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Comment Re:Breach? (Score 1) 95

From an IT perspective there was neither authentication nor authorisation. Legally, however, many jurisdictions make it illegal to access data without being authorised to do so and, by "authorised", they mean legally authorised. The fact that there was no security mechanism isn't going help any person found to have accessed these data; they're hackers in the eyes of the law. Obviously companies like it this way; for them, it's not a bug but a feature.

Comment Re:Shame on the WSJ for the clickbait headline! (Score 3, Interesting) 90

The switches are mechanical with electrical contacts that sense their position; there's no way for software to change their physical position. The speculation is around whether some electrical or software fault may have made the system behave as if the switches had been moved to the cut-off position, e.g., wiring shorting out or disconnecting. This seems unlikely for multiple reasons. One pilot asking the other why they were off suggests that the switches could be seen to be in the cut-off position. Also, the software saw them cut-off 1 second apart, as if someone moved them one at a time, whereas an electrical or software issue would be more likely to affect both switches at the same time.

Comment There are Possible Real-World Consequences (Score 1) 23

In 2023 this scientific article concluded "we are almost as likely as not to experience a negative leap second in the next 12 years." Check out Figure 4 to see the UTC-UT1 line curve back downward in a way that's never happened before since atomic time started in 1972. It's currently back in negative territory at -0.05s and, if makes it far past -0.5s, we'll need a negative leap second. Even the occasional positive leap second has caused software glitches in the past so an unprecedented negative leap second seems sure to cause more chaos.

Comment Re:16K is impressive (Score 1) 70

Many of the masterpiece films were filmed on 70mm which is about 4x the size of 35mm

Typical 65mm and 70mm frames are 53mm wide whereas 35mm frames are 22mm wide. That's only 2.4x wider (though the factor for area is greater, depending on which exact formats you're comparing). So 4K scales up to 10K and 16K is enough oversampling for a mastering scan. Remember that 4K refers to the number of pixels across the screen, not to a total pixel count.

The list of 70 mm films isn't that long.

IMAX is bigger again, though mostly in frame height. Its popularity has taken off as technology makes it more affordable but the list of masterpieces on that format is very short.

Comment Re:The real issue (Score 1) 159

The US ranks #11 globally for passenger-miles traveled by train

Now try passenger-miles travelled by train per head of population. Taking the 25-country list you're presumably using and dividing miles per year by population has Japan first with 3285 and the US third-last at 131. The average is 975. The list only includes countries with at least 5 billion passenger kilometres per year; there will be many others with fewer miles but which are far ahead of the US on a per-capita basis due to their small populations.

Comment Re:We need a better Unicode (Score 2) 95

This bug has zero to do with Unicode. The issue seems to be that the software generating the "&" doesn't realise that its output is being parsed and that it should instead be generating "&". Notice that all of the characters involved here are plain, 7-bit ASCII. We know this is true because ... this is Slashdot and Unicode is impossible. The fact that the ampersand is special in this context is nothing to do with Unicode, in which it has the category "other punctuation".

Comment Re:Lawyers Win (Score 1) 63

their entire business can be ruined by some random outside trusted agent

Well it's either that or have no anti-virus. In this case, other companies recovered faster than Delta, but it would be easy for AV software to screw up much worse and trash all the hosts to the point of requiring OS reinstallation. That's going to be very bad for any large business.

Comment Re:Precidents (Score 1) 63

Criminal Negligence sure

Gross negligence is just a greater degree of negligence, commonly described by words like wilful, wanton and reckless. Criminal is worse, e.g., involving intent to do harm. Not that there aren't contexts in which gross negligence is criminal, like in situations where there's a risk of injury or death. This is part of the reason some software companies ban the use of their products in medical and nuclear fields.

Comment Re: Yes, unicode is a security issue (Score 1) 69

I agree that the only correct character to use as the apostrophe should be the actual, ASCII, 0x27, ', apostrophe. The problem people have with this is that it looks horrible typographically because fonts generally have a vertical symbol (so it can also work as an opening or closing single quote). The correct fix is to use fonts where the apostrophe looks like a closing single quote. Obviously that's a disaster for coding ... so code with a console font. There are plenty of common fonts that are ambiguous about O and 0, and about 1, l, and I, so why care about apostrophes looking the same as closing single quotes? There are separate acute accent and prime symbol characters for use when those are required.

Editing prose (with a console font) is way easier when the open quote, close quote, and apostrophe characters are all different. Spell checkers aren't confused about closing quotes being part of a word and checking for broken pairs of quotes becomes trivial with regular expressions. LaTeX does this right, accepting an ASCII apostrophe in the input and producing the correct output. All the "smart-quote"-like WYSIWYG solutions are always breaking on edge cases.

Comment Re:Excellent, if affordable (Score 1) 52

There are the M-disc variants of CDs, DVDs, and BDs. These can be used with some popular brands of burners and work by deforming a layer, so they're not prone to dyes fading. It's cheap for an archival system and the discs are readable by standard hardware. Sure, Blu-ray drives might not be common in 2045 but they should be obtainable; at least you have a better chance than with some new, special-purpose technology that might never take off.

Comment Wrong metrics (Score 1) 59

Everyone knows SSDs are more expensive than spinning disks when measured per byte stored, whether you care about dollars or CO2, but strangely they're very popular. SSDs have speed advantages that make them worth their costs but this article ignores those. If my workload demands high IOPS then I might be able to get by with ten or more times less SSD terabytes than spinning disk terabytes.

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