testbro

> Society can hardly intervene in every individual's self destruction. But it cannot allow drugs which are not useful for anything BUT self destruction.

Why not? Should I not be permitted to destroy myself if I so choose?

Doesn't Reader automatically infer which parts of the page to style rather than just applying a custom stylesheet?

In a phrase: "does this just go into my iTunes then?". A large majority of Apple's customers presumably doesn't care about anything you mention, given by the simplicity of the iTunes model: you get music from the same place you listen to it and you put it on your iPod from there too.

The strategy of "few things, well executed" seems to be working fairly well too.

IIRC most of these bugs arise because of things that should be available while the device is unlocked: the dialler and camera for example. Camera is supposed to restrict gallery access and the dialler is supposed to only permit emergency calls. I'd expect that every app trusted with running while the device is locked will have these bugs as Apple goes forward too.

The bugs seem to a bit more nuanced than just testing for a locked device; the attacks seem to rely on performing actions simultaneously to exploit race conditions much like weird glitches in games. This class of bugs is really hard to test for due to the large search space. Model checking might offer a solution, but it's not a magic bullet by any means.

Scientific publishing isn't just about putting stuff somewhere for people to read it. Publishers, through their parasitic relationship with academia, have kept themselves relevant through the critical mass of people continuing to use them.

The purpose served by publishers isn't really the hosting of articles, it's the names of journals the publishers own which carries an implication that top-tier journals get better reviewers and therefore higher quality articles. As long as academia values impact factor and journal rankings, the parasite can subsist.

Most academics tend to self-host preprints, or stick them on arXiv so the publisher as a hosting service isn't really the "value-add" offered.

On a similar thread, Julian Bangert and Sergey Bratus have an implementation of the game of life that performs its computation on the MMU using traps[1] that technically uses 0 x86 instructions to run the computation. There's a video of it running available too [2].

[1] : https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc

[2] : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSRcvrVs5ug

> Words cannot express how much of an impact this OS would have had if the amount of time and resources dedicated to Linux, which is yet another UNIX clone in an age where 4-year CS majors do UNIX clones as assignments[1], were dedicated to ReactOS. Where might Microsoft be now if that had happened?

MS does offer some of the NT kernel source under an academic license precisely for this purpose [1]. I'm not sure if it's a response to ReactOS (does anyone know?).

[1] : http://www.microsoft.com/education/facultyconnection/article...

The other companion to this work (recovering COS disk images) is worth a read too [1]. Someone picked up where Chris left off and managed to get the images booting in an emulator [2].

[1] : http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130807191943/http://www.chr...

[2] : http://modularcircuits.tantosonline.com/blog/articles/the-cr...

Isn't the point of dynamically loading content to reduce the perceived waiting time though? I wonder if focus on cleanly showing the user the page is rendering might be better placed on getting content to load faster instead.

Scrollbars aren't but they still show on a scroll event (unless I'm mistaken - I'm only using 10.8).

Travis Goodspeed gave a talk at 29c3 about forensic-resistant thumbdrives [1]. The idea is that the host OS can be fingerprinted by the pattern of reads it makes; the drive can return different data or erase itself if it looks like it's being imaged (sequential block reads).

Of course, you'd have to package your DIY thumbstick pretty carefully (and pot the PCB) for this to not look suspicious.

[1] : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZtkANvDxZA

For anyone wanting to liberate their data from here, paste this into the JS console with the history page open (only tested in Chrome):

    var time = time=new Date("2010/01/01").getTime(); //set this to start date
    setInterval(function(){
	window.location="https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/kml?startTime=" + time + "&endTime=" + (time + 2678400000);
    	time += 2678400000
    }, 2000)

Doesn't know when to stop, so close the tab when you have all the data you want.

There'll never be a way of filtering it correctly (is ASCII art of sex acts posted to reddit porn?) so the only real option is ensure people are aware of the risks (whatever they might be). Opting out is already possible today - don't visit porn websites if you don't want to see it.

Is a government mandated filter the best way to allow parents to go beyond just educating their children? As a childless person who isn't petrified of naked people, why should I pay for a service that's only any good for lazy parents?

Mission creep is a concern I have with this though. It's a short jump to go from optional blocking to mandatory blocking (as we already have with CleanFeed). The proposal is for it to be on by default - that's censorship in my eyes since you have to ask for the perverse content you're already being protected from.

I don't agree with the notion that the freedoms offered by the internet need to be curtailed to bring it back into line with the rest of life.

In one out of the one trials I've expected OSX to automatically set the clock ("automatically change time zone") it hasn't.

This touches on to the relevant point of DST. I no longer have to worry about changing clocks; the worry has been replaced by the confusion over whether all my clocks have changed or none have.

At a bare minimum I'd expect any change of time zone to prompt the user.

The attack could compromise other servers yes. I think the scenario you describe is a possibility, although there are some technical feats that would make wide-scale exploitation difficult - you need to know what you want to modify ahead of time which would be difficult.

Virtualised environments that don't pass the vendor specific commands should be immune to the attack though. As others have said, encryption would probably allow tampered pages to be detected. I'd be interested to see if the modified firmware could ignore new firmware...

Britain already has a mostly mandatory filter designed to save it from child pornography. Cleanfeed is run by the Internet Watch Foundation who look for images of abuse and put it on the blocklist. They're responsible for blocking Wikipedia due to an album cover.

The same filter is now used to action on high court demands to block torrent websites like The Pirate Bay.

The same's true of mining equipment used to pull worthless diamonds out of the earth and the pollution it creates. The "problem" is the pointless mining generates valuable stuff in addition to waste heat.

This is the flaw with the analogy, as with all analogies that try to map meatspace to the internet. It would probably make sense to say that the book has been left in an apparently public space.

I'd analogise it to an open book in a public space. The information is there for you to see when you walk up to it, and you have to interact with it (turning the page) to see the other information. On being caught turning the pages on the book, you get yelled at and imprisoned, despite your contention that it's the book owner's fault for not making sure turning pages was prevented.

Do you think your experiences are typical? I get that MS does have some good offerings but at the same time I think the average consumer's perception isn't as good as it could be.

> Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released.

I'll be interested if the consumers even notice - is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds? In my (somewhat pompous) view, Apple's success is its focus on selling the consumer things they can understand the need for, not numbers. I see MS is taking this approach with the new Win8 marketing but it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with 8.1

Adjusting that for inflation, it's worth approximately 70% of that (based on 43% cumulative inflation 1998-2013).

In the UK universities' research output are assessed by HEFCE using the "Research Excellence Framework" (which replaced the Research Assessment Exercise) [1]. Sadly, it suffers the same problem of being another metric [2]. It's a time sink for academics and it fosters a cutthroat atmosphere in the run-up. I heard some unconfirmed rumours that academics not submitting case studies to the REF will have their contracts re-assessed.

I think this exposes the bigger problem of metrics in general. It's hard to determine how much impact research has, particularly in the short term. I'd be interested to see what the outcome of the REF is, but I remain sceptical and apathetic towards it, as does everyone else I've spoken to.

[1] : http://www.ref.ac.uk/

[2] : I get the impression it does anyway - I'm not involved in it this round.

I believe the concern was that it ran on GPUs (mining on CPUs hasn't been cost-effective for quite some time). Since GPUs are rarely run constantly and don't see loads like mining produces during typical use, their owners might have overclocked them under those assumptions. With those assumptions violated, I wouldn't be surprised to see cards fail prematurely.

I'd wager that there are a lot of in-house re-implementations of GPL software because the license isn't permissive enough. I think the fact that good non-GPL alternatives exist supports my hypothesis; given the choice between GPL and reinvent the wheel, it's feasible for someone to take the latter path.

I'm not sure I can really make an appropriate generalisation of the broad attitude towards it. I can, however, cherry pick Diane Abbot's views because she's often called upon for soundbites and political debates. As a consequence, my comment is a subset of reality.

In this case the fears stem from the perception that children viewing porn and sexualised content is damaging. In Diane Abbot's case [1] the concern is that sexualised environments might construct inaccurate attitudes towards women/sex in children.

I suppose that falls in the first and final scenarios you gave.

[1] : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21878027

To address your first point: the way the state religion works is a few bishops have seats in the House of Lords. That means they have the power to kick back legislation, but nothing else. That doesn't exclude the influence the Church of England can exercise indirectly through lobbying/high profile members issuing statements of course.

The advisor's statement is correct: this filtering does not depend on legislature. The proposal was to compel ISPs to filter porn by default. If all the ISPs sign up there's no need to create laws to force it. I don't get the impression that this legislation is religiously motivated beyond the puritanical underpinnings of the British public; it's based on "think of the children" rhetoric alone.

Isn't that sidestepping the morality of hacking foreign civilian infrastructure? I appreciate that national security is important, but should a nation state be permitted to break into whatever it wants without consequence?

The readme mentions that the issue is reproducible in OSX and Windows which further supports your theory.