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Comment Re:Google is now a bureaucracy (Score 1) 41

<quote> ... "It" is the possessive noun and does not typically end with an S, so putting apostrophe + s is straight up appropriate.</quote>

Not in this case, if you care for grammar rules. They are common contractions replacing the original phrases: "its" is short for it's and "it's" is short for it is.

Comment Re:I'm done with Firefox (Score 1) 301

As for Google hijacking my searches (if I request https://my.domain.home/ [domain.home] then I bloodly well DO NOT want to be redirected to "google.com?search=https://my.domain.home"...

It's not Google hijacking! It's Firefox trying its best when the address is not resolved by the DNS.

The browser is sending what you enter in the address-bar to your DNS/ISP (for dns-assistence) to be matched and redirected. Then if no match is found, it will be sent to your default search engine as a query.

To completely turn off searching from the address-bar, type "about:config" in the address-bar, find the "keyword.enabled" entry and set it to "false". Then the address-bar search/redirect will be disabled.

Comment Re:Hipster using wifi in fashion coffee shops... (Score 1) 301

I dropped them years ago for their willingness to fuck with standard network behavior. If I put an address in, I want my browser to ask my OS to resolve it. Period. I don't want to search for the thing if it's not found.

Firefox' default setting is that what you enter in the address-bar first get sent to your DNS/ISP (for dns-assistence) to be matched and redirected, if no match is found then a query will be sent to your default search engine.

To completely turn off searching from the address-bar, type "about:config" in the address-bar, find the "keyword.enabled" entry and set it to "false".
The address-bar search/redirect will be disabled.

Firefox does some domain-guessing too if enabled. Find the "browser.fixup.alternate.prefix" and "browser.fixup.alternate.suffix" entries and set the prefix and suffix you want Firefox to add to your incomplete typed URLs.

You can still use the address-bar for search if you have a search engine keyword in the search preferences, or you could turn on the "browser.urlbar.oneOffSearches" to display your search engines in a list to pick from. So to have the search box in the toolbar is not necessary.

Firefox has many useful preferences hidden, but they can all be found or created new if not present in the about:config page.
(Type about:about for a list of all about-pages)

OT, nah.

Submission + - HTML5 DRM standard is a go (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Artem Tashkinov
Artem Tashkinov writes: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry body that oversees development of HTML and related Web standards, has today published the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification as a Recommendation, marking its final blessing as an official Web standard. Final approval came after the W3C's members voted 58.4 percent to approve the spec, 30.8 percent to oppose, with 10.8 percent abstaining.

EME provides a standard interface for DRM protection of media delivered through the browser. EME is not itself a DRM scheme; rather, it defines how Web content can work with third-party Content Decryption Modules (CDMs) that handle the proprietary decryption and rights-management portion. The principal groups favoring the development of EME have been streaming media companies such as Netflix and Microsoft, Google, and Apple, companies that both develop browsers and operate streaming media services.

Submission + - How do you see you life after Firefox 52 ESR? (mozilla.org)

Submitted by Artem Tashkinov
Artem Tashkinov writes: Soon to be released Firefox 56 says that out of 35+ add-ons that I have installed only a single one is a proper WebExtension which means that Firefox 57 will disable over 95% of my add-ons many of which I just cannot live without and for most of them there are simply no alternatives. This number of add-ons sound like an overkill, but actually they are all pretty neat and improve your browsing abilities. That's the reason why I'm using Firefox 52 ESR, which still fully supports XUL add-ons, however after June 2018, it will stop being supported.

Let's list the most famous ones:
  • DownThemAll is still largely irreplaceable since you can download from many parts of the internet much faster if you split the downloaded files in chunks and download them simultaneously;
  • GreaseMonkey allows you to fix or extend your favourite websites using JavaScript;
  • Lazarus: Form Recovery has saved my time and life numerous times; it regularly backups the contents of web forms and allows to restore them after browser restart or accidental page refresh;
  • NoScript: allows you to whitelist JS execution only for websites that you really trust; JS has been used as an attack and tracking tool since its inception;
  • Status-4-Ever and Classic Theme Restorer return Firefox to the time when it was a powerful tool with its own identity and looks, and not a Chrome clone;
  • UnMHT add-on allows you to save complete web pages as a single MHT file;

So what will you do less than a year from now?

Submission + - Double KO! Capcom's Street Fighter V installs hidden rootkit on PCs (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A fresh update for Capcom's Street Fighter V for PCs includes a knock-out move: a secret rootkit that gives any installed application kernel-level privileges.

This means any malicious software on the system can poke a dodgy driver installed by SFV to completely take over the Windows machine. Capcom claims it uses the driver to stop players from hacking the high-def beat 'em up to cheat. Unfortunately, the code is so badly designed, it opens up a full-blown local backdoor. Gamers realized something was a little off when the upgrade brought in a new driver and demanded operating-system-grade access to the computer before the game starts. A number of players say they couldn't even get the new version to work at all. A full-blown online meltdown ensued.
The Almighty Buck

Malware Infects 70% of Seagate Central NAS Drives, Earns $86,400 (softpedia.com) 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the malware-mining-money dept.
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: A new malware family has infected over 70% of all Seagate Central NAS devices connected to the Internet. The malware, named Miner-C or PhotoMiner, uses these hard-drives as an intermediary point to infect connected PCs and install software that mines for the Monero cryptocurrency... The crooks made over $86,000 from Monero mining so far.

The hard drives are easy to infect because Seagate does not allow users to delete or deactivate a certain "shared" folder when the device is exposed to the Internet. Over 5,000 Seagate Central NAS devices are currently infected.
Researchers estimates the malware is now responsible for 2.5% of all mining activity for the Monero cryptocurrency, according to the article. "The quandary is that Seagate Central owners have no way to protect their device. Turning off the remote access NAS feature can prevent the infection, but also means they lose the ability to access the device from a remote location, one of the reasons they purchased the hard drive in the first place."

Comment Re:The browser wars are over (Score 1) 140

by WQSE (#50889419) Attached to: Vivaldi Hits Its First Beta

Opera 12 has function of selecting any text on pages, include the links, by holding the mouse's left-button while moving cursor like text editor. There is a work-around solution in Opera-Chrome but cause some unwanted side-effect. Firefox, does not have this.

Maybe I'm following, but I usually copy snippets exactly like that; left button selecting some displayed text, in both current Opera and Chromium and Firefox(ESR). For precision I adjust the selection with shift arrows. Works in all browsers/engins I tried, including Vivaldi alfa.

What I really miss from the early browsers (up to IE5) is the half page scrolling using the keyboard (d/D iirc?). Today there's only the whole page scrolling by space/shift-space.

Submission + - Automated uploaded-file verification? 1

Submitted by VernonNemitz
VernonNemitz writes: There are a lot of ways for hackers to abuse a web site, but it seems to me that one of them is receiving less attention than it deserves. This is the simple uploading of a malware file, that has an innocent file-name extension. I'm looking for a simple file-type verification program that the site could automatically run, on each uploaded file, to test it to see if it is actually the type of file that its file-name extension claims it is. That way, if it ever gets double-clicked, we can be assured it won't hijack the system or worse. At the moment I'm only interested in testing .png files, but I'm sure plenty of web site operators would want to be able to test other file types. A quick Googling indicates the existence of a validator project under the OWASP umbrella, but is it the best choice, and what other choices are there?

Submission + - Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Nominated for Nobel Prize

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Nobel Prizes are given for making important — preferably fundamental — breakthroughs in the realm of ideas and that just what Satoshi Nakamoto has done according to Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at UCLA, who has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel prize in economics. Chowdhry writes that Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, has invited Chowdhry to nominate someone for the 2016 Prize and he started thinking about whose ideas are likely to have a disruptive influence in the twenty first century. "The invention of bitcoin — a digital currency — is nothing short of revolutionary," says Chowdhry. "It offers many advantages over both physical and paper currencies. It is secure, relying on almost unbreakable cryptographic code, can be divided into millions of smaller sub-units, and can be transferred securely and nearly instantaneously from one person to any other person in the world with access to internet bypassing governments, central banks and financial intermediaries." Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Protocol has also spawned exciting innovations in the FinTech space by showing how many financial contracts — not just currencies — can be digitized, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another.

There's only one problem. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Suppose that the Nobel Committee is convinced that Satoshi Nakamoto deserves the Prize. Now the problem it will face is how to contact him to announce that he has won the Prize. According to Chowdhry, Nakamoto can be informed by contacting him online just the same way people have communicated with him in the past and he has anonymously communicated with the computer science and cryptography community. If he accepts the award, he can verifiably communicate his acceptance. Finally, there is the issue of the Prize money. Nakamoto is already in possession of several hundred million U.S. dollars worth of bitcoins so the additional prize money may not mean much to him. "Only if he wants, the committee could also transfer the prize money to my bitcoin address, 165sAHBpLHujHbHx2zSjC898oXEz25Awtj," concludes Chowdhry. "Mr Nakamoto and I will settle later."

Submission + - Intel Skylake-U For Laptops Posts Solid Gains In Testing, Especially Graphics (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel's 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now for desktops. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel's most potent incarnation of the new architecture that has been power-optimized on 14nm technology with a beefier graphics engine for notebooks. In late Q3, Intel started rolling out Skylake-U versions of the chip in a 15 Watt TDP flavor. This is the power envelope that most "ultrabooks" are built with and it's likely to be Intel's highest volume SKU of the processor. The Lenovo Yoga 900 tested here was configured with an Intel Core i7-6500U dual-core processor that also supports Intel HyperThreading for 4 logical processing threads available. Its base frequency is 2.5GHz, but the chip will Turbo Boost to 3GHz and down clocks way down to 500MHz when idle. The chip also has 4MB of shared L3 cache and 512K of L2 and 128K of data cache, total. In the benchmarks, the new Skylake-U mobile chip is about 5 — 10 faster than Intel's previous generation Broadwell platform in CPU-intensive tasks and 20+ percent faster in graphics and gaming, at the same power envelope, likely with better battery life, depending on the device.

Submission + - Linux Mint Will Continue to Provide Both Systemd and Upstart (softpedia.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: After Debian had adopted systemd, many of the Linux distributions based on that operating system made the switch as well. Ubuntu has already rolled out systemd in 15.04, but Linux Mint is providing dual options for users. The Ubuntu transition was surprisingly painless, and no one really put up a fight, but the Linux Mint team chose the middle ground. The Mint developers consider that the project needs to still wait for systemd to become more stable and mature, before it will be the default and only option.
Television

NFL Fights To Save TV Blackout Rule Despite $9 Billion Revenue 216

Posted by timothy from the why-I-always-miss-the-quidditch-matches dept.
An anonymous reader writes with word of new movement on an old front: namely, the rule that makes it hard for sports fans to see coverage of local teams. The 39-year-old blackout rule basically "prevents games from being televised locally when tickets remain unsold." The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in response to a 2011 petition by consumers, has decided to consider abolishing this rule. The National Football League (NFL) has of course objected, claiming that the rule allows it to keep airing their games on free TV. If that were to change and they would have to move to cable, they argue, the "result would represent a substantial loss of consumer welfare." In their petition to the FCC, consumers point out that the NFL charges "exorbitant prices for tickets" which results in lower attendance. The blackout rule, they claim, therefore punishes fans by preventing them from watching the game if the NFL can't sell enough stadium tickets. NFL yearly profits reportedly number in the billions. Even if the FCC supports the petition, however, sports leagues can and probably will privately negotiate blackouts to boost their revenue.

Submission + - DARPA Wants To Kill The Password (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Many security experts agree that our current authentication system, in which end users are forced to remember (or, more often, write down) a dizzying array of passwords is broken. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department research arm that developed the Internet, is trying to work past the problem by eliminating passwords altogether, replacing them with biometric and other cues, using off-the-shelf technology available today.

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