Viewing profile — brassic

You haven't addressed the actual point. Which was that we shouldn't need to think about whether any particular comic is or is not of interest to people carrying out surveillance.

I don't know if some present or future government could be offended by people reading this comic but it shouldn't be a question we even need to ask. If you want to live in a world …

To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's no…

This is basically national security letters with oversight. Which is part of the problem. When any of the major democracies introduces a law like this, it normalises it for the res…

Why not? The servers don't know what physical keys you are pressing.

This is kind of what LINQ does. You write a query in C#. The structure of the query (like an abstract syntax tree) can be exposed to the query provider which can interpret it or co…

There was another case where the voter drew a penis next to the conservative candidate and it counted as a vote: http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/2015-05-08/angry-voter-...

Not as painful as trying to correct it.

An HSM consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret. A Yubikey consists of some secur…

Seconded. In 18 months my RamNode VPS has had one unexpected reboot, but other than that it has been flawless.

Of course, it is ultimately a piece of paper... But in every company I've worked for mail is signed for by whoever and, if it's addressed to an executive, delivered to a secretary …

I bet you a jam sandwich that an NSL is not actually a letter sent in the regular post.

The long forgotten irony in this meme is that cars used to be designed like this. There were no seat belts and the steering column was a rigid spear. It was practically designed to…

This isn't theoretical, I've seen it with HTTP, HTML and elsewhere. Any time two pieces of software disagree on how to parse a chunk of data, especially if one of them is supposed …

And of course Kunstformen der Natur [1]. Even if Haeckel did cheat a bit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

Water pipes often accumulate a layer of sediment at the bottom. Anything that stirs it up will cause brief discolouration of the water. Your pipes may be fine. (That said, I wouldn…

You don't need a pause button on all the videos. You just need a single button that pauses all the videos. I would be delighted if the escape key on my laptop served this purpose. …

As Uber was quick to remind its drivers, the ruling merely covered the two drivers who went to the employment tribunal.

Early RISC processors read data from memory 32 bits (4 bytes) at a time, and these reads had to be aligned on 4-byte boundaries. This was a feature of the memory architecture, not …

I have to use two passwords to login to Lloyds bank. One conventional password (which is presumably stored salted and hashed) and one where I have to enter characters from three po…

I'm an ex-smoker and I had the same thought as I read the article: I wish I'd known this. But really, I know it wouldn't have made a difference. From an early age I was taught at s…

They don't need a revolution. They need to stop voting for Erdogan.

The law in the UK was changed a few years ago to permit this but it wasn't installed because of the cost. A quick search turned up [1] which reckons £300 million for installation a…

When NTFS was first released Microsoft claimed it was so awesome it didn't need defragging. In later releases of Windows NT they added a defragger. By around the time of XP this wa…

You don't need a failure for compressed air to be dangerous. The air itself can damage you in all kinds of ways: http://www.aircontrolindustries.com/dangers-of-compressed-ai...