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Submission + - Chowhound.com Redesign Puts Off Users 1

Submitted by paradog1
paradog1 writes: The popular food website chowhound.com rolled out a redesign a month ago. After a month-long beta period during which there were hundreds of complaints, the change appeared suddenly, and just as suddenly new content dropped precipitously. Most of the new content is in the Site Feedback area, not in areas related to food. Moderators are squelching posts criticizing the new design. There's an article in today's LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/food/la... , and one from a couple of weeks ago in the San Francisco area East Bay Express: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/... . Many computer professionals using the site think it's a classic example of how badly-planned UX design can kill off a website.

Submission + - Debian dropping Linux Standard Base (lwn.net)

Submitted by basscomm
basscomm writes: For years (as seen on Slashdot) the Linux Standard Base has been developed as an attempt to reduce the differences between Linux distributions in an effort significant effort. However, Debian Linux has announced that they are dropping support for the Linux Standard Base due to a lack of interest.

If [Raboud's] initial comments about lack of interest in LSB were not evidence enough, a full three months then went by with no one offering any support for maintaining the LSB-compliance packages and two terse votes in favor of dropping them. Consequently, on September 17, Raboud announced that he had gutted the src:lsb package (leaving just lsb-base and lsb-release as described) and uploaded it to the "unstable" archive. That minimalist set of tools will allow an interested user to start up the next Debian release and query whether or not it is LSB-compliant—and the answer will be "no."

Submission + - Another EPA wastewater spill in Colorado

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: EPA workers have caused another wastewater spill in Colorado.

According to the Denver Post, an EPA mine crew working Thursday at the Standard Mine in the mountains near Crested Butte, triggered another spill of some 2,000 gallons of wastewater into a nearby mountain creek. Supporting Tipton's remarks to Watchdog Arena, the Denver Post report states that the EPA had failed to release a report about the incident at the time of its writing.

Unlike the Gold King Mine, where on Aug. 5, an EPA mine crew exploring possible clean-up options, blew out a structural plug in the mine releasing over 3 million gallons of toxic waste into the Animas River, the Standard Mine is an EPA-designated superfund site, where the federal agency has been directing ongoing clean-up efforts.

According to a the Washington Times regarding this latest spill, Tipton's spokesman, Josh Green, said that locals in the Crested Butte area confirmed the spill. Watchdog Arena spoke directly with Tipton Thursday afternoon who claimed, "They are reporting that the spill consisted of "gray water," and was not toxic. But the definition of gray water does not preclude the presence of possible toxic substances."

It doesn't matter that this spill is smaller and at a superfund site. If a private landowner screwed up like this, and didn't report it, as required by the EPA, the EPA would move in faster than the speed of light to take everything they owned and to put them in prison.

Comment And there's always nginx rewrite, too — mdoc (Score 2) 138

by ConstantineM (#50554507) Attached to: UrlHosted Experiment: Host Content Within the URL

I might be subjective as I'm the author of it, but this somewhat remind me of my http://mdoc.su/ project, which is what I call a deterministic URL shortener, or, perhaps, better yet, a semantic URL provider.

The whole source code is an nginc.conf configuration file, and is just a bunch of regular expressions and `rewrite` and `location` rules, available under an BSD/ISC licence, of course -- that's the one that comes with "no strings attached", BTW!

http://mdoc.su/
http://mdoc.su/FreeBSD-10.2/fs
http://mdoc.su/f102/resolvconf
http://nginx.conf.mdoc.su/mdoc...
https://github.com/cnst/mdoc.s...

Comment Twitter download private links? (Score 1) 80

by ConstantineM (#50529503) Attached to: Twitter Sued For Scanning Direct Messages

If Twitter's behaviour for elongating the URLs in the public Tweets is any indication, their own bots actually download the contents of the links, allegedly trying to scan it for malware or whatnot.

I, personally, suffer because I never experience any URLs being shortened, they instead only get elongated by the service, reducing already constrained character space.

I mean, you don't have to go far to find a URL shorter than http://t.co/qLxImbQYvn. Even if you have a newly registered .com, it's still likely they'll only elongate it if you ever post a link to it.

And Twitter should really change the name of their subservice disservice to be more technically accurate.

The CEO of Sonic.net is especially annoyed (and rightly so) -- he can't even refer to his company without getting an elongation!

Comment Give me back my Zero Shutter Lag @ Galaxy Nexus! (Score 2) 117

Submission + - OpenBSD keyboard problems fixed by pms(4) and a forcible mouse port reset

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: Theo de Raadt writes in on tech@ a fascinating story from the s2k15 hackathon in Brisbane about the reasons that the mice and keyboards were problematic on the new ThinkPad X1, specifically, having keyboard repeat and shutter during install, eventually being figured out to happen due to the large and extra sensitive touchpad. It all came down to the pms driver, or lack thereof, as it's missing only on the RAMDISK kernels used on the install media, and they were the only ones being visibly affected.

The solution is to forcibly reset the mouse port at attach., de Raadt proclaims. Some other keyboard issues, notably boot -c not working on some machines, were also determined to be caused by the mouse ports, too.

But the changes are risky, and require lots of testing prior to commit, due to the plethora of keyboard controller models, so, it didn't make the cut for the upcoming 5.7 release.

Comment Don't you love NETGEAR support? (Score 1) 57

by ConstantineM (#49078249) Attached to: Flaw In Netgear Wi-Fi Routers Exposes Admin Password, WLAN Details

Don't you love the professionalism and issue escalation of the NETGEAR support team? Shows that we, the mere mortals, are not alone here at all!

If even the security research guy can't get them to stop sitting on their arses, what the mere mortals without such pressing issues are left to do when they encounter the various bugs here and there?

Comment Re:When will Lactose make it to Nutrition Facts? (Score 1) 180

by ConstantineM (#49035773) Attached to: US Gov't To Withdraw Food Warnings About Dietary Cholesterol

But most people in the US are not. Worldwide is meaningless.

Where did you get such information? Even if less than 50% of people in the US are lactose intolerant, the number is unlikely to be that far away from 50%. Most people aren't even aware they're lactose intolerant.

Comment Re:When will Lactose make it to Nutrition Facts? (Score 1) 180

by ConstantineM (#49035739) Attached to: US Gov't To Withdraw Food Warnings About Dietary Cholesterol

Above and beyond that, even the strictest of severe allergies can be tamed by - guess what - controlled exposure to the substance in question. Give a nut-allergy sufferer sufficiently small injections of nuts and build it up gradually and the allergy ...

The above is complete BS that has no proof whatsoever with science.

On the contrary, science tells us that these things work the other way around:

http://smithsonianscience.org/...

Ten to 15 percent of people are immune to poison ivy and will never have a rash. Repeated contact however will not give you immunity, in fact just the opposite, Pell explains. “The rashes get worse and worse as your immune system gets better and better at recognizing urushiol.”

Submission + - OpenSSH will feature key discovery and rotation for easier switching to Ed25519

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: OpenSSH developer Damien Miller wrote tomorrow from Down Under about a new feature he implemented and committed for the next upcoming 6.8 release of OpenSSH — hostkeys@openssh.com — an OpenSSH extension to the SSH protocol for sshd to automatically send all of its public keys to the client, and for the client to automatically replace all keys of such server within ~/.ssh/known_hosts with the fresh copies as supplied (provided the server is trusted in the first place, of course). The protocol extension is simple enough, and is aimed to make it easier to switch over from DSA to the OpenSSL-free Ed25519 public keys. It is also designed in such a way as to support the concept of spare host keys being stored offline, which could then seamlessly replace main active keys should they ever become compromised.

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