●Stories
●Firehose
●All
●Popular
●Polls
●Software
●Thought Leadership
Submit
●
Login
●or
●
Sign up
●Topics:
●Devices
●Build
●Entertainment
●Technology
●Open Source
●Science
●YRO
●Follow us:
●RSS
●Facebook
●LinkedIn
●Twitter
●
Youtube
●
Mastodon
●Bluesky
Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive
Forgot your password?
Close
wnewsdaystalestupid
sightfulinterestingmaybe
cflamebaittrollredundantoverrated
vefunnyunderrated
podupeerror
×
78866957
comment
byanagama
5, 2015 @05:25PM
(#51004913)
Attached to: Will You Be Able To Run a Modern Desktop Environment In 2016 Without Systemd?
This lets the desktop environments have more advanced features then they would with init systems that don't do this delegation.
First, is it the regular user account or the DE itself which essentially gets its privileges escalated? Either way, that sounds inherently dangerous -- if you want the DE to be all powerfull, just login as root (there are good reasons not to login as root of course, but if systemD is doing it for you anyway, why even bother with the distinction between root and user accounts).
74745279
comment
byanagama
@04:22PM
(#50178031)
Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Building an Open Source Community For a Proprietary Software Product?
Exactly right.
The incentive for people to contribute to a closed source project isn't all that much. Remember that open source isn't a gift by your company to the public, it is an offer of trade -- you let the public have the source, the public provides you with feedback (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) and gets its suggestions provided back to it. It's a circle.
What you are suggesting sounds like you want the benefit of that deal, while negating the benefit for those who are doing work for you. Psychologically, it's a hard sell to say to someone -- "mow my lawn for me and I'll sell you a lemonade afterward at full price --- um yeah, I'd also sell you the lemonade at full price if you don't mow my lawn." You aren't going to get many takers for that deal, and the ones who do take it will have questionable motives (scoping out the property) or will just be naive and gullible (not a great foundation to build upon).
74744785
comment
byanagama
@03:57PM
(#50177839)
Attached to: Criminal Inquiry Sought Over Hillary Clinton's Personal Email Server
The statute the sent Oliver North to prison might apply here. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Paragraph b, aside from other punishments, bars a person from holding public office.
The way I see it, the emails were filed with a public officer of the united states as required by par. a (HRC was a public officer so the emails sent/received were filed with her personally) and by deleting the emails, they were certainly "mutilated, obliterated, or destroyed". If deleting emails filed with the SOS is illegal, then that's good for 3 years in the pokey.
Next, under par. b, it is clear that HRC had custody of the records and again, destroyed them. If she is found guilty of par. b, she simply can't be president -- she couldn't be dog catcher. She'd be fully and finally retired.
74744469
comment
byanagama
@03:43PM
(#50177713)
Attached to: Criminal Inquiry Sought Over Hillary Clinton's Personal Email Server
The Rethuglikans are freaking out about Hillary. Absolutely losing their shit in a big way.
Let's be clear hear. HRC is a warmongering neo-con wallstreet cocksucker on the Democrat team. Some warmongering neo-con wallstreet cocksuckers on the Republican team hate her because she is on the other team.
I hate them all because they are war mongering neo-con wallstreet cocksuckers. I don't give a fuck about what team they're on -- I care about what they stand for.
74674655
comment
byanagama
015 @10:21AM
(#50160699)
Attached to: Police Not Issuing Charges For Handgun-Firing Drone -- Feds Undecided
This is marked funny, but the US Supreme Court recently affirmed that the joke is true.
http://thinkprogress.org/justi...
74674639
comment
byanagama
015 @10:20AM
(#50160683)
Attached to: Police Not Issuing Charges For Handgun-Firing Drone -- Feds Undecided
Ignorance of the law is not and has never been an excuse.
This is a legal principle that literally goes back to Greek antiquity.
How Heller-ishly convenient. There are so many criminal laws on the books, it is impossible to know them all (ask the ABA, they tried to simply count them, which is much less than _knowing_ them, and failed: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... ). And yet an individual person without ranks of lawyers to do the research, is presumed to know each and every one. This is extremely dangerous because it gives those in power the ability to lock up anyone they don't like, which means that an individual's freedom and liberty -- core American values right? -- are subject to the whim of any dickweed with a little power.
74261725
comment
byanagama
5 @03:20PM
(#50065011)
Attached to: How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives
Glad I'm not the only one who was annoyed. And why remove the "read more" link in the first place? They already have a "share" button to the left, and tags to the right. It would take no space to leave it.
74261589
comment
byanagama
5 @03:14PM
(#50064985)
Attached to: How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives
see if she'll switch to something like this:
https://www.openmailbox.org/
The webmail client is very clean and to the point. Pretty sure there are no ads too, but it's been a while since I used it.
74258825
comment
byanagama
5 @12:34PM
(#50063997)
Attached to: How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives
For someone using computers a lot, they're probably going to figure it out.
For someone not using computers a lot, and who have managed to do things by remembering exactly what to click - this is enormously fragile.
Even for people who do use computers a lot. I recently got a new macbook pro with Yosemite on it. I've been sticking with Snow Leopard because it seems so much better, but now that isn't an option. Yesterday I touched the touchpad in some way that made the computer go into some sort of mode in which I couldn't interact with any of the windows. I tried escape, random touchpad stuff, some other things. I'm embarrassed to say that I finally just resorted to a hard shutdown and reboot. There is apparently some cryptic touchpad sequence that will put the computer into useless mode, and a cryptic sequence required to get out of useless mode (and for what -- the view was just like normal view except for a darkened 1/4" frame around the whole screen -- it wasn't expose or full desktop -- I have no idea WTF it was for, normal view without the ability to interact with anything at all, not even force quit menu). Yosemite makes me seriously consider just putting Debian on that computer.
74232611
comment
byanagama
@03:57PM
(#50057729)
Attached to: "We Screwed Up," Says Reddit CEO In Formal Apology
Reddit may well find its users going elsewhere if someone else manages to build something that they find familiar without all of the current baggage.
I haven't tried it yet, but this looks interesting: http://getaether.net/
Aether is a free app that you use to read, write in, and create community moderated, distributed, and anonymous forums, an "anonymous reddit without servers."
74229373
comment
byanagama
@01:05PM
(#50056041)
Attached to: Proposed Regulation Could Keep 3D-printed Gun Blueprints Offline For Good
So we can just add the 1st amendment to the pile, you know, that pile of constitutional directives the government adheres to so much, like the 4th and 5th amendments, congressional responsibility for declaring wars, and likely others things I'm not aware of too. Essentially, anything that stands in the way of ever expanding executive power, corporate welfare, or wall street bailouts is just ignored. Instead, the NSA must monitor us and the police must practice military tactics, not because of terrorism, but because those mega-money interests pulling the puppet strings don't want to face any dangers.
That constitution is so quaint -- it makes a great wall hanging.
73764465
comment
byanagama
15 @11:53AM
(#49937647)
Attached to: LibreOffice Now Available On Apple's Mac App Store
Thanks for the memories -- it's been a long long time since I've seen that troll.
Here's the earliest version I could find with a zero effort search: http://kottke.org/98/11/my-mac... Maybe there is an earlier one?
73733431
comment
byanagama
015 @11:43AM
(#49930099)
Attached to: USAF Cuts Drone Flights As Stress Drives Off Operators
Perhaps what happens is that people in the Chair Force eventually realize that nobody has any idea if they are killing bad guys.
He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd"s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. ... As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.
http://www.gq.com/news-politic...
In one episode that will fuel controversy about allegations of civilian casualties, he described monitoring a drone strike on a mud compound in Afghanistan and seeing the figure of what he was certain was a child just before it was struck by a Hellfire missile.
When he expressed those concerns to an intelligence observer overseeing the operation, the response came back: "Per the review, it's a dog." Bryant replayed the shot repeatedly on tape and said that he was certain it was a child, not a dog.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Note -- it seems PTSD can arise from being a drone pilot, but also note, I have absolutely zero sympathy for the drone pilots. It's an incredibly small bit of karma for the horrific acts they've performed and is the least they deserve, and worse, probably most will never even get that.
73732959
comment
byanagama
015 @11:19AM
(#49929947)
Attached to: Should Edward Snowden Trust Apple To Do the Right Thing?
The part that concerns me is that it appears for some data Apple does not have the key and has no access even if it has possession of the data. For other data it does have the key and can thus decrypt the data. The first instance is secure and protects user privacy (given a good passphrase), the second is barely secure and subjects user data to the Third Party Doctrine -- this gives the government the ability to grab it whenever it wants to. If this is so, it will confuse unsophisticated users who think encryption _is_ information security, which is true in only certain circumstances, and not true if a third party can decrypt the data.
73716143
comment
byanagama
015 @12:21AM
(#49927035)
Attached to: Should Edward Snowden Trust Apple To Do the Right Thing?
the juxtaposition of the first and second sentence, the first saying how great the encryption is, the second implying that the backups aren't encrypted by the fact you can disable it if you want to -- it implies a lesser level of security by its silence on whether the data is only available to the user. But more to the point, the iCloud section states pretty clearly that Apple can access the data:
All your iCloud content is encrypted in transit and, in most cases, when stored (see below). If we use third-party vendors to store your data, we encrypt it and never give them the keys. Apple retains the encryption keys in our own data centers, so you can back up, sync, and share your iCloud data.
« Newer
Older »
Slashdot Top Deals
●obamaisaneocon@nothingchanged.org
http://nothingchanged.org/
●
Got a Score:5 Comment
●
Years Read
●
Days Metamoderated in a Row
●
Re:Duh
●
Re:Translation
(Score:2)
●
Re:Likely misdemeanor mishandling of classified in
●
Re:Likely misdemeanor mishandling of classified in
●
Re:Investigating if laws were broken
(Score:2)
●
dtmos
●
SumDog
●
anonymous_echidna
●
MechaStreisand
●
smooth wombat
●
slashdot (submissions)
●
interesting (submissions)
●
fresh (submissions)
●
feds (submissions)
●
anonymous (submissions)
●
More Evidence the NSA is Harming American's Economy
●
WA Post Publishes Four More Slides on Data Collection from Google et al.
●
NSA Surveillance Heat Map -- NSA Lied to Congress
●
Anonymous Hacks Federal Sentencing Commission website -- Posts Video
●
Exelon Nuclear Power Near Chicago on Emergency Bac
Slashdot
●
Submit Story
BYTE editors are people who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then
carefully print the chaff.
●FAQ
●Story Archive
●Hall of Fame
●Advertising
●Terms
●Privacy Statement
●About
●Feedback
●Mobile View
●Blog
Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
Copyright © 2026 Slashdot Media. All Rights Reserved.
×
Close
Working...
Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
Copyright © 2026 Slashdot Media. All Rights Reserved.
×
Close
Working...