I know it's standard practice on /. not to RTFA, but it even says in the first sentence of the summary that this guy demonstrated the legitimacy of his findings with 1,000 captured accounts.

Yes, he exposed sensitive data. Data that was already exposed by this vulnerability. Now at least everyone knows that their data isn't safe, as opposed to before when there was an illusion of security.

Feminism is simply the pursuit of equal rights for women in all things. Everyone should be a feminist. That doesn't make it meaningless, even if individual feminists don't agree on every issue or conform to some easily grasped stereotype.

I understand the point you were trying to make, but I don't think "feminism" was the right term for comparison.

My guess would be that the authorities may have included such a Javascript in the 'scare page' that is currently replacing the regular site. Regular visitors return to the site by following a bookmark, etc, and while the scare page is open in their browser the Javascript runs.

It would have likely been a part of the initial investigation to either set up a crawler to index the site before it was taken down, or simply pull down the RSS feed of new posts and scrape them for hrefs pointing to mp3s or otherwise. They could thus compile a list of "downloadable" files which had appeared on the blog.

Once the scare page has been put up, they could use the Javascript on the page to fetch lists of these download URLs, insert them into a hidden div on the page, and check each URL's "visited" status in unpatched browsers, sending the results back to the server asynchronously and logging them along with the IP and any other browser stats of the user in question. In this way they could glean data about which files from the site the current user had downloaded.

Now, assuming the above is even close to what happened in reality, I would guess that the site in question has had a large number of hits from curious bystanders (ie the slashdot / HN crowd) since the scare page went up, most of whom would have "clean" download histories as they had never visited the site during its operation. Maybe the people gathering stats have misinterpreted this as "lots of users who cleared their download history" before returning to the site.

Hooray for speculation!

I completely agree, and I think what Google is doing with the driverless car research is great. We all know humans aren't the best drivers, and in Google's preliminary tests their cars seem to have performed very well.

Sadly, it will probably only take one fatality caused by a driverless car for the reactionaries to come out of the woodwork and put some major weight against the technology and its adoption.

A CS lecturer of mine at a well known Australian University used to love telling a story from when he used to work at Microsoft in the late 90s. He was sent to a CS conference on a red-eye flight which caused him to arrive hours early. Having nothing better to do, he entered the conference room and found the Microsoft table, where he sat by himself.

Being so early, the entire conference room was empty except for one other table that already had several engineers sitting at it, having a rousing discussion. Everyone at the table was telling stories about the ridiculous routes they had taken to get there, some of them taking three or more connecting flights to seemingly random places before arriving at the city where the conference was being held.

During the conference he found out that the table with the crazy connecting flights was for engineers for Airbus, and by some casual snooping he discovered that these seemingly insane flight arrangements had been made by the Airbus employees to make sure that they weren't on a flight in an Airbus plane. At the time Boeing planes still had mechanical cockpit controls, whereas Airbus had a layer of software which translated cockpit controls into signals to mechanical actuators. Being engineers, these guys all understood that even very high quality software has bugs, and they didn't want to put their own safety in the hands of the code they had helped develop.

Now, whether my lecturer's story was true or not I have no idea (I believed him at the time). But the point of the story was that all software has bugs, and anything short of NASA-level diligence is probably not going to eliminate all of them. This story seems to prove that he was right!

Well why don't you start submitting stories about SugarCRM to slashdot then?

Personally, I can't wait for the people who bitch about Drupal's code quality to chime in on that trainwreck of a system.

I understand the Web app use cases, I use gmail, Dabbleboard, Grooveshark, etc, when they suit my needs. That isn't what this is about.

This is about some half-baked idea which adds nothing to the current technology landscape. This doesn't use less resources than a traditional browser, in fact as others have noted it quite possibly consumes more by utilising Chromeless for its UI. It doesn't add notable features which current browsers lack, add a clock extension to Chrome or Firefox, fullscreen it and voilà!

I read through the links in TFA and couldn't find mention of a single feature of this "project" that current mainstream browsers don't already have, nor could I find a compelling scenario that would actually necessitate this project's use in anything. It's a total non-story, and whoever posted this to slashdot at such an early phase of the projects conception has basically doomed it to never be taken seriously, ever.

The VC guys and I have already cooked up a name for it: Porn Shell.

Is this a patent application yet? Where do I collect my money rake and monocle?

To install Webian Shell:

1. Launch Firefox
2. F11
3. ???
4. ... oh wait there's no need to install Webian Shell.

What the parent here is trying to say is that even the first monitor is a crutch of the weak-minded.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, but sadly I don't own a telegraph machine.

I live in Australia, where we are only just starting to get "unlimited" broadband plans. I don't believe there's a very high uptake of these plans at the moment because they're relatively new, and to be fair the bandwidth allowances for quota plans are typically quite generous.

But in regards to the main point in your post, the bandwidth consumption issue, about half of the major Australian broadband providers host a Steam mirror for their subscribers. My ISP, Internode, has several regional Steam mirrors ensuring that I almost always get peak transfer on new games and updates, and it doesn't come out of my monthly quota. Other ISPs, typically cheaper ones, do not provide a quota free mirror, so my friends on TPG for example had to make damn well sure they had enough quota left over for Portal 2 on release day. This is a tradeoff between a cheap and a high quality service.

Perhaps where you live you don't get a choice between service providers, but maybe you and some of your gaming buddies could put together a petition to get your local ISP to set up their own quota free Steam mirror.

Personally, I like Steam's ease of use and great pricing. What I don't (always) like is forced updates, which every so often cause major bugs and can't be rolled back. It's a real shame when they roll out a Steam client update on Friday which borks your ability to play games, and it doesn't get fixed until several days later. That, in combination with a slightly buggy "Offline mode", would be my major complaints against Steam.

Which 10 year old game would that be?

While the facial animations and motion capture may not but up to LA Noire standards, they are certainly more detailed and natural than most 3D games on the market at the moment. Especially with regards to the ragdoll and impact animations when enemies are getting taken down. In any case, character animation has never been one of id's strong points.

I think what you may be missing is the extraordinary amount of detail in the outdoor environments. The unique shapes and textures of the hoodoos (rock pillars) for example, are absolutely stunning compared to any other 3D game out right now. This is not a space station, where every bulkhead looks exactly the same.

Making any kind of large, organic environment is incredibly hard and time consuming in a 3D game. You will see repeated textures and prefabs (3D shapes) everywhere you look. id Tech 5 has gone a long way towards addressing the unique texturing problem without making the game a 30GB download, and they have seemingly put a lot more effort into allowing organic level design in this project than any of their previous forays.

In terms of graphics, this is a bit of a renaissance period for 3D games, with id Tech 5 being one of the real show-stoppers. Add the human animation of LA Noire, and the brilliant dynamic lighting of the updated Unreal 3 engine (google for "Samaratin Demo"), and we are actually seeing some real improvements to the technology being used in 3D engines. That's of course not even mentioning Brink, the new Crytek engine, and a host of smaller companies who are doing great things with AI and physics.

No mention here of Valve, because their obvious strength is amazing gameplay, and their engine hasn't seen much love in the past 3 years while they've been kicking ass with TF2 and Portal. <3 u Valve.

My system runs 32-bit XP. It's the OS I installed when I built the computer, I haven't had to re-install it since the build.

So your observations and your experiences with a completely different operating system have no bearing on my situation, which is exactly what I was trying to say to someone else in the post that you so rudely replied to. Your anecdotal experience doesn't invalidate the frustration and wasted time which has been a prominent side effect of my experience with two consecutive SLI rigs.

It's the equivalent of me saying "there is no way I can ride my bicycle to work in under 30 minutes" and you responding with "you fucking idiot I can drive that distance in my car in under 10 minutes, the problem is YOU".

So because a feature wasn't implemented on my OS, but it was implemented on another OS, I'm "doing it wrong". And pointing this out to someone constitutes having "reading problems"? And despite scouring the internet and nvidia's own technical documentation, the problem is "guaranteed to be me". Amazing work dude, you are an inspiration to us all.

Seeing as I'm running 32-bit XP, the rest of your most recent comment makes no sense. Seeing as how you brought up WDDM, you might want to have a read about the differences between WDDM and XPDM, one of the major ones being WDDM's complete architectural redesign of how the display driver handles multiple displays. This improvement to Vista's display driver mode is important because it's what allowed nvidia to finally allow SLI mode to use multiple displays, something they had been trying to accomplish for more than four years without success.

Obviously WDDM (Windows Vista Display Driver Mode) isn't available in Windows XP 32-bit, it's an architectural change in the OS. So no, there is no ".ini hack" that will magically enable an entirely new driver architecture on Windows XP which nvidia's driver requires to allow SLI with multiple displays. If it was that fucking easy why wouldn't nvidia just allow XP users to use it? Fucking idiot.

You talk about your extensive nvidia experience, but when examined your actual words bely your complete fucking ignorance on the topic.

Hahaha, classic.

Ad hominem - check.

Appeal to ridicule - check.

Attempt to shift focus away from the substance of the argument - check.

Failure to back up claims with anything more substantial than anecdotal evidence - check.

Yup, one of us definitely sounds like a Republican! Maybe the "other person" that upmodded you is Republican also?

Thankfully someone has come along and moderated most of your posts back down. Maybe if you post something Interesting, Informative or Funny it will get modded up as it deserves, it would certainly be a refreshing change! Heaven forbid someone else should have to waste their time reading through this trainwreck of a conversation.

P.S. I know I should just let it go and stop responding to your comments. I just can't help myself. Having to have the last word, it's a terrible personality flaw isn't it??