Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Dont cry for me achivefloppy (Score 4, Informative) 57

Hey, floppies were a great start! I came home from computer camp in 1994 with parts of a Slackware Linux distribution on 40 floppies. I was excited... my parents not so much. The compiler package fit on a whole 10 1.44MB disks and you could load up a usable system on top of a FAT16 filesystem (with metadata for long file names/unix permissions) if you didn't want to take the plunge and re-partition your hard disk.

Chrome

'Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox - and You Should Too' (digitaltrends.com) 254

In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too."

Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they've also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox -- "and you should too." The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well... Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don't have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It's rare that I'm forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years...

Its Enhanced Tracking Protection framework keeps your identity safe by blocking trackers and cookies that otherwise follow you around the internet and collect sensitive information you probably didn't even know you were giving up. On top of that, Firefox can warn if a website is covertly mining cryptocurrency in the background. Most of these protections kick in by default and you have an exhaustive set of options to customize them the way you want. Firefox also lets you look into just how invasive a website is. It actively updates your personal privacy report so you can check how many trackers it has shut overall and for a specific website...

What really clinched the switch to Mozilla Firefox was the fact that it's the only cross-platform browser that's not running Google's open-source Chromium platform. Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi -- each of these browsers run on Chromium, accelerating Google's dominance over the web even when you're not directly using a Chrome user. Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way. It may not seem like as vital of a trait as I make it sound, but it truly is, even though Chromium is open-source. Google oversees a huge chunk of the web, including ads, browser, and search, and this supremacy has allowed the company to pretty much run a monopoly and set its own rules for the open internet...

Mozilla as a company has, despite a rocky journey, often taken bold stances in complex situations. In the Cambridge Analytica aftermath, Mozilla announced it would no longer run Facebook advertisements, cutting off direct marketing to over 2 billion users. In a world of tech companies taking frail, facile shots at protecting user privacy and barely delivering on their commitments, Mozilla is a breath of fresh air and you no longer have to live with any compromises to support it.

Comment The Physical Analogy (Score 4, Insightful) 69

The analogy is if you suspect someone of stealing your wallet, you are allowed to break into their house, search through it to find and take back your wallet, destroy a few things here and there to prevent them from pickpocketing in the future, and then call in the police to arrest the guy.

Oh, but if you made a mistake and destroyed some random person's stuff, well, you were still acting within the law.

Comment Few Qualified Candidates (Score 1) 809

What happened to all the /. posts about how there is an excess of qualified U.S. candidates and companies asking to raise the H1-B cap are just trying to pay people less?

Anyway, OP's problem is one I think is very common when you're actually looking for someone really good. Even if crypto or security is not the primary job, a senior architect/developer/designer will be able to do a much better job knowing about crypto and security for the same reasons such a person would do a much better job knowing about multi-threading or cache behaviors. Knowledge and skill in those areas will ensure the design and code starts out in a better state than otherwise. In today's increasingly security-conscious world even the most basic of applications and devices need team and project leads to consider security as a fundamental aspect of development.

A lot of answers to this post are basically stating security considerations are not important to the job or the questions are too specific. I disagree with that. (Although I do think it would be OK for people to make a few mistakes around details in an interview as long as they demonstrated proper understanding.)

Maybe a candidate does know how to set up a web site to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. Does that same candidate know why certain cipher suites should not be used? And that really only secures the public network communication. What ensures user passwords are not easily accessed while in use and not just while at rest? How do you protect sensitive keys, symmetric or private, like the one used to encrypt user data?

If you're putting together something super simple and turnkey like a personal blog then maybe you can get by just following examples you read online. But if you're actually developing a new application or device then your solutions will need to be customized to your needs and capabilities. And that's not something you can copy/paste out of a Google search.

Comment Re:HTTPS is not flawed (Score 2) 185

I had tried using GnuTLS for a while in one of my builds (with libcurl, I think), but found it didn't always work right while OpenSSL did. I'm not sure if that is because I had to do something different with GnuTLS, but it just wasn't happy as a drop-in replacement.

Anyway, I don't think "trust should be earned" works. If you visit a banking or shopping web site, in what way are they supposed to earn your trust before you do business with that web site? I can't think of a particularly good way (scalable, understandable, and convenient) other than the "I trust X and X trusts Y so I can trust Y" approach we are using today.

Comment Re:It's more like a stunt to me (Score 1) 229

Let's say one of your unionized coworkers came up with and lead the implementation of an idea that would save your company $5M or increase revenues by 10% over the next year. What would their expected reward be? If a different company saw that result (or potential) in that same coworker, what might they be willing to extend in terms of a job offer to that person?

You're kidding right? I used to work for a huge hardware/software company back in the day. My "real job" was to work on the OS, but I was also sent all over the world to "save" $50-150 million dollar sales on multiple occasions. I busted my ass and did some pretty damn good work - if I say so myself. Know what I got? $500, a plaque and a pat on the back for going above and beyond. I also got to keep my job and got a minor promotion. Which is exactly what would happen to the union guy - he'd get a few hundred bucks, and a bump to his pay grade (aka, a promotion.)

That was my point. I didn't say that this unionized employee who saved the company $5M or increased revenue 10% got rewarded. My expectation is that he wouldn't, precisely because his compensation (i.e. reward) is constrained by a preset formula. Which is great for treating everyone equally, but people are not all equal. A competitor that recognizes this would come in and grab that exceptional unionized employee in a heartbeat, and reward exceptional work appropriately.

IMO, Buffer is not going to attract any amazing talent. Just okay talent. Unless they have some other sort of bonus equity policy in place to reward exceptional contributions.

Anyway, I hope you left that job and went somewhere better that would recognize and reward your abilities.

Comment Re:It's more like a stunt to me (Score 1) 229

Let's say one of your unionized coworkers came up with and lead the implementation of an idea that would save your company $5M or increase revenues by 10% over the next year. What would their expected reward be? If a different company saw that result (or potential) in that same coworker, what might they be willing to extend in terms of a job offer to that person?

If you are at a job and had one of those ideas, do you know what your reward would be? I'll give you a hint. It isn't monetary (unless the company had a written policy before-hand, and almost none do). So unions don't make a difference in whether a single exceptional worker is paid for their exceptional work. Those types of bonuses are reserved for management only, so at best, your idea could make your department head some cash.

That was my point. When compensation is tied to a specific formula (be it a union-designed formula or just one the company came up with) you will run into trouble when it makes sense to reward exceptions. All people are not equal, nor do people or their ideas all fit into nice little compensation buckets. In such an event, the people with equity or who are not constrained by those buckets are the only ones who can benefit.

Instead, that exceptional employee is probably best off taking a competitor's job offer because that competitor is willing to recognize and reward being exceptional.

Slashdot Top Deals

1 Mole = 007 Secret Agents

Working...