Today's lazy dev mentality. Every fiscal quarter a certain dev or other will delegate a dangerous bug into the realm of "one-off". I am tired of this mentality of waving bug tracker reports away and closing them. We know they never get to the bug if it's delayed as a "corner case", improbable, right off the bat. They often close 'em when long enough has passed that we've stopped posting new leads, reports and requests for updates. Worse, many bug reports remain as "NEW" for years even after several different weeks of our trying to escalate them. It's intentional cruft.

Devs are saving face when they mess up. "One-off" is PR made to alude to some lottery-winning odds... a quantum soup with flukes so infinitely improbable that "NEVER GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN because the user will go away if we hide and we can pretend it never happened in the first place!" is the lie we're expected to live with and to spread to the users.

Helpdesk staff and programmers are supposed to follow logical thinking, fully aware that computers are powered by deterministic processes. A certain set of conditions will ALWAYS railroad an input from every single user who mounted the minecart right into a hard brick wall. It's just a matter of having the cart placed visibly enough for the conditions to be met over and over. Yet the people with the power to fix it deem the report as worthless due to negligence and shiny-chasing desires. The tech industry's drive is painfully shifting to a realm of stupid^W willfully hostile decisions the likes of Firefox, KDE4, Gnome3, Windows Metro and 10, SystemD proliferation and the Tracking + Analytics + Ad wars.

I've seen cases of severe bugs waved away by either hiding the feature that led to the bug or just giving an inaccurate warning that eventually comes back when some other related component is inadvertently not obfuscated with the same malice. Today's companies only "change" when something horribly high-profile happens and the reputation lands an egg on its face. The low-wage guys at the bottom were unable to change things when there was time and ample focus on the problem and reasons to fix it. Until tech makers --not tech *users* become the focus of today's court retribution worldwide (ie: being arrested for stupid stuff like breaking in when you're reporting an authentication / login breach as a user, but never seeing arrests of developers who create the breach to abuse the back door, let alone policy-makers... closed-door conspirators and knowing CEOs --think internet of things and remote power plant insecurity, while you're at it), things will continue this way.

Not sure if you include "credit card payments" here but it's becoming impossible to use the internet without a credit card and an email address. Trusting trust --if you want to have some kind of paypal account then you need to provide a credit card (or a bank account IIRC --and there's no offline way of populating that, so you're effectively doing banking by proxy)

But I digress. The reason I replied was to remind you that no matter what you do, your information will be leaked --if it's not YOU, it will be one of the companies you choose to use... But it doesn't stop there --if you live in the US, a coinflip chance determines whether scammers already got your information last year. So in a crowded stadium, one in two is a considerable amount to leave to random chance... half of the people you see are statistically likely to be one of those 150 million people out of 300 million total population attacked by the Equifax hack. Even if you never walk thru their corporate headquarters doors --you have no choice. Funny, I put the wrong name in a websearch and saw news that Experian (the other non-optional credit union out of now 4 standard bodies) also got hacked, though that one went under my radar -- https://www.theguardian.com/bu...

That one was "only" 15 million marks. Sad to think that something that large is discounted to the point of never being mentioned during Equifax's raking over the coals last year, just because it reduces the stadium illustration from 50% to a 10% of those 50% odds, which is still a respectable 1 in 20 people in that stadium instead of 1 in 2.

We are in deep trouble. If someone got your social security number and you keep it for life with no exceptions, then it's game over --we just don't know when or how we're going to get the surprise once the credit union hackers start trickling the data to high-payers. Worse yet, even legit companies share our data with impudence. It's only a matter of time before "private" data from that breach ends up tainting muddy sources like those gossipy involuntary aggregation | blackmail sites of the likes of Spokeo Inc.

It's worth checking out the recycle bin

Thanks for your thread. One AC child post mentions the term "scambating" and my ddg searches were immediately useful. A result was titled "419 Eater - The largest scambaiting community on the planet!"

I've got mixed feelings about realizing there are online communities doing this! If only we did something more to educate instead of fighting what isn't our war...

Anyway, I would worry their potential for exposure to retaliation after each volunteer eventually starts appearing in logs repeatedly. I know nothing about Doxing or the volunteer scambaiters' armor / proxies. Maybe the IP addresses and telco details can give away the well-meaning folks to scammer-initiated swatting if the scammers pool a few of their own resources for black ops teams or something --it is more profitable for them to organize versus the anti-scam volunteers and the might even burn a little of their non-zero ill-earned profits to outsource their hero hunts...)

Another led to a subreddit with this couple-day old post
https://www.reddit.com/r/scamb...
it says there is preliminary (unofficial) signs that VMware can be detected and glitched, but I would take these anonymous reports with a grain of salt till I learn more. I've heard of host VM exploits but not of who might use them outside of a security research lab till now

It is disappointing and scary that scammers don't just hang up in the safety of their spoofed caller ID.

The potential harm is deleting hundreds or thousands of pictures or your college papers / thesis or taxes just because their only goals are defrauding your for $$$ or destroying years of your digital memories.
That this seems widespread among the scammers is worrying, and you'd almost believe that scammer-college is teaching this same type of retaliation to all scammers :)

I've seen this kind of retaliation in a video where a techy guy on Youtube was documenting an attempt at scamming him.

It is easy to picture many a senior citizen somewhere getting a scam call to go sour. You can imagine a catalyst being unexpectedly running into a declined credit card transaction, as if the scammer felt he had a right to feel indignant for having had a waste-of-time for an evil deed he failed to complete.

The lack of automated local data redundancy thru file versioning on Windows is disturbing, especially given how popular ransomware is at achieving similar loss of both data and money.

"Absence of evidence is not proof of absence"
Let's keep this paraphrase and this story close at hand when the apologists continue professing how Apple absolutely protects your privacy.

Apple is more guarded with privacy and has done some commendable things standing up for privacy, but if they are willing to extract "other people's" private data from Facebook without our consent... how difficult could it be for us to be one of *those* "other people"? how appealing could it be your user's own data to be closely guarded if you are the borrower/keeper of that data, like Facebook happened to be in this case?

No "mistakes" are made when these costly / profitable data-sharing alliances are forged, except for getting caught, that is :)
It boils down to our picking the lesser of 2, 3, 4 evils, but every company ultimately ends up painting itself into a corner as the evidence slowly trickles in over the years.

Good points!

I had an annoying surprise helping someone important but not very tech-savvy 3 days ago. A couple, actually, since I'm not normally helping remote users and knowledge of these gotchas is "tribal". After the call I confirmed the Mac version just does not allow a PC user to take control of the mouse and keyboard control. MS always silently ignores features in their ports to mac even when version numbers are the same --as true in the IE5 port of 20 years ago as in the latest Office 2016 port.
I connected and the share button was present, but nothing advertised how he could yield control (or how we the technicians might "request" it, which Joinme makes a bit more obvious). This is a pain because of the travesty guess-heavy minimalistic design of the past decade. It prevents techs from saying "Click on X button, Y menu or Z dropdown". Many icons are hieroglyphs with no labels, and despite ample experience providing phone support in a more descriptive era of UI of the late nineties we end up wasting time describing these moon runes and how to click them even in cases where we're already seeing a read-only screen in someone else's control. The call was exploratory in nature rather than a "X is broken" call, and I would have had to poke around on webpages to trigger some dialogs as well as click a few programs --plus the person was not on Windows, which always adds a layer of mental conversions.

We've had 2 mandatory all-hands screenshares over Skype for Business for HR-related stuff. I wasted most of the first one assisting one of our users who had a black screen. This involved troubleshooting, describing slides and sending screenshots until the person finally gave up. The other time, I was the one impacted (I can't recall if I was seeing all black or just having no sound).

Skype is not alone. Slack has group calls and 7 of us had a frequent meeting with same-room screenshares where each person had a different thing to demo informally... one to three people would randomly roll bad dice and be unable to join properly. Some shoulder-surfing was needed and if you were remoting in that day, you'd sometimes be impacted and miss that part of the meeting. I hate that Firefox dropped their v40-something project to support screensharing. At one point mac users at our sites were on a 5-year-old version of Lync (Skype for Business) and it was a pain figuring out their options for a quick share anyway (sometimes we had to instruct them to use the little-known Office365 web install portal and use a login they weren't aware existed to download Lync or the new version of Skype), but FF was always there. Shame that FF also never supported change of control or one-to-many shares.

In a way, this is analog to the saying that the best camera when the moment is fleeting isn't the expensive DSLR glass that you left stashed elsewhere, but the cheap pinhole one you already have in your pocket.

Hi, there. I agree with the sentiment. Still, there are reasons the technical similarity is superficial. Apologies for the long post this late at night.

Both religions agree that there is a single god. However, at best, Allah and the religion around him represents a fork of the Abrahamic god. Saying both are the same is inaccurate similar to how certain words are hijacked beyond the original intent: "hacker" does not accurately reflect the context of "cracker".
Not being a Muslim, finding this article for my reply was interesting:
http://www.truthortradition.co.... One of the point is that Muslims do not believe in Jesus being the son of God. Some muslims present Jesus as just another prophet.

Considering bitrot, I'll paste some bullet points here though I do not agree with all the points:

God’s only begotten Son is Jesus. Allah has no begotten son.
        God made salvation available by sacrificing His Son and promises salvation by grace to those who believe. Allah sacrificed nothing, and only saves if sufficient works are done.
        God has a payment for sins—Jesus Christ. Allah has no payment for sins.
        God’s Christ paid for the sins of mankind. Allah paid for nothing, and all men pay for their own sins.
        God’s salvation is through Christ’s work. Allah’s salvation is through people’s works.
        God’s saving work is, “Come to Christ.” The major part of Moslem salvation is to believe Mohammed was the sum and seal of the prophets.
        God’s book is very different from Allah’s book. They contradict each other, so they cannot both be true. For example, the Bible says Christ was resurrected from the dead. The Moslems reject that as a lie.
        God says his Son is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Allah says Christ is “only a messenger” (Chap. 5, “The Food” sect. 10, par. 75).
        God treats men and women equally. Allah does not.
        God says marriages today (Christian) are to be monogamous. Allah allows more than one wife.
        There is no marriage in God’s Paradise. Faithful men get many virgins in Allah’s.
        God says it is not necessary to have special days. Allah does: for example, Ramadan, the Moslem holy month during which Moslems fast during the day.

God does have a personal name mentioned thousands of times in the original manuscripts. The original Jewish Tetragrammaton spelling of God's name has been largely replaced by misinterpretation of a commandment to respect the name. You see titles like "Allah" ("The [true] god"), "Lord" or the Jewish "The name" shaping tradition in ways God would not approve, considering his very liberal use of "God" alongside the characters for his name. Considering that we do know the names for mythological gods like Zeus and Apophis, it is funny that a name so important would be so uncharacteristically buried by his enemies. In modern faiths, the original Jewish name still survives in a few bible translations. The King James bible includes one of them, where it's survived the replacement largely customary within that translation and the name appears as Jehovah:
https://www.biblegateway.com/p...
Yahweh is a variant of that. It is enlightening how much the meaning changes when you consider scriptures like https://www.biblegateway.com/p... where text like "LORD the true God" is different from the intent of, say "Ra the true god" or "Jehovah the true god"

You're not alone... The sleep paralysis wiki page caught my eye some time ago. The picture is very appropriate for the unusual sensation of an outside force, when the unexpected lapse exerting our "inside" force is more accurate.

I've heard the threshold of sleep can come with the experience of auditory and visual hallucinations as the brain is countering sensory deprivation.

Panic attacks can happen at night at the waning edge of sleep, and instances of all three (paralysis, hallucinations and panic attacks) are mentioned on this source https://www.livestrong.com/art...

Berners is not to blame --agreed! However, there is no real power to prevent the current WWW committees and browser implementors from doing stupid things (feels like the sinking ship that was the adoption of KDE 4.0, Gnome Shell, Windows 10). Power Users Who Care are facing a losing fight. Most can't just fork Firefox every time it drops a feature nor expect Palemoon and Waterfox to support it forever, or at all. At some point an annoying standard is introduced that will not be reflected by these forks I do follow, or the browser just makes one up despite the obvious ill-will.*

We the users should be making the W3C and browser implementors responsible for crap standards and policy decisions. "Just switch!" isn't working when the 4 major browsers are an illusion of choice. It's almost like 2-party political voting, or broadband's "vote-with your wallet", or using iOS to run Safari skins that are marketed as non-Safari browsers.

* W3C was OK with a standard "Battery Status API" that eventually got canned for allowing mobile device fingerprinting - https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com...
There has been some stuff that seems to favor advertisers rather than regular folks (tracking beacons, localstorage tracking) are more often than not used by the enemy than corner cases of the likes of Flash games.

Most new phones out there where on 6 this past fall, despite the comfortable availability of 7, and fresh release of 8.

It takes 2 to 3 years for current versions of Android to reach the mainstream in a reasonable percentage. Till then, we're left with old devices that [sensible] people have little reason to shut off, barring physical breakage and battery degradation.

Degradation nicely segues into an interesting conversation on Hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318191) about what can be considered a reasonable slow support death for a long-lived device... the hardware looks new and hasn't failed, but the software from 5 years ago is no longer re-install-able in the event of a reset. There's a scary appy situation equivalent to link-rot that ultimately will get everyone off the old OS's... not going to be pretty

Will this MP3 and MPEG-2 combo result in finally getting US distros like Red Hat derivatives to build in support without incantations for alternative repositories and Lame (ha) combinations of gstreamer names?

I miss the wild, valiant days of Mandrake 7, where apparently nobody cared for scary patent click-thru warnings yet.

Sounds a lot like our expectations as consumers of cellphones. Modern software, even for the likes of free and open source (Firefox, Chromium, Android OSP) takes a particular cynical twist on that whole "if something goes wrong when we deprecate X for no good reason..."

I bought a gift a year ago and it was even worse with tablets on physical stores or Amazon. The asymptotic Android 4.4 version apparently just dropped off the map, but it dragged results down for years. Most worrysome is that its old Dalvik runtime is dog slow at best, and infuriating under load. 5 makes things better, but I wouldn't bet on finding it for cheap.

A few hours ago tonight I coincidentally ran into https://www.cnet.com/topics/ta...
where Samsung tablet's video says "best one it's ever made". It's a serious 500 bucks which I find offensive after having purchased other Samsungs for $200 before. That is the golden price point for Android in my eyes. Despite the 500 bucks, the OS is declared to be 7.

The Google tablet isn't reported with a specific version, so a search led to finding 6.0 and 7 https://arstechnica.com/gadget... (we can assume auto-updates given that Google's name is involved but it's almost like 8.0 wasn't even a dream in the reviewer's mind.) More likely the builds just don't exist yet.

The Huawei tablet is only on 6. These are reviews that will hang around for the whole year, so it is worrysome that they don't even mention 8.0 even though it's been available on Browserstack's test suite for several months.

It's odd that the cheap $125 Chinese smartphone I bought around September, despite its serious storage planned obsolescence, came with 7.1 when so much premium stuff out there was still on 6 (and serious offerings already had version 8). It's a pain just number-wise, and features even within the same Android build are shamefully inconsistent across manufacturers... this causes many people to go see things as "iPhone versus non-iPhone" if they are ever disappointed.

Yes! It's good seeing I'm not the only one. For other /.ers who think we're crazy, I think there are two things in play
0) Somewhat healthy hearing and not having reached the 40's.

1) SSD noise. Work refreshed the HDD laptop with an new SSD system from the same maker (Dell's Elitebook) around 18 months ago. I'm surprised I stopped noticing it a few months after resigning to my fate. It took me about 5 months of hearing the coil whine from up to 6 feet away whenever the drive is spinning up.

2) Scrolling whine. It sounds like a mix between white noise from radio stations and the SSD noises. It doesn't affect every brand of PC I've used, and it's only been present when using headphones as I scroll. I've experienced it on PCs as far back as a 386. Most recently on a Pentium 4, IIRC. It rarely comes out thru the speakers, if at all, so I'll second tepples in the issue being leaking from shoddy electronics.

Every time a fool advocates for changes for everyone because the internet appears to be fast enough at his personal ivory tower he must be reminded of what it looks like in the suburbs. And third world countries. And mobile browsers basically worldwide.

On mobile devices the effect is componded. Devices forever loading megs and megs of third party javascript tracking code, useless css and images in very improper amounts of ram (and how quickly the OS decides the page needs to be swapped out and fully reloaded from scratch yet again, for added pain) waste unknown man-hours because the web has been crippled as a tracking delivery platform rather than the humble beginnings as an information delivery one.

A page view with a dam providing the proper non-trivial adblock and hostfile fixes might load in a second, but it takes several times that much for everyone else even if much data is "cached" by your browser, router's DNS or ISP. A lot of code out there is made so it'll check for new content on every load (how else do you think they'd give us changing ads for every rotation, if not for dynamically reloading content we don't really need?)

On mobile, even HTML loaded from file:// still can take an unacceptable second or two loading *in AIRPLANE MODE*, because parsers are braindead. So, NO. If things on airplane mode are this bad for a non-trivial part of the modern world (almost 40% of traffic is smartphones, which is normally not going to be flying at the comfortable speeds you may see at home)