abbot2

Ex-russian here.

This might be counter-intuitive to many people who never lived in Russia, but: mobile phone service contracts in Russia almost do not exist, entire market model for carriers is quite different.

Carriers don't sell SIM-locked phones for over decade now in Russia. Most common contract features are implemented as pay-as-you-go with extra packs (quite similar to what giffgaff does in the UK). This is probably due to the fact that CRA and other similar financial institutions in Russia are currently in their earliest stages of development.

Mobile phones are usually purchased absolutely independently from the mobile service contract, and almost never purchased from carriers: electronics stores usually offer better prices, and all Russian carriers are happy to sell SIM-only prepaid contracts (also see PAYG model notice above).

So overall you should read this news as: "major russian mobile companies decided that long-term contract model required to sell 'cheap' iPhones in russia is still too risky and not feasible", no conspiracies.

If I were from NSA: 1. Go to linode (or your favourite hosting provider). 2. Make a snapshot of memory of a running VM. 3. Extract encryption keys from that snapshot. 4. Decrypt.

The message here is: it does not matter which server setup you use, be it own hardware, cloud hosting or gmail. If data is seen unencrypted in any place which is not under exclusive control of yourself or your peers, it can (and eventually will) be intercepted.

Never store != never see

This would be against github ToS

I read it as something like this: "We really promise not to mess up your account. Really-really. Oh wait, our server has been hacked".

" Authorize Real World OCaml Commenting?

The app Real World OCaml Commenting will be able to:

    Read your public information.
    Update your public repositories (Commits, Issues, etc).

"

WAT?

There is one good thing in UNIX shared library + package management model: security updates. You don't have to depend on some weird ISV to update his own copy of buggy openssl code in his own "app" in the Unix world. Good for sysadmins. Inconvenient for users. Doh.

Looks much like printer escape sequences.

I did a quick peek at their electronics schematics. Well, believe it or not, but it looks like designing a laser-cut custom wooden case for this phone took much more effort than the electronics part. So, returning to my analogy: you are building a DYI PC because you laser-cut a custom case for the off-the-shelf parts you purchased. If this is the level of DYI to be amazed of on this site, I'm completely confused.

Actually it is not ridiculous. There is a project which is much more a DYI then this one. Enjoy: http://wush.net/trac/rangepublic (OpenBTS).

"Cellular connectivity is provided by the SM5100B GSM Module...". Meh. No way a DYI. It's like you assemble your desktop PC from pieces like motherboard and power supply and say that you built a DYI PC.

It is never a good idea to keep backup copies at the same place as the source data, so normally it should be not that common for an attacker to be able to wipe both original and backup. Regarding the offline optical disc backups, they are still ridiculously expensive compared to magnetic spinning drives or tapes. Backup, especially an automated one, is always an extra security risk to consider, but apparently there are no other good ways...

Do your daily backups using rsync+hardlinks (rsnapshot, dirvish or something similar) and keep a long history. This is slower than copy-on-write ZFS (obviously), but works reliably on any Linux/Unix file system and the storage cost is roughly the same as for ZFS.

Unfortunately many of us learn this simple truth the hard way: a mirror is not equal to a (daily) backup.

Yes, you can place a link. But the link, unlike the page range, points only to the place, not to the scope.

"As show on pages 105-107" looks much better than "As shown in sections 4.5.4, 5.1 and 5.1.2". Really. You don't have the first option with HTML and/or sphinx. Oh, and can I have some bold italic text please?

I don't argue that TeX is good for typesetting thesis. I doubt that sphinx, even with some plug-ins is good for that. Also don't forget that reStructuredText has its own problems (not found in HTML and LaTeX). Can I have some bold italic or italic monospaced phrase example in reStructuredText please? No, really?

Why not to go the other way round in this case? Typeset your thesis in semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML5, and then just add some specific CSS to get the hard print copy?

As someone who did typeset his thesis not too long ago to forget all that lot of tiny tweaks I had to make to get a perfect print out from LaTeX, I would say that this project has a lot of issues. Some of them a more or less easy to fix, but some of them will be hard. Consider wrapping some specific paragraph in a \fussy / \sloppy pair, or hammering a specific float to this page, or ... (this list is really long). Not to mention bibliography tools. I don't claim that these issues are unsolvable, but the deeper you go into solving them the more you will discover that you are basically re-implementing LaTeX.

While the idea of multi-format thesis, or at least double format - PDF and HTML, is very compelling, I doubt there could be good enough solutions for that for any thesis which contains more then just text and some inconsiderate amount of figures/tables/formulae at all.

M-x doctor: No such command: doctor. You should just call that "yet another online editor", really.

I guess, the next notable iteration would be: "Google is working on integrating Emacs into Chrome". Oh well.