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Comment Oh for crying out loud (Score 1) 138

I literally just ordered a TPM modle for my backup gaming PC last night, as I'd read that Microsoft had officially published articles on how to workaround the legacy hardware check. I can still run most modern games at 1080P on it w/o issue, so it's frustrating to have it arbitrarily defined as legacy hardware.

Canada

Bell Canada Wants Pirate Websites Blocked For Canadians (www.cbc.ca) 136

New submitter wierzpio writes: According to Rob Malcolmson, Bell Canada's VP of regulatory affairs, Canada is a safe haven to internet pirates and the only solution is to create a federally mandated blacklist of pirate websites. Unlike the existing blacklist in the U.K., Bell's plan appears to involve no judicial oversight. "Engaging in extrajudicial attempts to block access to sites, I think, raises all kinds of Charter of Rights and Freedoms issues," argues Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor and internet law expert. Quebec also wants to block sites. The province recently introduced a provincial law that would force internet providers to block users' access to online gambling sites not approved by the government. It argues the legislation is necessary to ensure internet gambling companies maintain responsible gaming rules.
Microsoft

Microsoft Warns of 'Destructive Cyberattacks', Issues New Windows XP Patches (zdnet.com) 76

Ed Bott, reporting for ZDNet: Citing an "elevated risk for destructive cyberattacks," Microsoft today released an assortment of security updates designed to block attacks similar to those responsible for the devastating WannaCry/WannaCrypt ransomware outbreak last month. Today's critical security updates are in addition to the normal Patch Tuesday releases, Microsoft said. They'll be delivered automatically through Windows Update to devices running supported versions, including Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and post-2008 Windows Server releases. But in an unprecedented move, Microsoft announced that it was also making the patches available simultaneously for manual download and installation on unsupported versions, including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The new updates can be found in the Microsoft Download Center or, alternatively, in the Update Catalog.
Businesses

New iPhone 7 Case Brings Back the Headphone Jack (thenextweb.com) 377

Apple removed the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, forcing users to use either Bluetooth, the Lightning port or included Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor in order to listen to music through headphones. However, one company took it upon themselves to create an iPhone 7 case with a built-in 3.5mm headphone jack. The company is called Fuze and they recently launched an Indiegogo campaign that promises to bring the audio port back to the iPhone 7. The Next Web reports: To achieve this, the company is taking Apple's Lightning to 3.5mm adapter and building it straight into a case, where you can plug your headphones with "no dongles, no adapters, no problems." In addition to the audio port, the Fuze Case will also serve as a battery pack as it adds 2,400mAh of extra battery life to the iPhone 7 and 3,600mAh to the 7 Plus. It will be available in five different colors including white, black, gold, rose gold and blue. The case is currently available for $49 to "super early bird" backers, but will increase to $59 once more people have chipped in and will eventually sell for $69 in retail. The company expects to start shipping the accessory in December later this year.

Comment Re:Scrapbook in Firefox (Score 1) 353

I have over 3,000 webpages and over 2000 links saved and organized in Scrapbook. Scrapbook can recursively safe entire websites. Searching for good information is tedious with search engines. Webpages come and go. Scrapbook lets you build a library, your own personal knowledgeable over years. You can highlight text and save the results, too. All the webpages can be be organized in a tree-like hierarchal manner.

The only issue with it has to do with synchronization and differential backups. It should be rewritten to save Mozilla Archive Format files MAFF's so that synchronization would be quicker from machine to machine.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Just don't use Scrapbook on Slashdot. I got banned from Slashdot several times, because I wanted to save a single article to read while taking transit home. I once got my entire office banned from Slashdot.

Comment Re:Broken signal (Score 1) 976

As a bicyclist who follows the rules, I've almost been killed 3-4 times now by bicyclists who simply don't pay attention to stop signs or red lights, crossing straight through intersections at 40 km/h, while illegally driving on the sidewalk. I seriously hate about 60% of the bicyclists on the road, and wish traffic laws harsh enough to properly deter this behavior - deliberately ignoring a red light is a huge safety risk to everyone, and in my opinion, should carry a $3000 fine (I'm not talking about the kind where someone rushes through a yellow, and it turn's red half way through -- I'm talking about red lights that have been red for five seconds or more) Of course, cab drivers here are just as bad - I'm not really sure which I hate more.

Comment "Smart" parking meter anecdotes (Score 1) 863

Toronto has had similar style parking meters for a while. Paying for parking by credit card is actually pretty convenient - when it works. When you're paying $8 for parking, hunting down change isn't much fun (even if we do use $1 and $2 coins)

The original meters that were installed simply validated that the credit card swiped was valid, and stored the payment internally. People soon caught on and started using prepaid credit cards that were maxed out to pay. I experienced this first hand one day when we were parking, and a guy walking by and said "don't waste your money" to me, walked up to the meter, swiped a card, and paid for our parking that night.

The company that created the parking meters responded by upgrading the meters to store a blacklist of 1000 numbers. The machines were occasionally updated with a new set of blacklisted credit card numbers. Eventually, there were more prepaid and maxed out credit cards going around the city, so they upgraded the machines again with a 10,000 number blacklist. This approach inevitability failed as well, as the blacklist grew too large.

The next step was to install a modem into each of the parking machines. When you attempted to pay with a credit card, the machine would say "dialling...", and they would contact a credit card validation service somewhere. Nine times out of ten, this credit card validation routine fails to connect to the validation service properly, and the machine refuses to accept payment.

Sigh....if only these machines were a little "smarter"

Programming

Steve Bourne Talks About the History of Sh 232

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Bourne, the creator of the Bourne shell, or sh, talks about its history as the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7. Bourne worked on the shell in 1975 and said the process took no more than 6 months. Sh aimed to improve on the Thompson shell. 'I did change the shell so that command scripts could be used as filters. In the original shell this was not really feasible because the standard input for the executing script was the script itself. This change caused quite a disruption to the way people were used to working. I added variables, control flow and command substitution. The case statement allowed strings to be easily matched so that commands could decode their arguments and make decisions based on that. The for loop allowed iteration over a set of strings that were either explicit or by default the arguments that the command was given. I also added an additional quoting mechanism so that you could do variable substitutions within quotes. It was a significant redesign with some of the original flavor of the Thompson shell still there. Also I eliminated goto in favour of flow control primitives like if and for. This was also considered rather radical departure from the existing practice. Command substitution was something else I added because that gives you very general mechanism to do string processing; it allows you to get strings back from commands and use them as the text of the script as if you had typed it directly. I think this was a new idea that I, at least, had not seen in scripting languages, except perhaps LISP,' he says."

Comment Re:New Summary (Score 1) 333

Hey, the annual Banished Words List is the only time my Alma Mater is in the news these days, and it made me proud to see my no name school on Slashdot :)

Once upon a time, LSSU had a very good hockey program for a school their size (~3000 students), with NCAA national titles in 1988, 1992 and 1994.

Dugg for use of the word "nergasms", lol <3

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