electronic convict - Slashdot User

Submission + - HTML5 Has A Dirty Little Secret: It's Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile

Submitted by electronic convict on Monday November 17, 2014 @02:28PM

electronic convict writes: Tom Dale has never been shy, and in a Q&A with Matt Asay on ReadWrite, the EmberJS co-founder and JavaScript evangelist makes the outspoken claim that open Web technologies are already everywhere, even in native mobile apps, and that it's only a matter of time before they catch up to "all the capabilities of a native, proprietary platform." Take that, Web-is-dead doomsayers.

Dale has plenty more to say, calling Google an "adolescent behemoth" that's belatedly embracing open-Web technologies in mobile, lauding Apple's Nitro JS engine and belittling the idea that Web apps have to look and feel the same as native apps for the open Web to triumph. His bottom line: "[I]t's not hard to see that the future of the Web on mobile is a happy one."

Submission + - Torvalds: I Made A "Metric Sh--load" Of Mistakes With The Linux Community (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict on Thursday October 16, 2014 @05:59PM

electronic convict writes: In a Q&A at LinuxCon Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds — no stranger to strong language and blunt opinions — acknowledged a "metric shitload" of interpersonal mistakes that unnecessarily antagonized others within the Linux community. In response to Intel's Dirk Hohndel, who asked him which decision he regretted most over the past 23 years, Torvalds replied:
From a technical standpoint, no single decision has ever been that important... The problems tend to be around alienating users or developers and I'm pretty good at that. I use strong language. But again there's not a single instance I'd like to fix. There's a metric shitload of those.

It's probably not a coincidence that Torvalds said this just a few weeks after critics like Lennart Poettering started drawing attention to the abusive nature of some commentary within the open-source community. Poettering explicitly called out Torvalds for some of his most intemperate remarks and described open source as "quite a sick place to be in." Still, Torvalds doesn't sound like he's about to start making an apology tour. "One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," he said. "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle."

Submission + - Apple's TouchID Fingerprint Scanner: Still Hackable (lookout.com) 1

Submitted by electronic convict on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:43PM

electronic convict writes: A year ago, security researcher Marc Rogers demonstrated how to spoof the TouchID sensor in the iPhone 5S using some Elmer's glue and glycerol — oh, and a high resolution camera and a laser printer.

Has TouchID security improved at all on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus? Not really, Rogers reports in his latest post, in which he again hacks the latest TouchID sensors using the same method as before. 'Fake fingerprints created using my previous technique were able to readily fool both devices,' he reports.

Rogers, however, says there's no reason to panic, as the attack requires substantial skill, patience and a good clear fingerprint. . As he writes: 'We use locks on our doors to keep criminals out not because they are perfect, but because they are both convenient and effective enough to meet most traditional threats.'

Submission + - 'Reactive' Development Turns 2.0 (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict on Friday September 19, 2014 @04:34PM

electronic convict writes: First there was "agile" development. Now there's a new software movement—called 'reactive' development—that sets out principles for building resilient and failure-tolerant applications for cloud, mobile, multicore and Web-scale systems. ReadWrite's Matt Asay sat down with Jonas Bonér, the author of the Reactive Manifesto (just released in version 2.0), for a discussion of what, exactly, the reactive movement aims to fix in software development and how we get there from here.

Submission + - Hulu Blocks VPN Users (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by electronic convict on Friday April 25, 2014 @04:44PM

electronic convict writes: Hulu, apparently worried that too many non-U.S. residents are using cheap VPN services to watch its U.S. programming, has started blocking IP address ranges belonging to known VPN services. Hulu didn't announce the ban, but users of the affected VPNs are getting this message:
Based on your IP-address, we noticed that you are trying to access Hulu through an anonymous proxy tool. Hulu is not currently available outside the U.S. If you’re in the U.S. you’ll need to disable your anonymizer to access videos on Hulu.

Hulu may make Hollywood happy by temporarily locking out foreign users—at least until they find new VPN providers. But in so doing it's now forcing its U.S. customers to sacrifice their privacy and even to risk insecure connections. Hulu hasn't even implemented SSL on its site.

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