No relation to the sports channel.
In today’s example of a garden path sentence …
https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign
Here’s the actual security advisory, which contains much more information than the fluff article about it.
They should take down their shorts.
Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.
Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.
There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.
People pay for this?
Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.
Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.
First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.
Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.
Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.
This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.
Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?
Those were not very good.
If your input is limited to ASCII, sure.
But ASCII is only a 7-bit standard, and only supports those characters needed by American English computer users in the 1960s. Lots of characters you might see in “plain text” are not part of ASCII; including all accented characters, all non-Latin alphabets, and many common symbols and punctuation marks including these: £€¢©™°
(Yes, you could get accented characters in the pre-Unicode days using 8-bit “extended ASCII”, e.g. IBM/Windows code pages. However, those are not really ASCII and they will break if the text is interpreted as the wrong code page.)
Unicode collation is the Right Thing today.
This has been going on for over 25 years now.
The kind of people who go into business building censorship software turn out to quite often be the kind of people who think feminism is a hate group, atheism is a cult, birth control is a dangerous drug, evolutionary biology is political extremism, and therapists are child-molesters. As such, it is unsurprising that this software’s behavior has quite often reflected those views.
I’m confused. To me, “building a tree” and “parsing” are the same thing. If you end up with a tree representation of the structure of your document, the thing you did to get there is parsing.
“one who pays too much for speaker cables”
A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.
Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.
You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.
If you allow comments at all, you are gonna get spam. That spam will range from “please buy good vitamins from my holy web site” to horribly illegal eye-destroying things.
I’m sure you would have done great in the Roman Empire!
Recognize that a lot of what you’re suffering from is, well, suffering; that it’s part of the human condition and not really specific to one historical epoch, country, or economic system. Sickness, poverty, cruelty, envy, selfishness, domination, and other woes have been with us for much longer than economic or political modernity.
People have been investigating how to alleviate suffering — in the general sense — for a very long time. There are whole philosophical and social movements about it, which have proposed strategies such as —
Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.
Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that’s much easier on the programmer.
And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.
If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.