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Comment "Order of magnitude" abuse (Score 5, Insightful) 146

To say something is big these days it seems like you must include the term "order of magnitude!!!!!" to sound awesome, but that term actually has a meaning. It's like people who abuse "literally" in (not-literally) every single sentence. "I laughed so hard I literally died!" No, you didn't.

From the first paragraph quoting the researchers:

"Compared to SSDs, the embodied [carbon] cost of HDDs is at least an order of magnitude lower"

From the third paragraph:

"...lifetime footprint for a 1 terabyte SSD is 369.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent versus 199 kg for an HDD"

Since all of the numbers cited appear to be decimal (base 10), an order of magnitude means that that something is ten (10) times something else, e.g. SSDs are 10x worse, or HDDs are 1/10 as bad. Unfortunately for the writer, 199 kg * 10 is nowhere near 369.2 kg; the 369.2 number isn't even double, much less 10x worse.

I appreciate that somebody did some number crunching to show differing technologies in a light I had not considered before, but the inability of the researchers to either do basic math or understand the words that quantify numeric differences makes me wonder if they could really do the real math required to calculate the carbon footprint of these processes in a meaningful way.

Comment It's Chromium from Microsoft (Score 1) 194

TL;DR: Typical fluff from microsoft's great marketing team.

There has been no amazing freezing over; microsoft has not released Edge's lousy code to Linux (or even binaries of it). The failed browser known as Edge has been dropped by microsoft for being so bad it could not even dominate in a virtual monopoly, and since this is their second browser of theirs to fail in that way it's pretty sad. Realizing this, microsoft took Chromium (the codebase behind Google Chrome) and rebranded it to "Edge", and then "gave" it back to us for Linux use. This is pretty rich, even for microsoft.

I already have Chromium on my machines, along with Firefox, Chrome (based on Chromium), Opera, and Seamonkey, just so I can have lots of options for testing sites, or services, or the latest Angular and Bootstrap stuff. Getting another version of Chromium is a bit too much redundancy, even for me, and this is no technical miracle from microsoft. If their browser had actually been worthwhile, it might have actually been able to compete against things like Firefox and Chrome, but instead it is losing to them even on their own platform. Had they open-sourced, or even ported, Edge to other platforms, that would have been interesting since it could have made testing it on other platforms useful for web developers, but that's not the case; this is just another Chromium, and I already have that, twice.

Comment Encryption is the solution, but not today's model (Score 0) 207

Assumption: Evil powers still cannot break SSL that works as it should with random data and unknown private keys without centuries or millennia of computer time..

End-to-end encryption only works if the endpoints themselves are doing the encryption. Let's take a few examples:

Social media: Person A posts something online. The endpoints, the real endpoints, are Person A and all of Person A's followers. Is there encryption between Person A and all of Person A's followers? No, not currently, and that is the problem. If there were encryption between these endpoints, the evil powers would pull out their hair. Instead they short-circuit things, compromise the world thanks to Facebook, and get an easy in to everything. They are performing a traditional man-in-the-middle. Encryption, without compromises, is the key.

Instant messages: I send message to Google (Google Talk, Hangout, etc.) and they froward it on to my friends instantly. Are the endpoints doing encryption? No, not usually, and even with Off-The-Record functionality that Google provides, it is still plaintext along the way. This is the problem. It needs to be encrypted by the endpoints.

Skype: Same as above. The service in the middle is the problem.

There are some easy solutions for some of these.

First, the best solution is to be your own service provider somehow. When federation really makes this happen properly and we each control our content with others we trust directly then that will be neat. Maybe we can still use things like OpenID to help handle that authentication in the meantime, but keep in mind that delegating trust to one party means that if another party compromises them then all bets are, again, off. We each need to provide our own trust directly to others so that end-to-end encryption can happen. If the other ends are ever compromised, revoke their trust and then handle things going forward, but at least it's possible to know and handle that situation. I think the right way for this to happen involves our own services becoming insanely simple to deploy, and then running them at home, each of us being our own little provider. I know... too hard for the common user today, but so was accessing data via the Internet twenty years ago.

Second, in the meantime some of these services can be fixed right now. Run Pidgin to connect via Google Talk, or AIM, or ICQ, or anything else that's person-to-person, and implement the Off-The-Record plugin in there. Hooray! True end-to-end encryption. The service provider just sees crap in between, which is SSLized crap, and that's the end of their involvement even if the power scum that force them will take their data at gunpoint. Since he party in the middle has no keys, they have no data. Suddenly the evil powers must start attacking individuals instead of intermediaries which is much harder for them to do.

By the way, never use the same password, or even minor variations on passwords, on any two things, ever. Just don't. When you do, you make it trivial to take everything with the weakest link compromised. Which link will be attacked by anybody really caring? The weakest of course. Make them all strong, and different. LastPass is a good, secure option if you cannot manage passwords on your own without any intermediary (yes, it's work).

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Comment Re:Safety Warning. (Score 0) 152

Wow.... microsoft claiming it's not safe in some way to run third party stuff in their overly-secure browser? What a shocker when Google shows the IE JavaScript engine really is that bad. I'm really surprised they didn't welcome the enhancement of their own performance by an order of magnitude with open arms even though it shows that they can't code.

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