Topics

26

Developer's Corner / More General Ludum Dare fun

« on: November 20, 2014, 09:31 PM »

Thread for more general Ludum Dare adventures.

A few fellas have asked about my LD enthusiasm. I like to say it's like 20 parallel universe copies of the 1980's! (Because the 2-3 day time limit counters the older hardware of the times.) Plus, they feel like there is no stress - enjoy, or not, the games as they are - they're not part of the Memes of the Times. No one cares that I got a four miner win in Undermined.

And they feel accessible. I don't have the concentration to mount a 300 hour campaign against a lot of A-list titles. So I can float around these, even "nostaligically" play a few that look like 1983 all over again, and four to seven hours later, go on with my life.

Here is some basic info about the full series of LD. (Heavily edited from the site.)
#0    Apr 2002    Indirect Interaction (Beta (24h))    
#1    Jul 2002    Guardian    
#2    Nov 2002    Construction/Destruction (Minor: Sheep)    
#3    Apr 2003    Preparation – Set it up, let it go    
#4    Apr 2004    Infection
#5    Oct 2004    Random    
#6    Apr 2005    Light and Darkness    
#7    Dec 2005    Growth    
#8    Apr 2006    Swarms    
#8.5 Jan 2007    Moon / Anti-text (24h)    
#9    Apr 2007    Build The Level You Play    
#10    Dec 2007    Chain Reaction    
#10.5 Feb 2008    Weird / Unexpected / Surprise    
#11    Apr 2008    Minimalist    
#12    Aug 2008    The Tower    
#13    Dec 2008    Roads    
#14    Apr 2009    Advancing Wall of Doom    
#15    Aug 2009    Caverns    
#16    Dec 2009    Exploration    
#17    Apr 2010    Islands
#18    Aug 2010    Enemies as Weapons
#19    Dec 2010    Discovery    
#20    Apr 2011    It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!
#21    Aug 2011    Escape    
#22    Dec 2011    Alone    
#23    Apr 2012    Tiny World    
#24    Aug 2012    Evolution    
#25    Dec 2012    You are the Villain
#26    Apr 2013    Minimalism
#27    Aug 2013    10 Seconds
#28    Dec 2013    You Only Get One    



Meanwhile, the site guy is changing his layout. I have to look at it more to figure it out.

27

Living Room / Of Superheroes, Remakes, Flashbacks/Forwards/Sideways and more

« on: November 20, 2014, 09:58 AM »

In the realm of literature, superheroes occupy a funny place.

Except for your choice of X older precursors, the modern superhero genre is a 20th century phenomenon.

(Tangent: It's one reason I thought Warehouse 13 was brilliant in concept, because the people mostly stayed people, and it's the objects that wandered around and did strange (and usually dangerous) stuff. )

So a lot of superhero concepts are based on really simple concepts.

For the next day or two, I am comparing the original 1990 Flash TV series with the brand new remake. (We'll see if the new one lasts ... the old one got canceled after one season! I haven't yet looked up the reason why. Was it semi ahead of its time? Are we more attuned to superhero shows now?)

The people concepts tend to be pretty simple. Flash. Fast Man.  The fastest man alive. (Almost? "Oh look, it's someone faster than you are!")  End of power.

It's the surroundings that move. The 1990's series was based on the days when police were losing the battles vs gangs. The new one clearly has the police in control of gangs, and went straight for the super-villain angle. Gangs are a thing of the past, sorta. Now there's hints that the police are too strong, and dipping a bit into Orwell's Big Brother. How times have changed!!

And the Flash show is supposed to feature a crime-solving-partner with cutting edge tech ... trouble is, that's just really hard to portray even for good writers with decent scripts. You just have the context of the times. So the 1990's show had all these DOS boxes around, (with a few Hollywood blips and beeps!). The new one has more hi-res display stuff.

28

General Software Discussion / Multi Process Support comes to Firefox Nightly

« on: November 12, 2014, 05:27 AM »

Okay, this is why DC rocks!

You tech geniuses get to help the rest of us understand "the news behind the news".

More Firefox this time! (Making it hard for me to boycott them!)

"Multi-Process Support comes to Firefox Nightly"

Birdy see new feature, Birdy download new feature.

Slashdot's copy:
http://news.slashdot...fox-for-windows-soon

Venturebeat story
http://venturebeat.c...ox-for-windows-soon/

So what exactly is multi-process support? It sounds vaguely performance-enhancing. But I suppose the biggest nuisance I face is when Adobe Flash Plugin crashes, and then all 22 tabs across 5 browser windows need to be reloaded.

They say it took a huge long time, and some weren't sure it would ever land in a build. So What could this new feature do that's really useful?

29

General Software Discussion / Loaders vs "original software" - tips, tales, and troubles

« on: November 11, 2014, 06:40 PM »

Mostly because I am senile, I can't merge a prior thread I posted a good ways back. Mouser(Minor Deity) asked for some stuff to work with.

I had remarked that some of the worst were beginning to look like "games" to "remove the junkware".

See below.

30

General Software Discussion / Firefox begins its mass rollout of ads on new tab tiles

« on: November 10, 2014, 11:50 PM »

Okay, Firefox just stabbed themselves in the foot with a fork again. (Less dangerous than shooting it! And if you keep stabbing it enough, it raises the bottom line! ... Uh... by treating the (slightly smarter than IE) userbase as ... idiots?!)

Now they have decided, after testing in the test channels, to roll out ad tiles in Firefox.

Fine, there's plenty of ads everywhere else, and we go through the big discussion of adblock vs whitelisting a very few sites.

But ads in the browser proper?! That just feels wrong on so many levels! That's just smelling like giving the FF mod editions a lead in the race. The first few Slashdot comments are up, and so far they're "restrained". (I used the new Firefox Forget button, and I now forget ... didn't Firefox lose their big Google revenue stream contract? So, did they hit a cash crunch that the CFO decided to fix with ads in the browser?) But more importantly, I'd half expect the other Big Companies to do this, but Mozilla?! They were (once?) "the cool kids". So how can they not know that some corners of their base won't be so ... restrained?!

So for y'all on Palemoon, I so hope they use this to further promote themselves.

Iceweasel came up, which is also a good option at least for Linux. Is there a Windows version of Iceweasel? I ignored long running performance problems because the rule is "assume incompetence before malice" ... but now they just added malice! That's enough to make me boycot them, and just use the derivative mod editions out there. So, besides a guess at iceweasel for Win, P-M I have, is there a third such mod edition out there so I can go back to my 3-copy set usage style I just started working on today?

31

General Software Discussion / Firefox Developer Edition

« on: November 10, 2014, 04:36 PM »

Anyone had a chance to use this "for real" yet?

I just got a copy just to see what it's like, though I'm massively unqualified to use the actual tools!

However, it DOES change the UI - Aurora is gone!


It's back to some kind of one of the older square layouts, and yes, all the menus are back on top where they belong - none of this "let's hide everything under one button" junk!

I did have to put back in Classic Theme Restorer to fix some minor prefs of mine.
- Menu, Nav Toolbar, Tabs, in that order.
- I like the full quad of back, forward, stop, and reload buttons in that order on the left side. (Their original reload button is jammed way on the right of the address bar and I can't easily get rid of it, so I might have two reload buttons now. Who cares, that's nothing.)
- View/Toolbars/Customize is stripped pretty badly in the native version of most new Firefoxes, so CTR adds back a bunch of stuff you might have used. That's where I got those other buttons from - they weren't there to begin with in Customize.
- At some point a "Forget" button showed up in Customize, and I think it's from CTR, which should be interesting to try. For ex, when I get done with a LD marathon and I have 8 browser windows and 9 tabs each, my particular comp seems to make a big deal out of closing tabs ... it lags pretty badly for obscure reasons. So sometimes I go to Win Task Mgr, and just nuke the process... but on the days I was viewing 25 Youtube clips, sometimes the browser tries to "remember it all" and load them all back in at once. So "Forget" could be neat just to nuke all that stuff away, and then go back to more Ludum games er... real work!

- The usual tiny tweaks such as colors and spacing that CTR is known for.

So I always like to have "multi clones" of Firefox, it's actually a different process, so when I've got 25 Youtube clips open and Flash crashes, and I want to restart, at least I won't lose other open things such as email.

Edit:
Now that I have a "third" clone of FF, I might even make it Email-Only, whereupon it leaves me two clones to "do rec things with", and then email can be sitting on another tab in my virtual desktop splitter, and still be open even if I close the other two. I'll think about that.

Edit:
Looks like the Forget button was a new feature only just rolled out in "reg FF 33", but Dev Edition seems to be 35.0a2 from the Aurora channel.

32

Living Room / Thoughts on the tech on the TV show Scorpion?

« on: October 29, 2014, 07:25 PM »

So, another show has appeared about tech geniuses. For this thread, I'm skipping the controversy that Walter O'Brien is hyping himself, or casting problems, or plot cliches, etc.

I figured I'd ask y'all about the tech shown on the show.

Even to lil' ol' me, two categories stand out.

1. Ludicrous situations
In the pilot, supposedly the only way they could get some key software from point A to B was to fly a plane 8 feet above the ground and attach a cable!

2. Making things too hard for themselves
In another later episode ("Cyclone"?), there was supposedly some super incriminating file, and after a bomber blew up a backbone cable, they made it into a long term storage facility and downloaded a copy onto a flash drive and gave it to the govt handler agent ... who got mugged, and somewhere in the mess the flash drive was destroyed.

Uh ... *one* copy of this super-top file? Why didn't they make like seven copies, stash two of them in secret locations buried in the dirt, upload another copy into the darknet in the cloud, and more?

I'll let y'all come up with a third category if y'all think of one.

I do say it has to be a bit tough on writers to write for characters with a combined IQ of 700... I don't mind if they miss little details, but it's the glaring ones that annoy me just a little.

Thoughts?

33

DC Gamer Club / A different type of game! "Time Machine notes"!

« on: September 25, 2014, 12:33 PM »

I know this is stretching what we think this tab does, but I think I can squeeze it in!

See this xkcd:
http://www.xkcd.com/1421/
"Future Self"
Transcript (From Explain xkcd)

"    [Cueball is sitting at a laptop, reading code. The two separate parts of code as well as the two comments by Cueball is connected with "speak" lines, with the line from the code going down to the computer screen.]

    # Dear Future Self,
    #
    # You're looking at this file because
    # the parse function finally broke.
    #
    # It's not fixable. You have to rewrite it.
    # Sincerely, Past Self

    Cueball: Dear Past Self, it's kinda creepy how you do that.

    # Also, it's probably at least
    # 2013. Did you ever take
    # that trip to Iceland?

    Cueball: Stop judging me! "

-------------------------------------------------------------
The game:
Who has some useful but longish-term advice they might forget, but want to remember later?
We can write a note to ourselves and use the cute phrasing "Dear Future Self: _________". Maybe date it, and stick it in a folder called "Time Machine".

Then at some much later point we can trade notes on how things all shook out!

34

General Software Discussion / Dual Boot questions

« on: August 07, 2014, 02:48 PM »

A "long time ago" (in the comp-sci world) I had a buddy build a decent grade project computer we nicknamed "twilight", (not the TV show!!), designed to outlast XP and get info on wherever the state of Microsoft is at a bunch of years ahead.

(Update: We saw what should have been "awesome Longhorn" descend into the desperate Vista, then Win 7 wasn't bad, then the Win8 and 8.1 messes... so here we are.)

The "end of its mission" (heh, watching too much Star Trek Enterprise lately!) will be when Win 9 comes out. If all of our careful planning and a little luck holds out, my box might actually be able to handle it. Not counting raw core min specs, and I might need one more ram chip, the system has dual Terabyte hard drives.

So I plan to stick Win 9 (which if my ailing memory serves, is coming up semi soon now) on the second drive and get a techie to make a dual boot.

Supposing I get lucky and it works, will all my old apps still load? Last I knew they were all tied to C/Program Files/whatever. To me it shouldn't matter that the new system is on D Drive and new apps end up in D/Program files/whatever. Then little by little when I am bored I can just update versions at the same time I switch them over, etc etc.

Are my instincts right?

I don't really wanna run two whole new comps side by side and begin comparing stuff, plus except that HD problem we were talking about in another thread (fresh new HD, remember?), it would just make 2014-me smile that 2006-me got it right!      : )

35

Living Room / Groundhog Day Loops

« on: May 14, 2014, 12:53 PM »

Just a little thread asking if people know of any other "Groundhog Day Time Loop" TV/Movie episodes. (For pedantic completeness, Groundhog Day with Bill Murray featured a man who lived the same day over and over until he achieved the mysteriously driven required personal growth to snap out of it.)

The other ones I know of so far are:
Star Trek Next Generation Season 5 Episode 18 (sometimes written as Se05 Ep18) Cause and Effect
Eureka I Do Over Season 3 Episode 4 (Se03 Ep04)
The entire series of Daybreak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Break
The entire series of Seven Days: (But he only gets one shot at it)
http://en.wikipedia....Days_%28TV_series%29

Different but an Also Ran for interest is the Star Trek Next Generation finale All Good Things but that's more of a multi shift than a true loop.

Same goes for Warehouse 13 Season 6 Episode 1 (Se06 Ep01) Endless Terror. That one is about alternate realities via time travel which is not my focus here. I'm looking for where the character is in his own same loop and eventually realizes it. Also similar but slower is of course the famous Star Trek Original Series Season 1 Episode 28 (Se01 Ep28) The City on the Edge of Forever. (And many more.)

(Quick Edit: There seems to be a Wiki page!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_loop
(And a TV Tropes page!)
http://tvtropes.org/.../Main/StableTimeLoop

And so I think I am looking for examples that are not on those two pages. Also I think I want to focus on ones that are single episode long and multi loops featuring multiple restarts etc.
(This post has been brought to you by Crabby, who has now canonically documented my 12 minute obsessions that turn into 500 word posts that I only care about for a week!)

36

General Software Discussion / Firefox with multiple rows of tabs!?

« on: May 05, 2014, 09:03 PM »

When I poke around/research, I start wherever, then spawn "child pages" into the new tabs. But I have a limited capacity for dealing with the holistic flow after about seven tabs or so, especially because half way through I start with a new "top node page".

I'm not so worried about every last pixel of vertical space - so it would be an amusing addon that you can have multiple rows of tabs so if your have say five main topics going on, each topic gets its own line and then you intuitively know all the spawned tabs belong to that top node. (Maybe a couple misc junk lines you don't care about at the bottom.)

The best I can do so far is use my desktop splitter, then multi browser tabs, x tabs per browser, and the browser windows are color coded because FF main is orange and Palemoon is blue.

But multi tab rows would be neat.

37

General Software Discussion / Ludum Dare topic for other games

« on: May 01, 2014, 12:35 PM »

A thread for other games.

Here's a great take on the typing game:

http://www.ludumdare...review&uid=18627

Tenkosei ROBO - radmars - Jam Entry

Really uses the "use other artwork" to the advantage!

I'm slow so I could only get past the student. If I wanted to with work I might be able to beat the teacher once, but that's about it.

38

General Software Discussion / "Shadow Link" - A harmless example but a dangerous technique!

« on: April 30, 2014, 12:44 PM »

Okay this one is a little scary to me.

Here's the awards page for a property company.

http://www.halstead....ards-and-recognition
Take a look at those "Leading Real Estate Companies of the World" links.

When you click on one, it goes to some page that talks about an affiliation between a broker network and the company. But if you copy and re-paste the address "http://www.leadingre.com/", it goes to a different site!

To me the "pasted version" is the "real site", and the other page is something on the broker's site. Fine. But don't re-use the link address to create some kind of "shadow page"!
 

What I can't figure out is where the redirect script/whatever is coming from!

To me that's dangerous because the method can be used for MUCH more nasty uses! We all are pretty good at defending Phishing attacks by looking at the address it points to like "www.sdgfdfgd.com/BOA-attack". But on that awards page, the link points to the "right" address!

So I'd appreciate some advice on how to stop that "shadow page" because that could be the mother of all phishing weapons. It seems to work cross browser and even with javascript off!

I'd also like to know the true address of the "shadow page".

To make it worse, the "favicon" changes! (I think that's the word.) The shadow page is clearly on the broker's site because it has their favicon. But when you re-paste the address in the title bar, it changes back to the "national" one! That's just nasty!

I am sending them a version of this note.

39

General Software Discussion / 4 (Maybe more) Absolute top go-to programs

« on: April 30, 2014, 02:37 AM »

Just a thread to mention some programs that are absolutely at the top of your daily list that you'd be annoyed not to have around. The trap here is that second tier that are useful but only on occasion.

With a little work I came up with mine:

Taskbar Shuffle just sitting there. I shuffle my tabs around all day long.

That slightly unheard-of Non-NANY entry here Trandesk is a desktop splitter so you can hide some work on one tab and then later goof off on another tab without the cognitive load of 12 open browser windows and X tabs.
(It was buried in the C+ contest. There are many other splitters, but this one is good enough for me.)

Then Mouser's SC with his 1-click tweak he put in a while ago.

Into Tom Revell's Stickies. The trick is you bury the stickies on tab 4 of Trandesk, and whatever else useful junk like task manager and more. Notice the little green monitor is visible on all four tabs. And it all sits there. So you have an explosion of open stickies there. But on Trandesk nodes 1 and 2, you can make your few new important stickies. Node 3 is left for misc temporary experiments.

Yes, there's a minor problem if you reboot, you lose your Sticky placement. With a lot of work you can get it back. The easier way I do it is just re-open Trandesk, copy the image and make a new Sticky on tabs one and 2 and one day when you are bored you have two copies of it on Node 4 so you can delete one.

Whew!

It's not hard limited to 4 - just my method of narrowing down the supply of "useful stuff" to a flow that is absolutely at the top of your list. But the theme is stuff you absolutely use every day.

40

General Software Discussion / Scary Driveby Attack / Mysterious failure / Other

« on: April 16, 2014, 06:56 PM »

Okay, today was a weird day.

For no apparent reason while surfing what I think are safe sites, about 2PM my computer suddenly quit responding! Well, whatever etc, time to reboot. And then upon rebooting, processes started failing to load at very low levels! It was easy to tell that both mouse and keyboard were working, aka not a simple bad battery. But what was really scary is the comp didn't want to accept the function key to choose boot modes! (I think it's F8) to go into safe mode! Then when it did boot up (partially), it worked for like five seconds before doing anything would lock it up!

Has anyone here had their comp used in a botnet? What does that look like? That was my guess, though I was thinking virus, or hard drive dangers (though the pattern felt wrong for that one), and a couple other things. The suddenness and "thoroughness" were unnerving because the usual sequence of Go-To tricks weren't working. No easy Safe Boot. No easy System Restore.

I got a break when I went to the Bios and turned off Quickboot, and some logo setting, and something else. Then that slowed the machine down long enough to get the F8 boot menu to show, and Safeboot with networking worked, and it stayed there. So I made some copies of some important data to the spare internal drive. And I had browsers, so a vague memory led me to check the web and remember msconfig, where I turned off a bunch of stuff, a couple of which looked rather fishy. I went for a System restore to a couple of days ago, and that partially worked. Then on a boot in debug mode and a couple other variants, something finally gave way and MsSecEssentials sent a different notice "this process has stopped. Restart the process?" and then it's been fine since (though I haven't rebooted since all that!) So I still don't know if it's completely fixed.

Yeah, I need to do all those virus scans and stuff, but I think that can wait a little since it all seems to be back and I need to have my energy up for all that to concentrate. But it's leading me to think, is MS isn't officially doing security updates on XP anymore, how long before someone finds something really nasty and just goes mass comp hunting?

41

Living Room / Payment Services - opinions and ratings?

« on: April 01, 2014, 02:10 PM »

Something on the Goat Simulator page caught my eye enough for a decent little thread all its own.

Web Payment Services

One of the ones they offered was AmazonPayments.

It was my impression that Amazon is one of the "less evil" companies these days, right? They made their name by "doing something real world", which is to super-warehouse actual stuff and just blast the economy of scale sky high. Sure they play with the info they get along the way, but their core business is putting stores out of business ... uh ... selling the biggest inventory in the world cheaply.

So maybe their payment service might just be reputable?

Compare and contrast the other choice offered was Paypal...

42

Site/Forum Features / Smiley Extra Spaces

« on: February 19, 2014, 07:24 PM »

When I click a smiley, it adds an extra space. Is there a reason for this?

At the start of the line (which is where I like to put them) I have to delete the space to not have them look ugly!

  (before)
(After)

43

General Software Discussion / Processing Delays!?

« on: February 18, 2014, 08:06 PM »

A few times I have noticed that certain apps pause while doing something, while Task Manager "swears nothing is going on".

Does anyone know of a tool that covers this?

Just now I loaded a couple of programs and got stalled, but Task Manager was indicating cpu activity near 10% or less etc.

I'm on XP, it happens at work on Vista too.

How can a program delay and Task Manager not know about it?!

44

General Software Discussion / List all links and build a tree

« on: January 21, 2014, 02:17 PM »

One line borrowed from another thread:

Several tools will list all links and build a tree...

-BillR (January 19, 2014, 09:38 AM)

I'd like people's votes on their favorite "tool of the many that will do this".

I like link trees, and I haven't managed to really get a winner to do this. (I also haven't really pushed that hard at it.)

So I'll take recommendations. My focus varies, but it's a good starting place to have some "simple ones" just to get me going, and then later I can get fancy and think about features.

When I think about Trees, let's look at the DC thread this is in:

DC Forum
- Main Area
- - General Software
- - - My Topic

That's very very roughly what I hope one of those programs can do.

HomePage
- Link1
- - SubLink1
- - - SubSubLink1
- - SubLink2
- - - SubSubLink2
- Link2
- - SubLink1
- - - SubSubLink1
- - SubLink2
- - - SubSubLink2

Or something. Just to drill out a list. (Not necessarily with dashes, those are just concept formatting.)


Let the voting begin!

45

General Software Discussion / Too many programs in my start menu!

« on: January 03, 2014, 09:38 PM »

Heh I installed so many practice programs... that now my last row of the start menu/programs is off the screen!

Is there a trick to "compact" all that blank space so you can see them?

46

DC Website Help and Extras / AdBlock and DC Forum

« on: December 27, 2013, 01:50 PM »

While I don't recall the other sites, more and more often I'm noticing AdBlock simply "refusing" to kick in to block images.

For example on Giampy's post in the Humor Section:



But when I force a View Image,



I can do it.

Any tips?

This is already "a fork" - AdBlock Edge.

Is there any "2nd fork" that's even more aggressive and will simply nuke an image?

47

Adventures of Baby Cody / Baby Cody 2014!

« on: December 27, 2013, 01:47 PM »

Where did Baby Cody spend Christmas? Will he be in a New Year's Party?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Maybe in a few weeks when I get some money I can host him in NY City!?

48

Living Room / Security in TV Shows

« on: December 19, 2013, 07:50 PM »

Misc thread about how "Security" is treated in various TV shows before and after Sept11 and other stuff.

Some notable points:
1. Star Trek (Various)
A. NextGen had Worf and about four people. At least that's a bit more high profile than the Original Series. But there were still too many plots about getting past security... for the *24th Century*.
B. Deep Space 9 - Odo is chief of Security and gets around, but in the fewer episodes I saw, even his crew could be beaten by most double-attacks.

2. Seven Days
I'm doing some retro-marathons. Older TV shows and all that. Seven Days had a chief of Security written to be a caricature jerk. And just him and maybe a couple of guys. For a top secret installation. Still a bit thin.

3. Generic surprising lack of police
This one's more systemic. These days of "call if you have copied a song", cover up the era when the balance felt right, "call us when someone is in serious $hit". That used to be what police were for. It made sense. Now we have a serious over-reach of "police+NSA" etc.

But it's just fun to watch a "writer's impression of Security" 20-30 years ago.

49

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / "Good enough" and NANY proto-components!?

« on: December 18, 2013, 03:09 AM »

I like one of the trends of this year's nany towards "back to the basics" text processing. Merging some "innovative directions in nany" I thrashed out with Mouser a year or two ago, after thinking "gee, look at all the neat text apps under pledge", I suddenly thought to poke around my oDesk account.

Turns out I have some proto-components still in Alpha stages that aren't good enough yet to be legit nany by themselves. But maybe one of y'all could adapt them and/or the ideas into features of your own programs. They were parts of projects I was working on a couple of years ago until I ran out of development money!

The next couple of messages will rough out stuff as I poke around my archives and see what I have on tap. Sometimes I had a couple of different coders work on the same theme just to see different approaches, so sometimes if y'all don't care for a particular implementation, I might have a second version, and then you'd get the overall idea and can put it into your own versions.

These are all fragments that I custom commissioned and have not been released anywhere else.

50

General Software Discussion / "Epic Privacy Browser"

« on: December 16, 2013, 06:50 PM »

After Slashdot had its take on it a while back, I installed "Epic Privacy Browser".

But some disturbing things emerged.

Slashdot (with a couple of notes from me) reported that in too many places it was a cheap copy of Google Chrome, and thus solved nothing.

But today's note is sparked by something else.

It *keeps* putting shortcuts onto my desktop.

It's not yet clear what the exact trigger is. But NO other program I have ever seen, out of 100+ I have played with, does this. THAT'S Bad News.

So I haven't used it for much. I poked at it on days 1-4. But the fact it keeps putting icons on my desktop REALLY scares me ... for what was advertised as a "privacy oriented browser".