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Not sure what those are if not "web trackers".

The two first aren't things normal people associate with tracking, only us tin-foil hats - it's very likely that Bott hasn't considered how these can be are used.

Never heard of #3 - might be some legitimate reason for it, but it definitely does sound like something that can track.

Outside the rather brilliant sarcasm, I'm pretty sure that was f0dder's point. I've seen tons of different companies that use Yahoo Messenger for *FacePalm* "Internal Messaging"..

Indeed.

Anyway, sarcasm aside, I'm honestly not sure what to think of the URL-scanning. As mentioned above, it doesn't really matter in the face of Patriot Act, and the TOS that states they record your messages for 30-90 days (or whatever). And there's plenty of valid reasons for helping John & Jane Doe (the main demographic of Skype & MSN, I'd guess?) against malware - and HTTP HEAD is pretty harmless (dunno how it helps identify malware spreading sites, but ho humm).

Oh well, I guess this was a wake-up call for some. It's not like there wasn't wiretap abilities in Skype before MS bought it, at least now it's sorta kinda semi-official.

[REALLY]

According to ZDNet, only HTTP HEAD requests are sent (i.e., the page itself isn't actually fetched, only meta-information is returned) - and you'd have to be dealing with a REALLY retarded site to trigger any actions (but OK, there's plenty of sites retarded enough to trigger non-idempotent actions even on GET).

There's also this piece in the article:

Update: And contrary to heise Security's assertion, I found many examples of plain HTTP links that had been scanned by SmartScreen.

So, that leads me to another quote:

You can put that tinfoil hat away, at least for now.

Anyway, you obviously aren't discussing anything sensitive using a proprietary IM protocol, just like you don't discuss those things over facebook, plaintext email, and anything non-HTTPS... right? Oh, and this whole thing is pretty much a non-issue anyway, considering you've agreed to the TOS which means your messages are stored for some random period of time on Skype's servers. Not that even the TOS would matter, patriot act and all.

f0dder can you elaborate -- that sounds like a reasonable statement to me -- though i am an admitted newbie when it comes to hardware.

Platter data density.

What will deliver the highest throughput - "something" at 7200rpm, or twice the data density at 5400rpm?

I stopped reading the article at

With hard drives, the faster the spindle speed, the faster the drive. The amount of cache also comes into play, but by and large, a 10,000-rpm drive is faster than a 7200-rpm drive, which is in turn faster than 5400-rpm and 4800-rpm drives. That’s an easy and intuitive metric for comparison shopping.

..if they get something as simple as that wrong, I don't want to waste my time reading the rest.

[tslim]

tslim: supporting >4gig memory on 32bit XP is, at best, a terrible hack, and it's not something SoftPerfect even attempts. Move to a 64bit OS

I was able to resuscitate OpenOffice,

Don't bother next time. Just go with Libre and allow 'Open' to be put out of its misery once and for all.

Oh, I'm using Libre these days (and think it's pretty much as shitty as Open, but even though it doesn't run as well as old MSOffice versions, at least it's gratis). It's just that I was able to resuscitate OOo, not Libre. And only once or twice, anyway.

I'm leaving the exploring of what is at this link to you bold, dashing adventurers here.  Caveat emptor (Let the buyer(downloader) beware!)

Ahem, what's the legal status of that leaked ISO?

For what it's worth: this also happens to me with ClipX, and has happened in both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I've only had it happen in calc, and I haven't found out how to reproduce it - happens rarely enough that I haven't bothered /actively/ trying to reproduce, and it happens under different conditions (both when dealing with text-only cells as well as formula cells).

Once, I was able to resuscitate OpenOffice, but that was blind luck and I haven't been able to repeat that - involved the window system menu (upper left corner), and attempting a bunch of restore/maximize/move operations. Also, FWIW, ClipX seems to keep on trucking when OOo/LO locks up.

How long do you think before someone produces copies with the activation and online check code stripped out or the activation period updated to 1000 years?

That will work for now... but I expect them to begin moving more and more computations to the cloud within long. Just like there's big players trying to push internet-streamed gaming... it's a big wet dream not only to stop piracy, but perpetually berapereave sheepcustomers of cash on a monthly basis.

This is how it begins...

Just for the record, I don't believe you have malicious intents - a tool like this really wouldn't make much sense for malicious use. It would of course limit your system's resilience against malware quite a bit.

And while I don't believe there's any malicious intent, I still think it's misguided, though. But that's probably because I never really run into really vexing permission problems. I can think of perhaps three occasions over the last few years...

1) dealing with NTFS USB drive with user accounts made on another machine (and obviously in a non-domain setup).
2) doing some serious customization of Windows install images - removing and adding drivers.
3) fixing up a running Windows because I had messed up the install image too much.

Apart from that, I can't really recall any permission related problems. But I'm the kind of guy that really doesn't mind UAC popups, anyway.

The semi-official story was that

...I wonder if the EU settlement and the N editions of Windows doesn't have something to do with it?

Not much need to elaborate. Windows 8 dropped the ability to play such media out of the box. Saved themselves a whole $2 license fee per copy of Windows by taking that capability out.

Probably a bit more than $2 - anti-competitive lawsuits are costly.

Who uses Windows Media Player anyway, when there's MPC-HC and VLC?

The free VLC media player running under Win8 still works for most optical media disks (except encrypted Blue-Ray) although I wonder how much longer that will remain true. Microsoft is an avid supporter of DRM and patents and all things IP. If somebody in the industry seriously squawks about VLC, you can expect Microsoft will do something to prevent apps like that from working under Win8.

I kinda doubt they have the balls to do that, especially since there's already nice and cheap alternatives that make using pirated content so much easier than attempting to be honest and struggling with getting DRM'ed crap playing.

Your weekend cheer: Russian dashcams capture human kindness

More of that, please.

Tiny glimpse of hope.

[Curt]

Curt: it's because you haven't dealt with well-seeded torrents - and, perhaps, because you haven't had proper port-forwarding (which shouldn't matter with well-seeded stuff, but will hurt you badly with scarce and/or pirated stuff).

The protocol itself has several advantages to http/ftp... first, it's distributed - so you can saturate N links instead of 1. It has chunk-sized error detection and correction - with HTTP and FTP, you wont detect corruption unless you do an md5sum after downloading, and it's corrupt you'll have to regrab everything. With torrents, everything is broken into chunks (size can vary, but iirc chunksize is usually around 512kb).

Also, both HTTP and FTP *sucks* for small files - you need a new request for each file. For FTP it's really bad, for HTTP at least pipelining and keepalive mitigates stuff a bit... for torrents, you just keep on streaming (in a way that's not optimal for grabbing individual small files, but extremely superior for grabbing a wad of stuff).

Legitimate stuff has often sucked on torrents, though - a few years ago, I could grab linux ISOs a lot faster through HTTP than their torrent services - I guess they simply didn't hook up the entire http server bandwidth to their torrent protocol, which is pretty damn silly... after getting ~100kb/s (from random peers) for a few minutes, I'd cancel the download and hammer their HTTP servers directly at 4MB/s.

Btw, if you spend any time on linux (ubuntu), you may have realized the freetype rendering is superior to cleartype anyway.

That surprises me a bit - at least a while ago, FreeType didn't include sophisticated TTF hinting because of patents... but perhaps they've been able to work around that, or by using another font format, or something?

I've never been much of a fan of font anti-aliasing anyway, neither on Windows, Linux nor OS X - looks too smudgy for me, both on CRTs and TFTs.

Interesting idea to add the warning stuff - the ads served are definitely distasteful.

BestCrypt is (or at least used to be, haven't checked it in ages) a decent product.

But with TrueCrypt around, I honestly don't see the raison d'être for BC.

[flies]

My problem with LibreOffice is how resource intensive it is (and OpenOffice before it).

Open with a 3-sheet spreadsheet open, LibreOffice is using 128k of memory on my openSUSE Linux machine. I don't know what it would do on a Windows machine, which I assume you're using?

I seriously doubt you're looking at the correct memory stats. It's around 31 megs for LibreOffice calc on my Mint install, just-launched with three empty sheets.

Besides, it's not just about memory usage, the suite is a major CPU pig. It's slightly sluggish even on my i7-3770 with 16 gigs of ram - but try using it on a pmmx-200 with 64 megabytes. Office2000 on that hardware flies.

Presuming we're talking Windows ACLs: why on earth would you want something like that on a live system?

For the legitimate scenarios I can think of, you'd be better of with an exFAT partition or booting to Linux to salvage data...

[away]

So the -B option is buffer size, given in bytes? Then it sorta makes sense.

I wonder why they moved away from mmap.

[no]

I've got no idea whether a "controller swap would work" - it depends on where the drive's mapping tables are stored, and a lot of SSDs these days (at least claim to) have AES encryption - where's the encryption key stored? And finally, on top of that, I've got a feeling that the prints aren't built in a modular way that makes any kind of swapping possible unless you've got lab-grade equipment.

Just a few minutes, let me open up my failed Intel X25-E and grab a couple of snaps for y'all.

EDIT: here - does that look like something you can fix yourself?

[attachthumb=1][attachthumb=2]

This would be cool if one could somehow use an intermediary FTP server, to serve as the "middleman".

So it would be USER>FTP>USER<FTP<USER

You would get the benefits of private file sharing, with the added bonus of HTTP download speeds xD

Ummm... wat? O_o

The torrent protocol is superior to both HTTP and FTP in quite a lot of ways, including resume-ability and encryption (neither HTTPS, FTPS (foo! please die!) nor SFTP would work very well for peer-to-peer scenarios) and speed. And I can't see why having such a middle man would fix the residential upload bandwidth issue anyway? You'd still need to push your data there?

that is a pretty magic B option.

Yeah, that does look pretty incomprehensible O_o