brassic

You haven't addressed the actual point. Which was that we shouldn't need to think about whether any particular comic is or is not of interest to people carrying out surveillance.

I don't know if some present or future government could be offended by people reading this comic but it shouldn't be a question we even need to ask. If you want to live in a world where surveillance is not the default then the very least you can do is remove the tracking from your own websites.

Thus I applaud the author of this website. And I'm really bored of the dullards who chip away at my freedom saying "but it's only a tiny transgression, what does it matter?"

To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338

This is basically national security letters with oversight. Which is part of the problem. When any of the major democracies introduces a law like this, it normalises it for the rest. Which then gives encouragement to the more oppressive countries. The whole world seems to be in a race to the bottom.

Why not? The servers don't know what physical keys you are pressing.

This is kind of what LINQ does. You write a query in C#. The structure of the query (like an abstract syntax tree) can be exposed to the query provider which can interpret it or compile it to the CLR or compile it to SQL or whatever.

There was another case where the voter drew a penis next to the conservative candidate and it counted as a vote:

http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/2015-05-08/angry-voter-...

Not as painful as trying to correct it.

An HSM consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret.

A Yubikey consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret.

The programs are different but they are basically the same thing. The author wonders why there isn't a simple general purpose gadget you can load your own program on to. As long as the action of loading a program clears existing secrets, the device could be secure.

Or to put it another way, consider a Raspberry Pi acting as a router and as a Raspberry Pi acting as a media streamer. They have completely different purposes, but they are the same thing.

Seconded. In 18 months my RamNode VPS has had one unexpected reboot, but other than that it has been flawless.

Of course, it is ultimately a piece of paper...

But in every company I've worked for mail is signed for by whoever and, if it's addressed to an executive, delivered to a secretary who reads it and decides what to do it.

Given the requirement for secrecy, there is zero chance that an NSL will be treated in this way. And it won't be served by a random process server. Most likely it will be served by an NSA employee, in a discreet situation of their choosing.

I bet you a jam sandwich that an NSL is not actually a letter sent in the regular post.

The long forgotten irony in this meme is that cars used to be designed like this. There were no seat belts and the steering column was a rigid spear. It was practically designed to kill you.

Historical evidence suggests that there would indeed be fewer accidents but more car drivers would die (because even quite trivial bumps would be fatal), though pedestrians and cyclists would be safer. As someone who chooses not to drive, that sounds pretty good to me.

This isn't theoretical, I've seen it with HTTP, HTML and elsewhere. Any time two pieces of software disagree on how to parse a chunk of data, especially if one of them is supposed to be doing some sort of security check, you should expect to find a vulnerability lurking.

I don't know if there's a name for this class of problem. I'd be interested to know.

And of course Kunstformen der Natur [1]. Even if Haeckel did cheat a bit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

Water pipes often accumulate a layer of sediment at the bottom. Anything that stirs it up will cause brief discolouration of the water. Your pipes may be fine. (That said, I wouldn't drink the water right now.)

You don't need a pause button on all the videos. You just need a single button that pauses all the videos. I would be delighted if the escape key on my laptop served this purpose.

Of course, now you have no UI no restart a particular video. But the advertisers would figure this out about 30s after a global pause feature was introduced.

As Uber was quick to remind its drivers, the ruling merely covered the two drivers who went to the employment tribunal.

Early RISC processors read data from memory 32 bits (4 bytes) at a time, and these reads had to be aligned on 4-byte boundaries. This was a feature of the memory architecture, not just the processor.

Thus an aligned read of a 32-bit integer took one memory access; an unaligned read took two, which took twice as long. This killed performance.

Rather than quietly performing badly, the processor threw an exception to encourage you to fix your code.

The ARM2 worked a bit differently. It ignored the bottom two bits of the address when it read a value from memory. When the read was complete the value was rotated by the value of the bottom 2 bits multiplied by 8. This had the effect of putting the byte referenced by the full address in the bottom 8 bits of the 32-bit register. A flag in the instruction let you optionally mask off the top 24 bits to simulate a byte read.

I have to use two passwords to login to Lloyds bank. One conventional password (which is presumably stored salted and hashed) and one where I have to enter characters from three positions they choose. The latter is intended to mitigate the risk of using your account from a vulnerable computer. The former takes care of vulnerabilities on their end (as far as any password can).

I'm an ex-smoker and I had the same thought as I read the article: I wish I'd known this.

But really, I know it wouldn't have made a difference. From an early age I was taught at school that smoking would kill me and I started anyway. The idea that detailed knowledge of one particular cause of death would have made a difference is laughable. It's just a way of deflecting blame from one's own responsibility.

They don't need a revolution. They need to stop voting for Erdogan.

The law in the UK was changed a few years ago to permit this but it wasn't installed because of the cost.

A quick search turned up [1] which reckons £300 million for installation and £800,000 per annum to maintain. Which seems a bit pricey.

That said, there was a plan to trial it this year, but I can't remember if that was pre- or post-brexit.

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-35411297

When NTFS was first released Microsoft claimed it was so awesome it didn't need defragging. In later releases of Windows NT they added a defragger. By around the time of XP this was automatically scheduled to run in the background.

tldr: NTFS does a better job of avoiding fragmentation than FAT, but both need defragging.

You don't need a failure for compressed air to be dangerous. The air itself can damage you in all kinds of ways:

http://www.aircontrolindustries.com/dangers-of-compressed-ai...

A road atlas would have been much cheaper and you would have been able to buy one at any gas station without wasting an hour.

Here in Britain we have compulsory registers of births, deaths and marriages and anyone can query them. You don't get a number or ID card but the data is collected.

It doesn't seem especially different to the continental systems.

> Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless.

Absolutely. I've been practising this for more than 20 years. When the NT 4.0 Option Pack came out in 1998 I was delighted because it gave me a search engine on my desktop and I could stop feeling guilty about my lack of organisation. I don't have trouble finding things.

> 1MB can hold 500 pages of text; 1GB can hold 50,000 pages

You lost a factor of ten. 500 times 1000 is 500,000 so 1GB can hold 500,000 pages. 1TB can hold 500 million.

Are you in the UK? We're installing "smart" gas and electricity meters, which use 2G, but industry analysts are predicting the cessation of 2G here by 2020. Awesome!