throwaway125's comments

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

>all the text, sounds, textures models are present on the client side alone

This isn't entirely true. All the quest text, monster says, NPC interactions and more are sent by the server. Sure, the models and sounds are part of the client, but the server tells your client where to place which mobs, how much health they should have, how they react to you, etc.

>The content that is available on Nostralius is literally not available on any live server any more

Yeah, hosting a game server that is no longer available because the company that used to host them stopped offering that option should probably not be against the law. Even single player games are being created as "multiplayer" nowadays, so it's bound to become an even bigger problem in the future.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: How DuckDuckGo is trying to help programmers

I have noticed the same problem when adding several search terms and ddg ignoring the one that is the most important. I have found that if you quote that term it returns better results that do include that term.

For your particular example if you search for 'usb type c "resistor"' you get (what I assume to be) reasonable results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usb+type+c+"resistor"

Ideally duckduckgo should recognize which of the search terms are defining, but until that happens quoting should help you out.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: BMW Australia Refusing to Comply with Terms of GNU Public License

You are not required to make your application public as it is not considered a derivative of the linux kernel. If you distribute the device you are required to provide your customers with the source code to the running linux kernel.

The exact details depend on multiple factors (are you linking to libraries? Are they considered system libraries?) and if you are actually thinking of doing this you should invest some time in investigating this, and probably in consulting a lawyer.

Note that this is all based on my layman's understanding of the law and the license, and I'm definitely not a lawyer.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: Stop forcing arbitrary password rules

Most of the time you can paste the password in another field (like the username) and select and drag it to the password field.

Browsers should probably not allow that kind of interaction between javascript and the password field.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

While your name and phone number are public, the list of people who have your phone number saved is not public. These companies can effectively map who you associate with only by looking at other people's phones. They can profile you by association, and that is very wrong.

At some point privacy is no longer a choice, not a real choice anyway. You get to chose between participating in society or keeping your privacy. It shouldn't have to be this way, but it is.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Flexbox.io – a free video series on learning CSS Flexbox

I really do appreciate the effort you put into these videos, and I definitely understand you want something out of this as well but the user experience of having to go through your site instead of a link to a youtube playlist does put me off quite a bit.

Either way, the first few videos I've watched so far are great, thanks.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: Experiments with Ruby and Go

It's because the distinction isn't meaningful for day to day use. People use and compare languages and their standard libraries as a whole.

I do think people recognize the fact that these two are different things (e.g. when comparing C to a language with a richer standard library it's one of the points that are often specifically and separately mentioned.), but it's just not very useful to separate them explicitely in a comparison of languages from a user's point of view (as opposed to a language designer's point of view).

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: Why PowerPoint should be banned

techdevman: Your account is shadow banned. Looking at your history I think it was for your first article submission. It seems in error. No contact info in your profile so I wrote this reply.

throwaway125 | 10 years ago | on: Cryptographic Right Answers

What is your opinion on Threefish then? Is there something fundamentally wrong with bigger keys/blocks, or is it just that known big key/block schemes are not useful?

throwaway125 | 11 years ago | on: An Exemption to the DMCA Would Let Game Fans Keep Abandoned Games Running

I'm not sure why the proposal would not cover MMO games. If a game studio abandons an MMO game it is completely destroyed for the players, an exemption would be very useful in that case. Perhaps the EFF is trying to avoid too much resistance from big companies that make a lot of money on MMO games, which is understandable but unfortunate.

throwaway125 | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Get your local and public IP addresses in JavaScript

This can be disabled in firefox's about:config page by setting media.peerconnection.enabled to false.

The problem with disabling all these features on a case by case basis is that you contribute to a richer fingerprint this way. Browsers will become increasingly more vulnerable to fingerprinting and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it without going back to the dark ages of the web.

throwaway125 | 11 years ago | on: How compatible is LibreSSL?

While many of these warnings can be annoying during development they are also very useful if the code is kept clean of them. In this case the __bounded__ attribute is a security feature their compiler version has. If another platform can not support this feature then revoking this specific instance of this warning is an active decision someone should make when writing the build scripts. Just ignoring all warnings is certainly not the way to go.

The language often (always?) has facilities to remove those warnings on a case by case basis. For example when you don't want to use a parameter you can actively let the compiler know without assigning the variable to itself: you can only include the type and not the name:

    int fn(int, void*);
    
    int fn(int num, void* /*extra*/) {
        // If the name extra is commented out the compiler will
        // not warn that you are not using it. Now it is very
        // clear that not using this variable was an active choice
        // and not a mistake.
        return num;
    }
edit: as pbsd pointed out commenting out extra is not portable C code, though I believe the wider point still stands. These warnings can be very useful and should be be reviewed before ignoring them.

throwaway125 | 12 years ago | on: Today is The Day We Fight Back

It being closed source or not isn't what makes it ironic. Enticing people to include a <script> tag on their website that then makes their visitors download a .js that will leave an entry in cloudfront's log file documenting that your users visited your website (via the referrer url) is what makes it ironic.
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