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maxton

387 karma · joined May 12, 2017

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maxton··on Avast open-sources its machine-code decompiler
This is awesome! I had been using retdec.com since before Avast bought AVG (where RetDec was originally developed). I'm very excited to do away with the limits the website imposed.
maxton··on The Handled Ancient American Watermelon
When I click the down arrow, I am brought to the bottom of the page with the links to other articles but there is no article between the big picture and the links, just the "Read Our Other Stories" header.

EDIT: Resizing my browser to a smaller vertical size made it load. Strange UX.

maxton··on The Handled Ancient American Watermelon
Is there supposed to be any content here? All I see is a giant image of some watermelons and links to other images of fruits and vegetables. The links are under "read our other stories" so I assume there is supposed to be text.
maxton··on Apple internal music video – I Think We're a Clone Now (1994) [video]
There might also be a connection to Weird Al's parody of that song, titled "I Think I'm A Clone Now" from 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kw_d3d0XAo
maxton··on Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service
That would depend on the cipher mode, no? Assuming the container is using something like CTR, the diff should only consist of changed bytes.
maxton··on Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform
I don't think that's true for every project, as I have contributed to an open-source project[1] started by a Googler, and never had to sign a CLA, nor is the project hosted under the Google Github org.

1: https://github.com/benvanik/xenia

maxton··on TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code
Important to note is that this code is not the source code, but rather was generated by dotPeek, a C# decompiler, as mentioned in the repo's README: https://github.com/csnxs/Terraria/
maxton··on If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint
It's rather frightening that a bug as serious as this one got past Apple's QA. It seems like the list of known problems with the new Disk Utility is growing - recently there was a submission about how High Sierra's Disk Utility did not show unformatted disks.
maxton··on Winamp2-Js: A Reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript
Past discussion of this project can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565665
maxton··on Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
This is a very smart move by Facebook, and a win for the open source community as a whole. Why it took so long for the license change is a bit of a mystery, but removing the complications of software patents from their licenses will help further drive adoption and remove the precedent they were in danger of setting.
maxton··on Malware Encoded in DNA Can Hack Gene-Sequencing Software
> "Rather than exploit an existing vulnerability in the fqzcomp program, as real-world hackers do, they modified the program's open-source code to insert their own flaw allowing the buffer overflow."

So really, this is not as interesting as the headline would have you believe. Storing data in DNA is nothing new, and these researchers are just using it as input to a program that was deliberately written to improperly handle that data.

maxton··on “Avoid Buying New Domain Extensions” Says Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
I don't think you can compare .io, a ccTLD, with the new gTLDs. It's apples and oranges.
maxton··on Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken (2006)
That line from the C/C++ "fix" is an atrocity; `low`, `mid`, and `high` should never have been declared as signed integers in the first place, since array indices are never negative. It's unfortunate that in Java there is no other option than to use signed ints.
maxton··on Net Neutrality Won't Save Us If DRM Is Baked into the Web
It's sad that some of the same companies that have shown their support of net neutrality also support the adoption of EME. What's the point of an open internet if we have a closed web?
maxton··on Amazon stock reported at -87.24% on Google Finance
This must be an issue with Google's data provider. Their graphs still show the correct stock price.
maxton··on Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
I think the headline here is misleading. What they are offering is a prize to decentralize the internet - the actual network to which people connect in order to use the web. Judging from the other comments here, I don't think a lot of people have actually read the article.

IPFS and blockchain are technologies that are built on top of the internet - they assume a network connection already exists.

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