Because PhotoBucket know that if people even had two weeks to evaluate it, they'd put their images on AWS's S3 service instead for pennies on the dollar.
6,721 karma · joined June 8, 2012
To give an example of how frustrating it can be... I went through the visa -> green card -> citizenship process. No two departments talk to one another, and when they do they seemingly transmit information on paper which is then transcribed by hand introducing errors/typos.
For example USCIS does not talk to the SSA digitally at all. I filled in a single form which was used for both my Visa/Green Card and to apply for a Social Security Card on my behalf, my name was spelt correctly on the visa, but got typo-ed during entry into the SSA's system (then the emphasis placed on me to prove their error, even though other US government departments don't have the typo, including any official ID I hold or naturalisation certificate).
Additionally when you earn citizenship the USCIS won't tell anyone. You have to get your piece of paper and physically go tell each department one by one about the change, otherwise nothing will happen.
Why doesn't the federal government just have a big database? Or failing that, why does one department not electronically transfer records to another department? Why are people still hand re-entering information already held digitally?
The ACA ("Obamacare") Marketplace was the right model, but it failed. It failed largely because insurance consumers were largely put into two "buckets" those with employer provided insurance (more wealthy; more healthy; more profitable) and those without employer provided health insurance (less wealthy/startups/unemployed/sicker/less profitable/etc).
To use an analogy, imagine for a second what would happen if everyone got their car insurance through their employer. You'd expect car insurance for the employed to get a little cheaper, and the car insurance for those buying it independently to shoot through the roof.
If everyone purchased their insurance privately, and employers could only provide money for that via the pre-existing HSA accounts (tax free), then everyone would get to pay the same rates. In that scenario the unemployed would pay the same as federal employees.
Why is scrapping employer provided health insurance never discussed in the US healthcare debate? We already have the mechanism for employers to pay for employee's health insurance tax free (HSAs), all we need to do is ban employers from picking an employee's insurance company for them.
Everyone always talks about competition in the US. But how can there be competition when an employer can dictate just one or two different insurance companies their employees are forced to take? And only one or two tiers of care?
Which monopoly does Amazon have that they're abusing to sell hardware?
> Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space.
Nope; only businesses which are a monopoly.
Amazon has no monopoly, therefore the argument cannot be used against them. Plus nobody is stopping Google from opening a new website (e.g. GoogleShopCompare.com) and doing anything they want, using their huge brand and financial power, what they're saying is wrong is embedding it into their existing monopolistic property to give it an unfair advantage (Google.com).
It is exactly comparable to the Microsoft/Windows issues in the 1990s. Microsoft could sell/give away IE, they just couldn't bundle it with their monopoly (Windows) to give it an unfair advantage. Google previously got into trouble for exactly this due to Google Maps being bundled with Google.com.
The US just oddly decides not to enforce it, then the EU gets shit on for being anti-American when they correctly enforce things that are illegal in both the EU and US.
> this seems idiotic. Every large tech company leverages its dominance in one area to compete in a different market.
Then they will continue to be fined for anti-competitive behaviour. Which is also illegal in the US, the US just doesn't enforce their existing laws.
It is "idiotic" that the US fails to enforce existing US law. It isn't "idiotic" that the EU does.
I've been to over thirty countries, including Russia.
The US was the worst and UK was the second worst out of all of them. Immigration always sucks just due to the nature of it, but there's a difference between the process sucking and the employees/policy going out of its way to make a bad situation much worse.
I've experienced these problems first hand. US immigration being incredibly rude to visitors for no reason at all, and know someone from London who was sent to secondary because they were the wrong skin color (their electronic devices searched, books read, and seemingly no clear answer as to why, it was a business trip with a return ticket to a conference they had a ticket for and hotel room booked for).
I genuinely wish Americans could experience US immigration as a foreigner; rather than get their special lines where they just get waved through. Then things would change, things would change rapidly.
How many times, online, do Americans need to read that US immigration is some of the worst in the world before you'll believe it? That your border feels like entering a police state? Seriously, what will it take? The fact that you guys are now attributing it to "fake news" says a lot.
News stories are fake, anecdotes are fake, it is all fake because you don't like to hear it...
PS - US immigration has been horrible since at least 9/11 (arguably it was bad before). This has nothing to do with Trump, it was horrible under Obama and W. Bush too.
Outlook.com offers "Premium" which removes ads. If you stop paying you just get the ads back but your account is otherwise unaffected[0].
Gsuite on the other hand removes ads, but if you stop paying then you lose access to your email and additional messages may bounce.
Apples and oranges.
But reality is that we're seeing higher color depth ("HDR"), higher framerates, higher quality sound streams (e.g. Dolby Atmos and beyond), and even technologies we aren't envisioning today because the hardware isn't "there" yet.
If 8K is only a resolution bump, then boring, but it may be much more than that. 4K is.
OpenVPN was designed for the "Starbucks WiFi" scenario, it can traverse a NAT, and uses standard TLS. It therefore appears like any other HTTPS traffic and will be very infrequently blocked.
There's nothing inherently wrong with L2TP/IPSec; it is secure and fast. Just nicer to blend in with other TLS traffic for reliability reasons.
For a specific example, GoGo Internet (in-flight WiFi), doesn't allow L2TP/IPsec unless you use UDP encapsulation. OpenVPN works out of the box.
US customs is fine. TSA is a mixed bag. But US immigration are unfathomably rude and disrespectful for no reason at all; they treat you like scum. I've been through US immigration & customs a lot, been sent to secondary three times, ironically the people you deal with in secondary are more polite/reasonable than the people in the little glass booths, but still very "respect my authority."
Ironically going into the US feels more like entering a police state than going into Russia. The Russians were just super disinterested and to-the-point. The US is fine once you're in, but getting in as a non-American is a bad first impression (the UK has this issue too).
I'd hate to think how much worse they would treat me if I was non-white and from a country with traditionally bad or mixed ties to the US. From other people's anecdotes that I've read or spoken to: Bad. Just by what their official union supports (and who) you can get a sense of their views on other races.
Last year the US just started a new policy of asking foreigners for our social media credentials. It is starting out as option, but like all of these things it is just a matter of "when" not "if" it will be made mandatory.
You can find other figures, but many are in the petaflop range, well above what could be realistically installed in a vehicle.
If you seriously want to play the inane game of "well if a human doesn't have it then a Tesla doesn't need it" then let's play that game and talk about the things humans have that the Tesla lacks.
What's interesting about human's vision system is that the human eyeball is, relatively speaking, poor. We have digital cameras far better than that already. It is what the human brain that does with that raw data which makes us, as a species, thrive. Most of what we believe we "see" we never actually see, our brain fills in the gaps dynamically and infers information over time.
So this human processing ability, much of it automated rather than conscious, is totally relevant if you want to have this "Tesla Vs. human" debate. It is also why Lidar might be needed to make up the massive shortfall in a Tesla's processing ability relative to the human brain.
But hey, you want to keep to the "but HUMANS don't need it" then I ask where is my 38 petaflops and 1 TB of memory...
Again, the kind of software development people claim they do online, and what I see day to day have no connection to one another. If you're literally spending a whole day typing then you're extremely unusual. Even when writing fresh code with no front end, a lot of time is spent mapping data to structures, requirements building, diagramming, testing, or just considering the most maintainable way to solve the problem(s) presented.
These programming speed challenges that have popped up in the last few years are lies too. All these people do is pre-solve problems slowly and thoughtfully, then regurgitate those solutions within a very small timespan on the day. That's why many of them let the contestants create their own problem to solve, or give them very generic problems (e.g. twitter clone).
Software development has absolutely nothing to do with code entry speed.
Requirements gathering, mockups, design, testing, and thought make up the vast majority of development time. Then even once you get down to coding, you're often maintaining existing code rather than writing code from a blank slate, which requires more time reading and thought than actual modifications. A one character code change might take an hour; but you spent that time testing, following workflows, and documenting.
So the supposed developers online who obsess over their mechanical keyboards and 1ms time saved hotkeys really confuse me. I genuinely think the day to day software development that I and my colleagues do has no relationship to this bizarre online fetish with code entry speed.
If I really want to improve my coding performance, I'll do a standing meeting instead of a sit down meeting, reduce the number of people in a meeting, or stop requirements slip by completely clamping down on change requests mid-work. Those are my performance tips, and they save hours, not milliseconds...
Nobody cares about Yahoo! anymore except in niche tech circles. That's why you're reading this on techcrunch.
As a technical user, I was using certificate info multiple times a day, even on sites where I didn't want nor need the developer bar open. Now I keep on opening the Developer Bar to check the certificate and it shoots me straight into emulation mode, disrupting my entire workflow.
They should just re-add it at the bottom by "Site Settings."
It is entirely unclear if they did.
While the name of big companies (Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc) got dragged through the mud, it only appears that these companies were responding to court orders and that "directly" in this context meant with cooperation of these companies and the courts. Companies are legally obligated to respond to valid court orders, issued from a normal court or secret court. See this slide[0], the fact that all data from those companies was going through the FBI instead of an NSA codename project, should tell you everything you need to know about the mechanism (i.e. legal, not technological).
The PRISM program seems to primarily be about hooking into telecommunication infrastructure (both in the US and abroad). Telecommunications companies were definitely complicit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
Raises questions about deployment. Didn't the on-call have a previous build they could rollback to? Customers shouldn't have been left with an issue while someone tried to hunt down the bug (which "luckily" they located), instead the first step should have been a rollback to a known good build and then the bug tracked down before a re-release (e.g. review all changesets in the latest).
That's incorrect. When you change the round count your master password is re-computed, and database is re-encrypted with the new hash. The server needs to return the round count so the client can generate the correct master password hash, if you ignore that and simply calculate it for e.g. 2 rounds, the master password hash won't match and therefore the AES-256 database won't decrypt.
The way Lastpass works is straightforward... PBKDF2(password, rounds) -> AES256(hash, blob). If the rounds change then the resulting hash changes and therefore the database won't decrypt. Your second paragraph is quite confusing, in that I cannot make heads or tails of why you think you can use 2 rounds when e.g. 10,000 are specified previously. A correct round count is just as vital as a correct password in generating the correct hash.
I was just pointing out that Open Source in and of itself isn't a security protection. If you follow the same design you'll have the same design weaknesses, Open Source or closed. The "more eyes" thing, may be true, but I'd argue popularity is more important than license in determining the number of "eyes."
I'd also caution you in assuming an exploit would be against the server side. The server holds a bunch of really hard to decrypt blobs. The client is the real crown jewel. The client browser has all of the usernames/passwords decrypted, so if you were either able to deliver an "evil" extension update, or find an exploit in the existing extension, you could extricate those credentials.
That's the real rub: You turn off extension updates and you're more secure against "evil" extension updates; but you're now more vulnerable to situations where a bug is discovered in the legitimate extension and the organisation pushes a real update to patch that. Auto-updaters in particular are both a huge benefit and a huge security hole.
I believe the Chrome Web Store does check an extension's signing certificate before updates are published, so security wise that's a good thing, but realistically it remains the weakest part of Lastpass's overall design.
You don't need to. You need to trust Lastpass's design.
A Lastpass database is an AES-256 encrypted blob, encrypted using a "slow" hash of your master password (PBKDF2, rounds are configurable). Lastpass don't know your password. When they authenticate you they test to see if your database is decryptable with the password you entered (after it is hashed). If you set 2F then they won't even allow attempts until 2F is satisfied (Google Authenticator is free).
Lastpass's biggest weakness is also applicable to this theoretical OpenSource alternative: Javascript. Javascript is delivered from Lastpass (for the browser extension) and after you decrypt your password database, that JS has full access to it. If a "bad guy" is able to inject evil JS between you and them, then they could trivially steal already decrypted passwords.
As I said, this weakness has nothing to do with Lastpass, it would equally apply to all password managers which integrate into the browser with an extension. In effect you've exchanged convenience for security. And you can already read the Lastpass browser extension's source code, being more open source doesn't make you immune from this issue.
So you can choose to trust Lastpass, or not, but the design is sound. Slapping the words "open source" onto something won't mitigate any of LastPass's inherent design issues, and you'd still want to follow a similar design since it is a good compromise between security and convenience. Coming up with a superior design that doesn't sacrifice convenience would be awesome, but it is a hard problem...
Older versions of the Office suite used ~ files as locks. New versions flag those same files as hidden and system, so Microsoft hacked in a compatibility fix for old versions of Office to mark all ~ files similarly automagically.
It really was the wild west back when 9x was popular. I'm genuinely surprised they ran as well as they did. NT was a vast improvement.