All browsers using Google’s Blink engine are distasteful. Vivaldi is less bad than most, despite being closed-source, but to echo many here, you’re better off with almost any Firefox derivative. Libre Wolf has a good rep. I use Pale Moon, but its old-fashioned interface isn’t for everyone.

The problem isn’t that it didn’t. The problem is that anyone thought that it should have.

It’s one of those things that needs careful handling and is unlikely to get it. I can see it having some value in therapy, but only if there is, y’know, an actual therapist involved who can make an informed call as to whether their patient will be helped or harmed by talking to a digital fake of a loved one. Instead, we’re likely to see a ham-fisted “allow all” or “forbid all” call by regulators.

Even if the storage were strictly local, there would still be some privacy concerns. Hackers can’t steal data that isn’t there.

Hmmm. I wonder who is making so much money off this that the project is willing to push them into forking it . . . ?

Seeing the word “smart” in a device description has become a warning flag.

In my experience, that’s a good way to overextend yourself and end up becoming nothing to no one as a result.

This too shall pass. Granted, it might take a while, though.

Taiwan has urged its citizens to “avoid non-essential travel” to the mainland as well as Hong Kong and Macau after China unveiled guidelines in June detailing criminal punishments for what Beijing described as diehard “Taiwan independence” separatists.

I’m surprised that hasn’t always been the recommendation—it isn’t like Taiwan has had a good relationship with China since the establishment of the two countries’ current governmental setups.

It’s a cat. It got curious about the inner workings of a satellite and stayed there past liftoff to investigate. And now it’s acting silly in front of the camera in the hope that the servant monkeys back on the ground can figure out how to send it a zero-G litterbox and a bag of Cat Chow.

(/s, of course.)

We’ve known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.

You consider school shootings to be be progress? (Seriously, that’s a topic that should never be brought up with respect to the presence or absence of cell phones in schools. Fix your damned gun control laws, or rather the lack thereof.)

I have mixed feelings about the necessity of this.

On the one hand, I know they don’t really need the cell phones, because they didn’t exist when I was in school.

On the other hand, the kids who are paying attention to their cell phone rather than the teacher probably wouldn’t listen to the teacher if the cell phone wasn’t present, either, and some of them would be far more disruptive toward other students who are trying to listen.

On the third hand, expecting the kids to pay attention all the time even if they’ve already mastered the subject and are bored out of their skulls by the repetition needed for the kids below the class median to have a chance of understanding too is a problem in and of itself.

Fortunately, I am not a teacher, a student, or the parent of a student, so I have no horse in this race and am not required to make a decision on whether the bans are useful or just obnoxious.

Hmm. So is it actually the number of fraudullent papers that’s up, or is it the number of frauds that get caught?

There’s a reason why most other groups on the emulation scene wait for a given console to be a couple of generations dead before they’ll touch it. And Nintendo has always been touchy about their property (intellectual and otherwise) I’m not going to argue about who has the moral high ground here, but this result isn’t unexpected.

Unfortunately, it’s rare that we can control what hashing algorithm is being used to secure the passwords we enter. I merely pray that any account that also holds my credit card data or other important information isn’t using MD5. Some companies still don’t take cybersecurity seriously.

intelligent regex

That would be much, much worse than what we actually have. Complex regex are positively Lovecraftian. You’d be chanting “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftaghn!” before you knew it.

Cracking an 8-char on an ordinary desktop or laptop PC can still take quite a while depending on the details. Unfortunately, the existence of specialized crypto-coin-mining rigs designed to spit out hashes at high speed, plus the ability to farm things out into the cloud, means that the threat we’re facing is no longer the lone hacker cracking things on his own PC.

Only problem is that you wouldn’t be able to visit most sites, because Mosaic only supports HTTP 1.0. You could go for Lynx, though. Just remember to disable the cookie support.

Open up the back of the device and check inside. If you see something that looks like a lump of modeling clay with wires sticking out of it crammed into the corner, your device has been compromised, and you should maybe try to remember whether you bought said device during a visit to Lebanon. After you put it in the middle of an empty driveway with a wall of sandbags around it and call the bomb squad, that is.

(Trying to associate literal exploding pagers with hacking borders on the surreal.)

One question I haven’t seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn’t have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.