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Comment Data fetishization (Score 1) 273

There's a strong tendency in the past decade or two that because you *can* measure something, you *should* measure it and that it's meaningful, with curation being pooh-poohed, disregarded, or rejected in favor of the hand-wavey "But we might need this data someday!". It didn't work for the NSA with their massive hoovering of all sorts of metadata, it doesn't work for companies. In a similar vein, A/B testing is bunk if you don't know what it is you're differentiating.

Comment Migrated to Waterfox (Score 1) 323

I'd been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix (itself a fork of the Mozilla codebase), but now I've moved over to Waterfox, so all my extensions still work and I have a modicum of control over the UI. It imported my old Firefox profile with only a few minor config issues. (I had also looked at moving to Pale Moon, but it has a lot more compatibility issues than I want to deal with.)

Submission + - Ask Slashtot: How to determine if your IOT device is part of a botnet? 1

Submitted by galgon
galgon writes: There has been a number of stories of IoT devices becoming part of
Botnets and being used in DDOS Attacks. If these devices are seemingly working correctly to the user how would they ever know the device was compromised? Is there anything the average user can do to detect when they have a misbehaving device on their network?

Submission + - New formula massively reduces prime number memory requirements.

Submitted by grcumb
grcumb writes: Peruvian mathematician Harald Helfgott made his mark on the history of mathematics by solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture, which every odd number greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three prime numbers. Now, according to Scientific American, he's found a better solution to the Sieve of Erasthones:

In order to determine with this sieve all primes between 1 and 100, for example, one has to write down the list of numbers in numerical order and start crossing them out in a certain order: first, the multiples of 2 (except the 2); then, the multiples of 3, except the 3; and so on, starting by the next number that had not been crossed out. The numbers that survive this procedure will be the primes. The method can be formulated as an algorithm.

But now, Helfgott has found a method to drastically reduce the amount of RAM required to run the algorithm:

Helfgott was able to modify the sieve of Eratosthenes to work with less physical memory space. In mathematical terms: instead of needing a space N, now it is enough to have the cube root of N.

So what will be the impact of this? Will we see cheaper, lower-power encryption devices? Or maybe quicker cracking times in brute force attacks?

Comment Re:Curly braces = good. Indents = bad. (Score 1) 173

by secretagentmoof (#52955757) Attached to: A New Programming Language Expands on Google's Go
I have dyslexia, and severe issues with telling whether things are vertically or horizontally aligned. Curly braces are much, much more useful than horizontal indentation for me; I imagine people with more severe visual impairment would have even worse issues. (I can configure my editor to do vertical greenbar for the background, but that's a hack that only works in my local environment.)

Submission + - Firefox 49 Postponed One Week Due to Unexpected Bugs (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced this week that it is delaying the release of Firefox 49 for one week to address two unexpected bugs. Firefox 49, which was set for release on Tuesday, September 13, will now launch the following Tuesday, on September 20.

Work on fixing the two issues is ongoing. The first is a problem with a slow browser script, which is also the most time-consuming issue since the Mozilla team needs around a week of telemetry data to evaluate the fix. This is also the primary reason they've delayed Firefox 49 in the first place. The second problem relates to loading Giphy GIF images on Twitter, which open in a new blank page instead of the Giphy URL. This issue was first detected in Firefox 49 Beta releases.

Firefox 49 is an important release in Mozilla's grand scheme of things when it comes to Firefox. This is the version when Mozilla will finish multi-process support rollout (a.k.a. e10s, or Electrolysis), and the version when Firefox launches the new WebExtensions API that replaces the old Add-ons API, making Firefox compatible with Chromium extensions.

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