuff probably is no different)

Comment Re:Not-so-accurate source (Score 1) 487

Right now their problem is that people with their clock incorrectly set will see an incorrect time.
They probably don't want to change that into a situation where people with their timezone incorrectly set will see an incorrect time.
(as that will probably largely be the same group of people)

Comment Re:Things like this (Score 2) 150

In a recent programme on local TV, some investigative journalist reported that they had found many
NAS devices online. A certain brand of NAS comes with sharing enabled by default, with a default password.
You just need to unpack your NAS and connect it to your local network and all the data you put on it
is accessible to the world. It uses UPNP to overcome the NAT problem.

The journalist found several NAS boxes with backups of very private data on it.
Another issue is the HP all-in-one printer/scanner devices, which also are internet connected by
default (even via WiFi). So you can access them from your smartphone, how convenient.
But they found people who had left private documents like account activation letters on the scanner,
and could remotely start a scan and read the document.
The users who were contacted were not aware of any problem.

So, it is a big security risk. But to have this work in the case you know what you are doing and
purposely want to share your data or your device, you need the possibilty to contact your port 80.
So it is no good if the provider blocks this with no way to unblock it.

That is forbidden here. A provider must give transparent access when the customer wants that.

Comment Re:Things like this (Score 2) 150

How terrible!
And how do you access your own NAS or printer over the net?
These days, more and more devices come with their built-in webserver that enables the owner to contact home from his smartphone or tablet.
It is a security nightmare, but that is a different topic.

In the Netherlands, it is forbidden to filter internet other than for security or customer-opted convenience reasons (e.g. spam filtering).
Many providers also offer fixed or semi-fixed IP as standard feature.

Comment twitter email (Score 1) 49

Fortunately I entered an invalid e-mail address on my Twitter account.
Every time I log in they bug me about "e-mails to your address to not get delivered, please update your address"
but after all it was good that I never did that. Why would I want to receive e-mail from Twitter?? Or from any other
party they choose to share my info with?

Comment Re:I'm not British (Score 1) 160

Fortunately the BBC also transmits DVB subtitling.
However, the typical cable company does not relay it to the clients yet.
Maybe this changes in the future?
Right now, I can enable subtitles on my satellite receiver, but not on Ziggo digital cable.
(on analogue cable you are probably out of luck - DVB subtitling cannot be converted to teletext)

Comment Re:If it ain't broken... (Score 1) 160

One of the alleged problems of teletekst is claimed to be that everything has to be in a 24x40 character frame,
of which in practice only 24x39 is usable, and of course all the standard headers and footers further subtract
from that to leave maybe 20x39 available for each news item.

But while that is limited space and the youngsters undoubtedly would want more space to express the content,
those youngsters invented twitter and use text messaging, with even shorter messages!

I think it actually is a strength of teletekst. The editors are forced to condense their items into very compact and
factual text. Of course this shows the capabilties of the editors, which makes the NOS Teletekst so much
better than the competition from RTL or worst: SBS.

Comment Re:Firefox (Score 1) 302

I don't know what filehippo is or why you refer to it, but SeaMonkey 2.13.1 has been released 2 weeks ago and is
as modern (and is supporting as many standards) as FireFox 16.0.1
The patches of FireFox quickly make it into SeaMoney, which shares large parts of its code (and of Thunderbird).
It even sends Firefox as part of its user agent string, just to satisfy those that know about Firefox and not about SeaMonkey.

Comment Re:Driving style above 8bit (Score 1) 283

You seem to presume an unchecked environment where operations just continue with ruined data.
However, in a more professional runtime environment such an integer overflow is causing an exception which can be handled in more or less successful ways.
One would assume that systems used to provide evidence in legal procedures have the facilities to protect them against using invalid data because of variable overflows etc.

Comment Re:Why is the burden on millions... (Score 2) 166

The way it is implemented here in the Netherlands is that cookies required for technical operation,
like login sessions, store baskets, user preferences are allowed but cookies used for other purposes,
like tracking site visits and controlling ad placement, are not. (unless allowed explicitly by the user)

What is required now is an extra field in the cookies that conveys cookie intent, and a setting screen
in the browser to allow/deny cookies with given intent (as a default).
So users can opt-out of tracking and still be able to login and shop without having to confirm their
cookie acceptance for every site.

Comment Re:Dumb laws are dumb. (Score 1) 166

Of course whitelisting cookies by site is useless. Many sites send different cookies, you want to block some of them but not all.
Blocking by name is difficult because there is no name convention.
When every session cookie would start with SESS and every tracking cookie with TRK, it would be easy.
Now that there is no such naming convention, and no tools in place to do anything with cookie names, it is probably best to add
another field to cookies, to convey cookie intent. Then users can allow or block cookies based on intent. They can allow
cookies used to keep a login session, and refuse cookies used to track users.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

Working...