notzorbo3

> A pity that multinational companies can usually afford much better lawyers than the average Joe.

I'm always amazed at how afraid customers are of companies in the US/UK. Like this article, where they threaten legal action and make the customer responsible for being available to hand off the third Switch. As a customer in a western European country, I'd laugh straight in their face and wouldn't lose a second of sleep over threats like that. I may live in a country that has a weird and at times annoying obsession with rules and regulations, but when it comes to being a consumer, it's great.

> the alternative, having no formal history lessons, is far worse

It depends. If the history lessons are strongly indoctrinating, then it's better not to have them. How many of the very good principles of Communism are being dismissed because people have been taught that communism == the Russian implementation of it?

Maybe we should have our worst historical enemies write our history textbooks for us.

> My history texts taught me to be once quite strongly of the belief that the atomic bombings of Japan were necessary, and even saved lives

So that's where that attitude / excuse comes from whenever I talk to americans about the bombings of Japan?! Is that literally taught in history classes? It always seemed to me like a statement made by an indoctrinated mind. It was nuclear bombs used on civilians in two densely populated cities. How can people spin that into something good?

>I just know a lot of people find side projects fun because they can let loose a bit and try out random stuff that may not be their "best" code.

This is still a huge asset. It's important for a person to want to grow and learn new stuff. When it comes to hiring a person, there's a whole lot of stuff that's important. Maintaining a long lasting project is one of them. Having an interested in fun side projects, also. It doesn't have to be good code. In fact, I have my fair share of "this project is not maintained and should not be used in production code" repositories. That's just shorthand for "this code sucks".

When I look at a developer's Github profile I know that:

1. They care enough to have a Github profile

2. I can see their actual interests.

3. I know they're interested in random experiments

4. I can see if and how they treat their projects. Are they dedicated maintainers, or do they just fire off one-shot projects without ever deciding to maintain them?

And a whole lot more. A person who maintains a single shell script project with diligence is worth more to me than a thousand developers with bullshit lisp and haskell repositories.

Yes, there's a bunch of great engineers with empty or bad github profiles out there. But those engineers aren't showing me that they're great engineers. The ones with a single or few well-maintained projects do.

> Employers don't care.

The wrong empoyers don't care. The right ones do. My github portfolio is a means for me to determine if a potential employer is suitable for me, not the other way around. It's not a test for me to pass, it's a test for a potential employer to pass.

If a recruiter brings up things listed on my LinkedIn page, I know they're not suitable for me. If they bring up things on my github, I'm reasonably positive I want to talk to them. One company's CEO asked me a whole bunch of questions about one of my projects. Not as an interview, but as a peer. He had a genuine interest in my side projects. If he'd asked me to come work for him, I would have said yes in an instance.

Why not? Can you elaborate? Because 10 minutes with a Github account is enough for me to decide whether I'd hire someone or not.

You know what's universally hard? Finding people who are good at their jobs. References don't matter, experience doesn't matter, education doesn't matter. Why not? Because it doesn't say anything about actual skill. What does? Side projects, where you can actually see if a person has skills.

> a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work?

You hire a corporate lawyer based on their public reputation. For a programmer, that's their github portfolio.

Business are in a unique position to actually judge programmers by their merit, not just hearsay or bullshit references or lies on a resume. Of course companies are going to factor that into their decision!

In modern times (read: every site leaks its database all over the place), you really need a different password per service. XKCD approach isn't going to help, since you'll never be able to remember the password to a site you haven't used in 4 months. You still need a password manager, so you might as well let it generate strong passwords for you. XKCD passwords aren't as strong as you'd think.

Can you elaborate a bit? I'm asking because as a bit of security aficionado, I've yet to see a scheme that's better than passwords + 2FA.

> that the passwords would be recoverable by you

Just click "Forgot password"?

Diceware encourages reuse of a single password on multiple sites. It's also much more time consuming than just clicking the "randomly generate password" button and having it spit out a 30 char password. That, and a randomly generated password of, say, 16 chars is much much more secure than a diceware generated password of 4 or 5 words, IIRC. And I'd still need a password manager, because reusing passwords on different sites / accounts is a big no-no.

This page is more broken than usual, so it's still interesting. Regardless of you snide remark.

It's interesting that people go out of their way to complain about their privacy being invaded by cameras, drones, the NSA snooping backbones, google, etc but most of us are fine with out browsers connecting to 61 different domains (CNN.com) to render a 3 paragraph news story.

The craziness is that more and more sites won't even render anymore without third-party javascript. Without bootstrap, jquery, fonts, etc, at least the page will still work, and it will work better because there's no bootstrap, jquery, fonts, etc.

Mind you, these are sites that can be served perfectly with a 1Kb HTML page + a bit of CSS. Not web apps or anything, where I understand you'd want to load a bunch of XHR requests.

Normal website works fine without cookies and javascript. AMP version does not. It gives you a blank page. Thus, AMP is bad, since a simple HTML page like this one should never require javascript to just display the contents.

> It really has changed the way I use the internet.

I agree so much. I cannot recommend umatrix highly enough. It has put me completely back in control of what sites can and can't do. I block everything by default except for first-party CSS and images (e.g. *.ycombinator.com when I visit news.ycombinator). It's great, and not at all as bothersome as I thought.

No more HTML5 pop-ups, deceptive ads, no more auto loading videos, no more sneaky audio, no more weird javascript that slows my browser to a crawl, no more tracking.

Honestly people, give it a shot. It's amazing.

I run umatrix, and I block everything. Cookies, CSS, images, scripts, media, XHR, etc. Everything, except for CSS and images from the thirst-party domain (e.g. *.ycombinator.com).

Most sites actually work better with this. They're faster, there's less clutter, no ads, less risk. Some need a little convincing by unblocking some CSS or images. Umatrix makes this super easy. If a site requires javascript to run, I just skip that content. It's different for web apps like trello or github of course. Those get much more permissions.

> How on earth do you navigate what to let through and what to block?

umatrix gives a nice matrix (duh) that shows exactly what's trying to load. I dont often need to unblock things, but when I do, it's usually obvious right away. Takes maybe two clicks. Worth the effort IMHO

Most vulnerabilities are listed as: "allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user". So it would seem that Edge is good at preventing elevated privileges.

However, I don't care at all about elevated privileges. If a bug in my browser allows code executing, that means that code is executing with my privileges. So all my data is already at risk. And my data is basically the only thing that's important. Becoming part of a botnet or the propagator of virusses is annoying at worst. Ransomware or my data leaking out is infinitely worse.

And Edge seems to exceptionally horrible at preventing code execution. Perhaps their security team should focus on that for a bit.

Thinking the "market will fix everything eventually" is like thinking democracy will eventually fix a dictatorship.

Location History is something different I believe. It's whether Android / Google stores the history of places you've been too. It says nothing about whether it's doing things with your current location.

On Android 7.x:

Settings -> Location -> Recent location requests, tap each service, tap 'Permissions' and revoke the permissions for each app that has it.

Settings -> Location -> Location services, tap each service and disable everything.

That seems to fix it for me. Of course, at some random time in the future, Google will enable them again. I'm fairly certain I disabled this a few times already.

Android's location tracking is a feature and I believe is not turned on automatically. Most of Windows 10's data collection serves no obvious purpose and is on by default. It's also 4 screens full of toggles that make you go "uh what?!"

But I wouldn't mind if they went after android for the purpose of making it clearer what's being tracked and gathered.

Let's also quote the relevant parts:

> However, it failed to result in major concessions from the British.

If you do those things to a force invading your country, sure. For protests, no.

It's probably a combination of high cost of texts at the time when Whatsapp became popular, no limit (or much larger limit) to the size of texts, a reasonable probability of texts not arriving or arriving late and a "fuck telcos for squeezing millions of euros from their users for no other reason than to turn massive profits from texting" attitude.

That's even worse, because it makes it easier to correlate when two people are Whatsapping with each other. If they both happen to be online at the same time a lot...

> They provided details - the passwords were salted SHA1 hashes which is not a pretty story to tell in this day and age, but they told it truthfully regardless

The leak is from 2012, which might explain SHA1 usage. It should still have been something beter, even for that time, but still.

Anyway, I think it's pretty hilarious that we're now patting companies on the back after leaking 17.5 million user details. Not that Disqus' disclosure wasn't text book. Just that it's now so normal for companies to leak things all over the place that we actually have Best Practices for what to do when (not if ;-) that happens.

Personally, I don't register with my real name and email anymore, anywhere. It's a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes, but worth it.

There's plenty of gamified learning out there. It's just not something most educators want to use for some reason. Learning has to be boring and dull after all!

Meanwhile, I started learning english (not a native speaker) at age 5 because all the broadcasted cartoons were in english, with subtitles. I remember my dad loading up gamified math puzzle games on the Commodore 64 for me to play. And this was some 32 years ago.

I don't know why it's so underused. Perhaps educator are afraid they'll be seen as lazy or not serious about their teaching if they use such measures?

What I do know is that gamification was one of the best ways of being educated as a kid.