blucoat's comments

blucoat | 9 years ago | on: Annotation is now a web standard

Perhaps the filtering would also be done by a third party. This isn't entirely foreign now: if you write an article online, you can't control the comments on reddit, HN or 4chan. However, users have some control over which comments they see, in that they can select which sources of comments they want, and each source has different moderation policies. The roles of publishing content and moderating comments are totally de-coupled from each other.

blucoat | 9 years ago | on: Should you be scared of Unix signals?

>SIGSEGV is a very important signal. It happens when your program tries to access memory that it does not have. An appropriate reaction might be to

    allocate more memory
    read some data from disk into that memory
    do something with garbage collcetion (but what? I'm confused about this still.)
What? Are there any Real World Programs which do anything other than print a stacktrace and exit? I don't think this person gets what a segfault is.

blucoat | 10 years ago | on: Trump’s “Ban Muslims” Proposal Is Not Far Outside the U.S. Mainstream

I agree with you that Trump gets a ridiculously disproportionate amount of news -- not a surprise, considering how much money covering him makes -- but that's not how I interpreted the article's complaints. It read to me like the author was upset that the media weren't actively denouncing him, like they had some moral obligation to. If I've misinterpreted that then that's my error.

blucoat | 10 years ago | on: Trump’s “Ban Muslims” Proposal Is Not Far Outside the U.S. Mainstream

> [The media] simply do not see that as their role. For most of them, a posture of “neutrality” and “opinion-free” blankness are the highest values.

> ... that’s all one can expect from large sectors of the U.S. media: cowardly neutrality, feigned analytical objectivity ...

> Shortly before this article was published this morning, Cuomo re-appeared on Twitter and apparently had a change of heart from last night’s proclamation. ... Sometimes, social media shaming works.

Am I the only one really bothered by what the author of this article thinks news should be? As an instrument to shut down political ideas you don't like? I find it ironic that he criticizes the idea of limiting freedom of speech to fight terrorism, but then thinks we should turn around and silence bigots.

blucoat | 10 years ago | on: Richard Prince, the world’s highest-grossing “photographer”

It seems like everyone here has this mentality that "of course he's evil, he's a thief!" Can someone explain what actual harm this causes anyone? I think it's ridiculous that people pay so much for his "work", but that's their choice. It's not like people are going to him as an alternative to the original source; if he didn't copy it, nobody would give a damn about the original.

EDIT: I'm sorry if this came off as aggressive, but somebody's downvoted me without answering my question. I seriously want to know why his actions are so terrible. What harm does this cause to anyone?

blucoat | 10 years ago | on: 2,000% price hike for infant seizure drug called 'absurd'

This is what confuses me, so maybe someone with a better understanding of this market works can elaborate. How is it that the drug is not patented but the manufacturer has the exclusive right to sell it? It blows my mind that one company can overnight make such a huge change and there is no competitor to turn to.

blucoat | 10 years ago | on: Underhanded C 2015

Gcc with default options does. I was curious about this and tested it, expecting to get a segmentation fault, but to my surprise string constants are executable. A mutable string, however (char data[] instead of char *data), is not executable. I don't think this is a totally insane vulnerability or anything, since no memory is both writeable and executable at once.

blucoat | 10 years ago | on: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

Something to keep in mind:

Of all Tox clients, uTox is written in C, using its own UI framework that directly interfaces with X11 and WinAPI. This makes the code itself a mess. The reasoning behind this is that it's somewhat of a meme on /g/ that anything but pure C code is "bloat". I tried contributing a bit last year, did some work on copy/pasting inline images, and found a remote code execution vuln. Then I got fed up with how terribly confusing the codebase was for something so simple. I'm not a professional programmer or anything, just a student, but it seems like it's the same for everyone else in the project.

blucoat | 11 years ago | on: 15-year-old bug allows malicious code execution in all versions of Windows

I have no experience using Active Directory. Is this common practice? I would personally not even classify this as a bug; it seems like common sense that running code downloaded from an unauthenticated connection is bad. How is this different from saying there are critical security bugs in http/ftp, since the same type of attack is possible (but well known)?

blucoat | 11 years ago | on: German-designed ‘smart’ guns rerouted after cultural backlash in U.S

I'm not typically a gun person, but this seems like a really flawed idea. As the article describes it, it's a gun that only works against an unprepared enemy. Anyone with an RF jammer could completely stop its use, if I understand it correctly. It wouldn't be much more complicated to make a device that could pick up its frequency from a distance and use it on a stolen weapon either. Of course some cryptographic exchange between the watch and the gun would fix that, but it still doesn't prevent you from jamming it.

In cases like many school shootings, where the gun was stolen ahead of time, all it does is require the culprit to steal the watch too. A physical key (old-fashioned or cryptographic) would do the same thing but more reliably.

The term "smart gun" brings to mind a development that I think most users of HN would agree is a bad idea. Making a gun that tries to automatically determine who's authorized to shoot whom, like a Dominator from Psycho-Pass, seems to open up a whole mess of problems. Making more reliable non-lethal weapons is the direction I'd rather see the problem attacked from.

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