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The Internet Has a Huge C/C++ Problem and Developers Don't Want to Deal With It (vice.com) 663

What do Heartbleed, WannaCry, and million dollar iPhone bugs have in common? From a report: One bug affects iPhones, another affects Windows, and the third affects servers running Linux. At first glance these might seem unrelated, but in reality all three were made possible because the software that was being exploited was written in programming languages which allow a category of errors called "memory unsafety." By allowing these types of vulnerabilities, languages such as C and C++ have facilitated a nearly unending stream of critical computer security vulnerabilities for years.

Imagine you had a program with a list of 10 numbers. What should happen if you asked the list for its 11th element? Most of us would say an error of some sort should occur, and in a memory safe programming language (for example, Python or Java) that's what would happen. In a memory unsafe programming language, it'll look at wherever in memory the 11th element would be (if it existed) and try to access it. Sometimes this will result in a crash, but in many cases you get whatever happens to be at that location in memory, even if that portion of memory has nothing to do with our list. This type of vulnerability is called a "buffer-overflow," and it's one of the most common types of memory unsafety vulnerabilities. HeartBleed, which impacted 17 percent of the secure web servers on the internet, was a buffer-overflow exploit, letting you read 60 kilobytes past the end of a list, including passwords and other users' data.

Comment Re:Not news for Canadian (Score 1) 69

I was going to post the same thing. I doubt any Canadian who has a cell phone will be surprised by this news. I might be a little surprised that there isn't some other country whose telecoms are squeezing their customers harder, but I think most of us would have assumed we were top five at least before this study came out.

Comment Re:Mostly immaterial what people think... (Score 1) 660

I'm a third-party Illustrator developer and I can say that the move to a subscription model is a bit of a pain for us. We have a lot of users who won't budge from CS6 as a result. This really ties a support anchor around our neck.

That said, knowing a number of people at Adobe I can safely tell you that this wasn't purely a "let's lock people" decision. I'm sure they're happy with that as a by-product, but a big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.

You might ask: requested it? Sure. If you're a big company and you have, say, 100 seats of Illustrator, but you only upgrade every two years, you have a major problem. You need $100k to do your upgrade, but you only use it on alternating years. If you don't spend that $100k in one year, your accounting department won't give it to you the year after. Corporate account is *really* stupid that way. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from their corporate users that a subscription model would be ideal: they wouldn't have to worry about big jumps in upgrades (every other version) and it would smooth out their expenses.

Now, could you have worked out some way to let them do that while also letting someone own it? Maybe, but once you build the subscription model code, I imagine they decided supporting both methods was stupid. And again, as others have pointed out, they priced the subscription so if you were a regular upgrader, you're saving money. If you weren't, it will be pricier, but why should Adobe bend over backwards to make that person's life easier? If you skipped every other upgrade, it's a wash in terms of cost.

Comment Re:Abuse of power? (Score 5, Insightful) 557

If the results are going to other people ("a range of stakeholders", which includes Congress) the information is there for Trump if he wants it. By having it delivered to him before he leaves office, that puts a timetable on it. Otherwise it's "Hey, go do this thing for me. Also, I'm out of here", which in my experience results in nothing happening.

Comment Re:pump the brakes, CNN (Score 1) 62

I spent about two months trying to figure out how to tell the suggestion service on Android TV that I was not interested in his crap. I still don't know how he got into my rotation and I'm still not sure why he was finally removed. But it's good to know that CNN is going to inflict him on a whole generation; I feel like my pain should be shared.

Comment Holy Carpal Tunnel Batman (Score 2) 361

I can see some interesting use cases for that TouchBar, but dear God, when that Photoshop lady was demonstrating using the mousepad & TouchBar at the same time, I cringed. I mimicked it on my keyboard in front of me and my wrists cried out in pain -- I can't imagine how it'd be if the keyboard was in my lap (i.e. on a laptop).

Comment Re:Already Implemented in Ontario, Canada (Score 1) 228

It's funny, my wife & I were talking about that the other day. Her cousin's kid can't do multiplication to save her life and neither of us could fathom why they dropped the multiplication table approach. Great, calculators are useful, but if you don't have one, you can't even *do* long-form multiplication if you don't have the Ten Times Table memorized. We agreed that whatever the hell the schools did, our kids are going to know their goddamn multiplication tables.

Comment Already Implemented in Ontario, Canada (Score 4, Insightful) 228

My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.

By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student /isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.

At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.

Youtube

YouTube Is Guilty Of Criminal Racketeering, Grammy Winner Says (torrentfreak.com) 246

An anonymous reader cites a TorrentFreak report (edited and condensed): YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering. That's the headline-grabbing claim of Grammy award winning musician Maria Schneider, who claims that the Google-owned site is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to siphon money away from musicians into its own pockets. Over the years, Google has transformed into the new bad guy and the pressure is mounting in a way never witnessed before. The U.S. Copyright Office's request for comments into the efficacy of the DMCA's safe harbor provisions has resulted in a wave of condemnation for both Google search and the company's YouTube platform, with everyone from the major record labels to the MPAA and back again attacking the technology giant. Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider really ups the ante by stating that YouTube is guilty of the same criminal acts that Megaupload is currently accused of. "YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering," Schneider wrote in an open letter to the platform. "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all types, and siphoned directly into their own pockets."Digital Music News has more information.
Education

Study Suggests Free Will Is An Illusion (iflscience.com) 386

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IFLScience: A new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has attempted to define and investigate the subject of free will. By asking participants to anticipate when they thought a specific color of circle would appear before them, something determined completely by chance, the researchers found that their predictions were more accurate when they had only a fraction of a second to guess than when they had more time. The participants subconsciously perceived the color change as it happened prior to making their mental choice, even though they always thought they made their prediction before the change occurred. They were getting the answers right because they already knew the answer. "Our minds may be rewriting history," Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. The implication here is that when it comes to very short time scales, even before we think we've made a conscious choice, our mind has already subconsciously decided for us, and free will is more of an illusion than we think.

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