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devcpp

741 karma · joined July 26, 2012

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devcpp··on Get Facebook WiFi for your business
Because if you admit that it's a possibility, then the Facebook login security measure accomplishes nothing at all.
devcpp··on We Need Viable Search Engine Competition
Fair enough, you know much more than me in that domain. :)

Are you going to argue about the famous general instability of Windows compared to its large competitors though? It seems like a good indicator of bad design in low level implementations.

devcpp··on We Need Viable Search Engine Competition
You make some good points but you lost me there:

>Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS

Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores, threads, paging, scheduling and so on) so there's really nothing to be amazed at.

I'll spare you my opinions on Bing. Reinventing the wheel is not worth describing, no matter how beautiful that wheel is, although I'm happy for you to be a part of the team making that wheel. If only Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search, some people under 70 would actually consider migrating. But if you're happy with your default-search-engine-bundled-with-IE market share at 20%, good for you (eh, it does bring a lot of ad money). You may not call the shots at MS, but you can at least admit all the shortcomings.

devcpp··on Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant
Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that anything Microsoft produces is out of question. The reason for that is that whenever I use one of their products, it progressively turns into a locked proprietary program and getting out of it becomes impossible. That's fine if the product remains unbeatable in quality but it's rarely the case to say the least. I try to not have that happen again and FOSS never lets me down on that.

There is also the question of privacy. That's why my Org files are on my ownCloud and I have peace of mind forever.

devcpp··on Uruguay is the Economist's Country of the Year
Everything that remotely relates to health is risky. The problem is simply the lack of regulation.
devcpp··on Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins
Huh, I'll remember the "take it to HN" option if I ever run into big problems with a high-tech company.
devcpp··on Google Zeitgeist 2013
Exactly. After all, it's pretty much how Apple made its historic unprecedented profits: more designers than engineers.
devcpp··on Why Google isn't our Bell Labs
According to Wikipedia, Bell Labs most notably contributed to the invention of "radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language". Google doesn't come close to such groundbreaking innovations [1]. Granted, there's not a whole lot of those these days but it can't be a coincidence that innovation slowed down at the same moment Bell Labs was downsized. Google doesn't help with that.

[1] MapReduce is probably the most important thing Google researched but it only helps with companies' computing load, much like AT&T's telephony protocol improvements we never talk about.

devcpp··on Uruguay legalises production and sale of cannabis
Your body generally prevents you from drinking too much water, and from eating too much food, etc. Besides, water and food is a necessity while heroin is not (far from it, almost no one will ever need it).

And that's what the person above meant: it's not the highly addictive or the easily lethal nature of heroin that is a problem, but the combination of both. Most things that combine these two attributes are illegal.

However, I go agree that there is a problem with the fact that it is so addictive that making it illegal makes things worse because of low quality products. Doesn't undermine the point of the post above though. In an ideal world, no one would try to get heroin.

devcpp··on Facebook's AI lab
Again, these applications are important to their customers (advertisers), not to the users. And while the research might be reused somewhere else, these companies are so big that the negative impact to users will be much larger.
devcpp··on President Obama calls on every American to learn code
A more proper analogy is: do you think it would be helpful to everyone to know the process for making laws?
devcpp··on Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming
I doubt it, he replied to himself.
devcpp··on Valve joins the Linux Foundation
Gabe was the 271st employee at Microsoft[0] and "was the producer on the first three releases of Windows"[1], so I suppose that, even if he hasn't contributed to the very same code as Bill Gates did, there must be an earlier employee who has. I don't estimate his Gates code number to be more than 2.

[0] http://www.giantbomb.com/gabe-newell/3040-4498/

[1] http://www.computerandvideogames.com/172835/interviews/creat...

devcpp··on Yotaphone
I got a scrollbar too but the page is neatly arranged to fit the browser's window so I didn't pay attention to it. It's the first time I've seen a footer from the top of a scrollpage.
devcpp··on Jolla CEO: You will soon be able turn your Android device into a Sailfish device
Very legitimate concern. Jolla is a company that strives for profit, unlike Mozilla. And as such we can't expect them to have the same motives to keep their platform free.

However, Mozilla also doesn't have the same influence, because of that, and makes pretty weak phones.

devcpp··on MtGox launches Bitcoins.com, an information site for all things Bitcoin
Like they said, "Your level of privacy is up to you". It seems like most people are competent enough to manage keeping their wallets safe...
devcpp··on Mozilla’s reliance on Google is increasing: 90% of 2012 revenue
Politicians often pull this sort of "I'm not here for the money and I'm proving it" trick. Please don't compare them with corporations.
devcpp··on Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving
Agreed, there are relatively few idiots on /b/, most posts there just have a special kind of humor. Not for everyone, but certainly enjoyable for the people who can get used to this.

Youtube, on the other hand, is simply plagued by stupid comments.

devcpp··on A Critique of Lavabit
Decentralized email, uh?

It's been attempted, but the issue of storage remains the most bothering. A mailbox can be pretty big and having it distributed over the network is difficult. Not to mention spamming problems.

Maybe some day we'll find the right formula. But I think the who-owns-the-private-key problem is a bigger priority.

devcpp··on Hackpad
Yup, same on the latest Firefox Nightly. This isn't really acceptable behavior for a released product.
devcpp··on iPad Air Review
I don't think so, otherwise we'd still have black and white operating systems, because colors add so much memory usage.

If Apple doesn't let its apps get more intricated, competitors will do it first...

devcpp··on The Zuckerberg Files - All public utterances of Mark Zuckerberg
And the CEO of Facebook of all people. If one non-public person in the entire world deserves scrutiny, it's Zuckerberg.
devcpp··on US bugged Merkel's phone from 2002 until 2013, report claims
On the other hand, the POTUS is at least supposed to look powerful in the eyes of the citizens. By recognizing that he doesn't know (and can't know) what's going on, he is announcing to the world that he is a puppet and that the POTUS is nothing but a servant to higher interests.

Bad move by the puppet masters.

devcpp··on Clojure from the ground up
Agreed, it struck me as unique that the author says anything about women. I have seen dozens (if not hundreds) of programming tutorials and that was the first one that said anything about genders. The problem is somewhere else.
devcpp··on The Facts about LinkedIn Intro
Exactly. I have never heard of Google sending emails on my behalf through gmail without me knowing about it.
devcpp··on Can you break my home rolled encryption?
As everyone said, you have created a stream cipher. But I feel that I have to add that your idea (OTP with small key) is usually implemented this way: the small key is a counter used an input to some PRNG specifically designed for this (you should try AES in CTR mode), which you increment every time.

This produces a sequence which is always the same for each session, but because the keyspace is so large (2^128 with AES-128), this is acceptable because these PRNGs are actually cryptographically secure hash functions, which makes them very hard to reverse. Therefore, the only efficient way to crack your session is to either catch the key (your counter) or to brute force it by using every value of the counter and test whether this leads to a successful decryption. Not only are there 2^n possibilities, but every possibility is extremely expensive to test and then you have to accurately check whether the decrypted values are coherent (this is difficult with packets with a fixed header and nearly impossible with raw binary data).

The big disadvantage is having to store your small key until decryption.

devcpp··on Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
He meant free (as in freedom), not open. "Proof" of that is in the submission's article. It's not exactly a formal proof but it has convinced most people here.

Unfortunately, this highlights some weaknesses in the GPLv2, which is supposed to guarantee freedom.

devcpp··on You’re infected—if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins
Problem is, the prompt doesn't appear until the encryption has ended, the key has been sent to the servers (it's kind of complicated, it apparently tries to find servers on its own, I wonder if it can be fooled) and that key has been locally destroyed.

So, by the time the user is notified that there is malware on their PC, it's too late. People who know to detect viruses while they're running don't run attachments in the first place.

devcpp··on Baidu now accepts Bitcoin
I share that opinion so I'll answer. IMO, China letting control over currency just slip away is as realistic as China letting control over anything slip away. AFAIK it's still an authoritarian state. It could happen (it has a relatively free economy after all) but it's not consistent with China.
devcpp··on Air Gaps
This is for personal reasons.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#On_web_browsi...

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