brassic

6 ms·

1.
by brassic 10y ago
You haven't addressed the actual point. Which was that we shouldn't need to think about whether any particular comic is or is not of interest to people carrying out surveillance.
2.
by brassic 10y ago
I don't know if some present or future government could be offended by people reading this comic but it shouldn't be a question we even need to ask. If you want to live in a world where surveillance is not the default then the ve
3.
by brassic 10y ago
To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com&#x2F
4.
by brassic 10y ago
This is basically national security letters with oversight. Which is part of the problem. When any of the major democracies introduces a law like this, it normalises it for the rest. Which then gives encouragement to the more oppressive
5.
by brassic 10y ago
Why not? The servers don't know what physical keys you are pressing.
6.
by brassic 10y ago
This is kind of what LINQ does. You write a query in C#. The structure of the query (like an abstract syntax tree) can be exposed to the query provider which can interpret it or compile it to the CLR or compile it to SQL or whatever.
7.
by brassic 10y ago
There was another case where the voter drew a penis next to the conservative candidate and it counted as a vote: http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/2015-05-08/angry-voter-...
8.
by brassic 10y ago
Not as painful as trying to correct it.
9.
by brassic 10y ago
An HSM consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret. A Yubikey consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to
10.
by brassic 10y ago
Seconded. In 18 months my RamNode VPS has had one unexpected reboot, but other than that it has been flawless.
11.
by brassic 10y ago
Of course, it is ultimately a piece of paper... But in every company I've worked for mail is signed for by whoever and, if it's addressed to an executive, delivered to a secretary who reads it and decides what to do it. Given the
12.
by brassic 10y ago
I bet you a jam sandwich that an NSL is not actually a letter sent in the regular post.
13.
by brassic 10y ago
The long forgotten irony in this meme is that cars used to be designed like this. There were no seat belts and the steering column was a rigid spear. It was practically designed to kill you. Historical evidence suggests that there would i
14.
by brassic 10y ago
This isn't theoretical, I've seen it with HTTP, HTML and elsewhere. Any time two pieces of software disagree on how to parse a chunk of data, especially if one of them is supposed to be doing some sort of security check, you shou
15.
by brassic 10y ago
And of course Kunstformen der Natur [1]. Even if Haeckel did cheat a bit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
16.
by brassic 10y ago
Water pipes often accumulate a layer of sediment at the bottom. Anything that stirs it up will cause brief discolouration of the water. Your pipes may be fine. (That said, I wouldn't drink the water right now.)
17.
by brassic 10y ago
You don't need a pause button on all the videos. You just need a single button that pauses all the videos. I would be delighted if the escape key on my laptop served this purpose. Of course, now you have no UI no restart a particular
18.
by brassic 10y ago
As Uber was quick to remind its drivers, the ruling merely covered the two drivers who went to the employment tribunal.
19.
by brassic 10y ago
Early RISC processors read data from memory 32 bits (4 bytes) at a time, and these reads had to be aligned on 4-byte boundaries. This was a feature of the memory architecture, not just the processor. Thus an aligned read of a 32-bit intege
20.
by brassic 10y ago
I have to use two passwords to login to Lloyds bank. One conventional password (which is presumably stored salted and hashed) and one where I have to enter characters from three positions they choose. The latter is intended to mitigate th
21.
by brassic 10y ago
I'm an ex-smoker and I had the same thought as I read the article: I wish I'd known this. But really, I know it wouldn't have made a difference. From an early age I was taught at school that smoking would kill me and I start
22.
by brassic 10y ago
They don't need a revolution. They need to stop voting for Erdogan.
23.
by brassic 10y ago
The law in the UK was changed a few years ago to permit this but it wasn't installed because of the cost. A quick search turned up [1] which reckons £300 million for installation and £800,000 per annum to maintain. Which seems a bit p
24.
by brassic 10y ago
When NTFS was first released Microsoft claimed it was so awesome it didn't need defragging. In later releases of Windows NT they added a defragger. By around the time of XP this was automatically scheduled to run in the background. t
25.
by brassic 10y ago
You don't need a failure for compressed air to be dangerous. The air itself can damage you in all kinds of ways: http://www.aircontrolindustries.com/dangers-of-compressed-ai...
26.
by brassic 10y ago
A road atlas would have been much cheaper and you would have been able to buy one at any gas station without wasting an hour.
27.
by brassic 10y ago
Here in Britain we have compulsory registers of births, deaths and marriages and anyone can query them. You don't get a number or ID card but the data is collected. It doesn't seem especially different to the continental systems.
28.
by brassic 10y ago
> Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless. Absolutely. I've been practising this for more than 20 years. When the NT 4.0 Option Pack came out in 1998 I was delighted because it gave me
29.
by brassic 10y ago
> 1MB can hold 500 pages of text; 1GB can hold 50,000 pages You lost a factor of ten. 500 times 1000 is 500,000 so 1GB can hold 500,000 pages. 1TB can hold 500 million.
30.
by brassic 10y ago
Are you in the UK? We're installing "smart" gas and electricity meters, which use 2G, but industry analysts are predicting the cessation of 2G here by 2020. Awesome!

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