dave1010uk

Apple must need to know who you are as soon as you log in for this to work. Presumably this only works if you have some kind of Apple account. Do Macs call home each time a user logs into a Mac? If so, are Mac users generally aware and OK with this?

You could probably use WebCL, Flash or Silverlight to use the user's GPU. A quick Google shows this has been done with WebCL already: http://webcl.nokiaresearch.com/jsoclbm/

Is there anything a native Bitcoin app could do that a web app couldn't do without a proxy to the Bitcoin network? (Which is what I believe Coinbase does anyway)

Doesn't this apply to anything you can buy from multiple places? Milk may be $1.50 from a corner shop but $2 from a supermarket. What price is the "real" one? Taking a mean average based on trade volume seems to be the most logical way to value it.

I guess as good becomes more liquid (like USD and gold) then the gap gets reduced.

Could a non root user just read the host keys from sshd, then kill it and serve them? Or could it even just MITM it?

Free upgrade or free for everyone? Would be awesome if it could be run in a VM on any hardware for free.

Small correction: "Chrome is still open source" is incorrect. Chromium is open source. Chrome is closed source.

Completely agree with this. In a live environment (loud, dark, time sensitive) I've found using a iPad to control music much harder than using a standard computer keyboard, even with the iPad's simple controls.

Is it generally considered better to go with a better supported OS (eg CentOS or an Ubuntu LTS) and use extra package sources for non-OS programs or to use a more up to date OS that's already tested with the latest programs?

We made this choice recently, choosing Ubuntu 12.04 and a few (popular but unofficial) PPAs, rather than use Ubuntu 13.04.

Everyone seems to be moving from WebKit to Blink/Chromium. I wonder if / when Apple will be the only one using WebKit?

Slightly off topic: are there any desktop browsers that run on Linux or Windows that run an up to date version of webkit (for browser testing)?

This sounds way more impressive spec-wise than the original iPhone, which was called a smartphone. I think the definition of a smart/feature/dumb phones changes constantly.

I believe Windows 8.1 ships with IE11, which means now all current desktop browsers support WebGL!

http://caniuse.com/#search=webgl

Along the same lines: "If programming languages were cars"

http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/cars.htm...

I remember when the iPad first came out and I (along with many others) were concerned that it was a device for consumption and not creation: the first step in the "war" on general-purpose computation. However, with the continual improvements in web browsers and JavaScript runtimes (as well as things like Emscriptrn) I'm far less concerned. Nowadays even a locked down phone can run any JavaScript, which may provide the user with an IDE or a secure messaging system. I still think there's a war but I think it's more at the network level rather than device level.

That's a great idea. This should work with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. You'd have to come up with a good idea first and manage the quality well some how.

I'm really interested in an open standard too. If anyone's up for getting involved, my email is in my profile.

Oh I'm not apologising for them, they still messed up (and I still actively discourage people from buying Apple products). I don't use any Apple products / services, so their downtime didn't bother me. Their lack of communication is bad but I'd prefer poor communication over poor security.

We know they didn't push a quick hacky fix live. I think it's quite likely (due to the resources they have) that they deployed a proper fix, not sacrificing security for a faster response. I could be wrong.

Does anyone know of a centralised database of security breaches? It would be great if there were a standard (like CVEs), which included how well the breach was dealt with (eg informing public, mitigation, prevention, changes made). If there isn't one and there's interest here then maybe I'll start one.

Not not often one to praise Apple, but I'm really impressed that they spent the time they did to fix this. Apple are known for their strong brand and taking down the dev centre for so long must have been an awkward decision between the marketing side and the technical one.

I don't know the extent of the problem but taking down an online service for weeks is very uncommon. I guess (speculating a bit) that Apple could have applied a quick fix to the problem within a day to save their (short term, at least) brand appearance. I think "just getting it secure enough" is the most many people would do if an important service was down. It appears that Apple took the time required to deploy a proper fix, prioritising security over shot term wins.

It would be interesting to see what someone like Microsoft or Amazon would have done in this situation, or what Apple would have done if it was all of iTunes instead of the dev centre.

This was found on a deployed instance, rather than in the main Joomla source repository or download? The article doesn't make this clear.

This looks similar to what http://chirp.io/ is doing, only more open. It's great to see interesting advancements like this, especially using web technologies.

This is the closest blog post I can find, is this the one you mean? http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who...

I don't think 3rd party software distribution is a main contributor to openness. Before Apple's app store most software was distributed directly to customers. For example, Symbian, J2ME phones, Windows Mobile, etc. None of these were considered open.

Could you share some of these?

Anthony Ferrara did a similar presentation a while back: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/05/dont-be-stupid-grasp-solid...

This looks like the changelog: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/6342

3 days seems like a long time to alert people. Releasing the news early would be the right thing to do but keeping it secret until you know the extent of the breach was probably better for their brand.

The developer had lots of Windows desktop experience but little Linux desktop experience. We run a mix of Windows, Mac and Linux here, so using Windows shouldn't have been a problem.

We made the mistake of installing Windows 7 Premium 64-bit on a workstation with 24GB of RAM but Windows only said 16GB was available!

I can see why MS restrict their products like this so they can artificially price them. But in the end we ditched Windows and just installed Linux.

For those that aren't aware, the security of a rand number generator is very important: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack