I think a lot of discussion around "fact checking" that Meta has been doing completely misses the point that Meta has been actively manipulating news worldwide and not just in the US.

For instance, in India, FB has been actively censoring news that is inconvenient to the central government.
https://www.indiatvnews.com/ne...

Facebook has also been allowing advertising calling for genocide in India:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Google and Youtube are also actively engaged in suppressing independent journalism in India.
https://reutersinstitute.polit...

I am not buying Apple's story that they don't have any backdoors on their devices. Why I don't buy that is because there is evidence to indicate that they have secret API which they allow some select companies to use which has only one conceivable purpose - for spying and surveillance. I am referring to this incident when Uber app on Iphone was caught recording screens even when the app wasn't even running on the iphone. Somehow this story just disappeared with next to no followups from the IT security people.

https://thenextweb.com/news/re...

Uber came up with a totally B.S explanation for why they were recording screens: "This API isn’t connected to anything in our current codebase, meaning it’s non-functional & there’s no existing feature using it. It was only ever used to render maps for an early version of our Apple Watch app, but has been dormant for quite some time. We are working with Apple to remove it completely ASAP."

What does recording screens have to do with displaying maps? and why didn't Apple contest this explanation? and how is it that Apple gave this secret entitlement to Uber?

This incident does show that, at the very least, there was some secret collusion between Apple and Uber to spy on users. And why would this happen unless there was some use case pushed by the surveillance state?

I would argue that it is the responsibility of ethical humans to have kids and to raise them to be very good human beings who benefit society. If enough people in an area bring up their kids to be good human beings, then in about 20 years the world may be in much better hands.

This is great news but I hope these laws apply to software diagnostic tools as well where manufacturers find ways to ensure that only those service centers who are purchasing a VERY EXPENSIVE license for the maintenance software are allowed access to the hardware through license keys etc.

Really sad to hear this - and what an impressive resume to have - to be considered the primary person responsible for the enterprise features of a database that is as widely used as PostgreSQL.

RIP and my condolences to his family and friends

Interesting.

The Orchard Valley Coffee shop looks similar to the One Field Farm Kitchen in Bangalore! Yes, I run this

The rise of the totalitarian Modi govt is because of sites like Twitter, FB etc giving these right wing elements full sway over their networks while restricting the voices of the opposition, human rights workers etc - Twitter didn't count on these same forces getting big enough to the point where they can exert pressure on these networks.

It was initially available only through 3D printing but the researchers have figured out how to do injection molding as well.

From the article:

And later:

What took MS down a notch wasn't ActiveX vs the web, but the fact that more and more apps simply became websites and escaped the stranglehold of the Windows Ecosystem and anyone - no matter what OS, could use these web applications.

The fact that apps like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Google Docs, Google Sheet etc became a reality and you could do most of your email work, word processing, spreadsheet work, calendaring etc without buying Windows and office licenses reduced MS's grip on the market.

As someone who used to battle suicidal thoughts for years let me offer some perspective.

For a long time there was a single thought that would go through my mind - almost constantly, even when I wasn't really *feeling* depressed. The thought was of stabbing myself in the chest or stomach with a large kitchen knife or cutting myself in a way which would kill me.

The reason I am putting an * around the word feeling is because I wasn't always self-aware of my deeply depressed state.. Actually, there were times I would even feel euphoric but yet that thought of inflicting such injuries upon myself would constantly go through my mind. By constantly, I mean every few minutes (if not every few seconds).

The thought was that this act would release me - that it would give me a sense of relief. I am not surprised that some people give in to this senseless feeling.

For myself, I escaped because I turned to religion. Those thoughts don't cross my mind anymore and haven't anymore. I recognise now that there are forces out there which don't want me alive and that there is also a benevolent personality out there (God) who wants me to live and thrive.

I realise that this thought may be scorned or mocked on this site and others. But for me it saved my life.

Yes, I agree. Many of us still visit the site but it has gradually become less and less relevant to the geeks and the nerds. These days I find better news articles in other sites such as news.ycombinator.com but the comment section there is an absolute eyesore. Slashdot has the best comments system by far, but I wish the corporate overlords would post the right stories. I have submitted stories which may have been of interest to people like me and many of those have never hit the site but on the same day I would see stories on slashdot which are pure clickbait and which are only very, very remotely related to tech. The site has started posting more and more stories which arepolitical in nature rather than technical in nature.

Something else which I have noticed is that stories have very few comments these days - often less than 100, and that is a far cry from the glory days when it wasn't unusual to have multiple stories with 1000+ comments on the same day.

One more thing: I do see the occasional comments from people like Bruce Schnier and other experts on this stie, but those are very, very rare these days - and not like during Slashdot's heydays. So am seeing less and less value in the comments section.

You are arguing that java should not be used because one of the dozens of mvc libraries had a security issue? That is similar to saying operating systems should not be written in C because operating systems written in C have had security vulnerabilities in the past

Java is excellent for some scenarios such as the development of server-side applications, webservices and so on. For stuff such as desktop GUI development, C/C++/.NET etc may be better options.

Apart from that, Jave has the following advantages:
Excellent portability
Automatic garbage collection
Huge collection of excellent libraries accessible via well-organized central repositories via build tools such as maven, gradle and so on
Dependency management is lot easier if you use build tools such as maven/gradle etc
Huge numbers of competent developers

This is exactly the approach that the present Indian government is also using. Their intent is to use propaganda, lies and an army of trolls to control dissent, distract people from what is really happening and also to suppress any hint of an opposition.

One of the former members of this huge paid army even released a book on it:
http://www.amazon.in/Am-Troll-...

The Prime Minister Modi himself follows some of the worst members of this troll army who use rape threats, murder threats and whatever else against anyone engaging in any form of dissent.

The BJP party which is in power is the primary backers and the ones who run this troll army:
http://mashable.com/2016/12/27...

I wonder if systemd, pulseaudio etc are trojan horses inserted into the Linux ecosystem for nothing else but screwing things up - they work, sort of, but not very well.. they are irritating enough to significantly reduce the adoption of Linux and also to slow down the overall development of the Linux ecosystem by focusing attention on problems which could have been easily avoided. There there is of course these security vulnerabilities which open up in the strangest of places.

Of course, I have no evidence for this, but it has been a nagging suspicion.