Astronaut endorses destroying the moon!
The best exchange on the IAmA:
Ghostshirts it’s been a dream for a long time now, do you think that we’ll actually be able to blow up the moon in our lifetime?
RonGaran I truly believe that we can accomplish anything we set our minds on. We only need the will to do it
recommendations on how Internet Service
Providers can use various remediation techniques to manage the
effects of malicious bot infestations on computers used by their
subscribers.
Detection and notification recommendations.
Is this really the right way to do this? Feels icky:
To programmatically add or modify system environment variables, add them to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment registry key, then broadcast a WM_SETTINGCHANGE message with lParam set to the string “Environment”.
Hmmm
“This rather embarrassing issue was pointed out to the committee, the fact that there were three votes too many, and that these three votes determined the outcome. When this was done, along with formally requesting a re-vote, that re-vote on the points in question was denied.”
By the URI RFC there is only one way to represent a particular IPv4 address in the host of a URI. This is the standard dotted decimal notation of four bytes in decimal with no leading zeroes delimited by periods. And no leading zeros are allowed which means there's only one textual representation of a particular IPv4 address.
However as discussed in the URI RFC, there are other forms of IPv4 addresses that although not officially allowed are generally accepted. Many implementations used inet_aton to parse the address from the URI which accepts more than just dotted decimal. Instead of dotted decimal, each dot delimited part can be in decimal, octal (if preceded by a '0') or hex (if preceded by '0x' or '0X'). And that's each section individually - they don't have to match. And there need not be 4 parts: there can be between 1 and 4 (inclusive). In case of less than 4, the last part in the string represents all of the left over bytes, not just one.
For example the following are all equivalent:
The bread and butter of URI related security issues is when one part of the system disagrees with another about the interpretation of the URI. So this non-standard, non-normal form syntax has been been a great source of security issues in the past. Its mostly well known now (CreateUri normalizes these non-normal forms to dotted decimal), but occasionally a good tool for bypassing naive URI blocking systems.
Set of issues run into by children using iPad apps. Should be generally appropriate though:
“Designing apps for children is extremely hard. Not only is quality, age-appropriate content hard to create, but designing the flow and interaction of these apps is made more difficult because designers must refrain from implementing advanced gestures, which would only confuse and frustrate kids (and, by extension, their parents). Yet all apps can and should adhere to certain basics. Hopefully, the four guidelines discussed here can become fixtures of all children’s apps.”
I can’t believe the dumb TED conference made me miss seeing prominent Ragnarok denier Eliott Kalan being sprayed by with seltzer by Jon Stewart.
Fictional plot summaries of TNG S8 episodes. Like:
BE EXCITED.Promo on IFC for the upcoming Comedy Bang Bang TV show!!!
I am excited Paul.
I say all of this to set up the fact that Beatrix has little idea of how traditional TV works and seeing her first real exposure to it was enlightening to say the least.
Elaborating on a previous brief post on the topic of Web Worker initialization race conditions, there's two important points to avoid a race condition when setting up a Worker:
For example the following has no race becaues the spec guarentees that messages posted to a worker during its first synchronous block of execution will be queued and handled after that block. So the worker gets a chance to setup its onmessage handler. No race:
'parent.js':
var worker = new Worker();
worker.postMessage("initialize");
'worker.js':
onmessage = function(e) {
// ...
}The following has a race because there's no guarentee that the parent's onmessage handler is setup before the worker executes postMessage. Race (violates 1):
'parent.js':
var worker = new Worker();
worker.onmessage = function(e) {
// ...
};
'worker.js':
postMessage("initialize");
The following has a race because the worker has no onmessage handler set in its first synchronous execution block and so the parent's postMessage may be sent before the worker sets its onmessage handler. Race (violates 2):
'parent.js':
var worker = new Worker();
worker.postMessage("initialize");
'worker.js':
setTimeout(
function() {
onmessage = function(e) {
// ...
}
},
0);
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
Awwww
“Staff writer J.O. Rolston’s Jan. 28 feature “Swing Set,” about swing revivalists Squirrel Nut Zippers, was mistakenly written in 2012. He meant to write it in 1997. The Onion regrets the error.”
I like Squirrel Nut Zippers…
“Two million-dollar projects, a major political speech involving Kickstarter, an amazing band launching a project for a comeback 20 years in the making… the list goes on. Here’s a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day’s events.”
“He’s either a bro or a hipster, he can’t be both. Because that’s not how stereotypes work.”
General Purpose Computing vs The World. Round 1 is copyright. What will be round 2?
FTA:
The MPAA is getting pretty desperate, it seems. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was out trying to defend censoring the internet this week by using China as an example of why censorship isn’t a problem. It’s kind of shocking, really.
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”
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