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An emergency stop button is something, but one would think there'd be some steering in case the thing's about to drive you into incoming traffic or some other dangerous situation. I'd rather take public transport than risk my life in this, to be honest.

By: Anon | 05/2014

Fiction: Do you remember the scene near the end of the movie Scarface where the group of criminals conspired in an attempt to remove an individual speaking out against them before he spoke at the UN? (UN - IIRC)

Reality: Do you remember the individual who died just shortly prior to speaking out about pacemakers (and possibly other technology) and how they are vulnerable to hacker attacks?

Possibility: Sn0wd3n and/or others about to deliver a speech which mentions the useful tool TrueCrypt to a wider audience - TrueCrypt project dies.

I'm interested in the results of the complete TC code audit, but give this comparison some thought.

However, I was concerned about the project when releases ceased after 7.1a. There were steady releases up until that time and I'm curious if 7.1a was released as low hanging fruit with a backdoor and the site was allowed to operate for a few years before closing shop when the hunger for enough interesting people who downloaded/used TC was satisfied.

TrueCrypt WTF @ Bruce Schneier blog
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/truecrypt_wtf.html

Also contains TC posts:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_bl_426.html

Ya, I've been waiting on a more official reply from the maintainers. The current homepage on SF really looks like a web-defacement and not something that is official.

To make things worse, the "new release" of the software is signed using the official key. Does that mean that they were able to deface the site and nab the private keys at the same time?

I've heard some competent economists say that Tesla's been fudging their books, which would make this much less about credit rating ego and more Elon Musk's.

If we're going all the way geek here, I'm thinking the best use for a 3D printer is printing models of your D&D characters. ...That said, I half agree with you--this is not an effective implementation of 3D printing. We're sort of in a pre-enlightenment period of the science. The really interesting stuff is going to happen when they start putting together synthesized chemicals and we get 3D printed food ala Star Trek.

Who are we kidding here? All the real meat of the robotics and electronics are being delivered separately. All that the 3D printer is doing is producing plastic parts... slowly, roughly, and very inefficiently.

I'm not against it, but there's a huge hype train on 3D printing.

Why wouldn't this "kit" just also include the plastic shell parts, efficiently and cheaply mass produced in a real factory?

Is it really that thrilling for aging geeks to watch plastic getting melted in person?

Thank you for the option to disable images/icons completely. With a smaller width browser window, the images would cover up the headline/story. Got to be a bit annoying resizing the window each time.
Good work, B

Agreed. Not to mention they have one of the most anal groups of editors (the users...) of any website. While not all of these people are qualified, it seems like the ones who are are the most whiny--which is great.

I read through most of that. They compare WP summaries with peer reviewed scientific journals, and find discrepancies.

What if they had compared against a print encyclopedia? Against a batch of NY Times articles? Against a stack of Dr. Oz books and videos? How would these other popular layperson resources stand up to this same scrutiny?

This seems like a stretch for attention on someone's part (the study authors or the subsequent publicizers).

Frankly I think Wikipedia does a great job of explaining most things, and completely unlike the other popular resources available to people (including most medical sites) WP cites the heck out of its claims right in the article.

I'll file a bug report.

Sorry everyone, I saw a post on this page about XSS vulnerabilities in the title of posts, so I went ahead and submitted a benign example. It's ruining the page for everyone, but does illustrate the vulnerability quite nicely.

XSS Test: <script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

Why is everything in modern tech measured in the billions all of a sudden?

It seems so ridiculous that all these ephemeral digital services can be worth more than centuries' old media empires.

Gotta be Bubble 2.0, right? How many overpriced headphone buyers and FM radio exiles can there be?

Self-righteousness - Check
High horse - Check
May care about this issue one day when friend or relative gets hit by a false positive but doesn't get cleared before being shamed and smeared through the court system - Unsure
Will still be an asshole either way - Check

(sorry for double post)

Self-righteousness - Check
High horse - Check
May care about this issue one day when friend or relative gets hit by a false positive but doesn't get cleared before being shamed and smeared through the court system - Unsure
Will still be an asshole either way - Check

Err, no need to resort to a browser extension to remove the images. The site allows you to pick "None" for story image type on the settings page.

Unauthorized != illegal.

If it were up to the copyright holders than yes, it would, but the reality is more nuanced than that.

What gave it away? The rounded corners?

Conversations often go like this:

Person A: I need a new phone, thinking of a iphone 5s.
Person B: Why not give the nexus 5 a try?
Person A: Well, I have Verizon....
Everyone else in earshot: Oohh... Sorry about that. {Everyone akwardly looks around to avoid eye contact with the unfortunate soul, as Person A despretly seeks eye contact from someone to let him know that everything will be ok.}

In the Northeast GSM is pretty bad and I understand it's not much better in parts of CA.

I wish it weren't so, but Verizon really did build out the best network on this continent. CDMA rightly belongs on history's dustheap, but that's not gonna happen for a while yet.

that in the world of patent wars, they're going to be sued for that design very, very quickly.

Not if it can be safely deflated using the mechanism of corrupt oligopolistic business practices.

Well Tesla did get a Government backed loan, which they paid back early.

I don't know how you came to the conclusion that GSM is useless in most of the US. I've mostly lived in the south east and midwest of the country. GSM seemed to be in the majoriy every where I went. at&t is a pretty big carrier, and tmobile seems to be growing fast, due to cut rate prices. Maybe you have different experiences in different places.

In any case, this sounds like a developer phone, rather than a mass market phone to be sold in the retail stores. If you're a developer interested in firefox os, then this is the phone for you. You'll have to us GSM as its the platform used by most of the world that mozilla is targeting with firefox os.

Given the way the auto industry has been trying to use the law to slow down Tesla and spreading a whole lot of FUD about it, at this point I'd say "it's a conspiracy!" is actually a very reasonable reaction when stuff goes wrong for them.

BTW, the red flagging is b/c pipedot's RSS feed is NOT valid XML (the unescaped ampersand).

<title>S&P sets Tesla's credit rating to B-</title>
The ampersand wasn't escaped and apparently pipedot is just regurgitating text entered on a webform. And, if that is true, is vulnerable to XSS attacks from maliciously entered titles. :-[

And what about body text and comments?

At the very least my aggregator is erroring out and red flagging pipedot's RSS feed.

Or an attempt by another auto manufacturer to defame Tesla via their friends.

Telsa IS the "competitive and technological displacement risk"

Other companies are backed by the government, giving them excellent credit.

I agree. I sort of understand the desire to have images, but really, it rarely adds anything of value to the story. I don't need any images, thank you!

stock photos... would be, by myself at least, unwelcome.

Not just you; by myself too at least. Besides the... glibness of it, It's also annoying to spend even a few brain cycles on figuring out what an image has to do with a story, and then realize it's just stock. (As someone had pointed out on /. critiquing the Beta, an actual image seems to imply it's something specific.)

OTOH well-chosen specific images work well - for example, the earlier story about the "world's coolest new watch" looks great.

But icons are fine too - they're understood as thematic (i.e. stock), but may also aid in navigation. (E.g. when scrolling rapidly, looking for a story you saw earlier.)

Compared with larger, more established automakers, the company is less likely "to successfully adapt to competitive and technological displacement risks over the medium to long term," [S&P analysts Nishit Madlani, Dan Picciotto and Joseph Lin wrote in the report].

With Elon Musk leading the company, seems to me that the opposite would be true.

Exactly! And they haven't taken money from a bailout in order to stay afloat, unlike some other companies.

How does this compare to other car companies? Particularly, the credit rating itself, but also the collaborative (or not) process? Not that I suspect it's a conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if S&P was pressured to say bad things about Tesla, so long as they could make it look reasonable.

Excellent counterpoints. :)

In reality, rather than following MS and Canonical down this rathole, I wish they'd fix their browser and stop pooping on Thunderbird, but as usual MoFo is just chasing money.

Sounds like someone got butt-hurt about not being included. How dare they successfully raise money without getting one of our credit reports!

Apple did that (deploy a GSM-only phone in the US - the first iPhone was GSM only) and was a wild success.

The problem is not whether they are using GSM/UMTS but that they are now against two fully entrenched platforms (iOS and Android) and several minor platforms (Windows Phone, Blackberry etc) and it's going to be difficult to enter with a new smart phone platform against all the entrenched competition. As such because their slice of the pie will never be anything other than tiny, it's probably best to develop the hardware for the most widely used world standard (GSM and its descendents) rather than a minority US-only standard.

It's hard enough getting a decent CDMA data signal in most places (Sprint sucks balls), but deploying a flagship GSM-only phone for the US market is ridiculous.

Also, who the hell is this "T2Mobile" they plug throughout the release?

Images are fine if they contribute to the story

Exactly.

And I just looked over the images currently on the main page, decided that most did not contribute at all and so removed them from the page. Much better.
(Using the Quickstyle extension for Safari, if you want to know.)

No.. that is slashdot

I was thinking more like http://stackoverflow.com/

Survival of the fightest!!!

It seems you want to breed fast spelling/grammar nazis.

This. Options, options, options. Most of us wouldn't be here if a certain other site had choices that weren't shoved down our throats.

The layout is good.

The ability to edit a comment for 5 minutes after posting would be very useful; unless the comment has a reply in which case it is frozen for historical accuracy.

Says this anonymous coward without voting privileges.

I appreciate the option to use images from stories, and I think it has merit. I'm also thankful that the icons may still be utilized. I prefer the icons, and I'm not too picky about the variety or if they exactly match the article. On the flip side, the accompanying article images chosen by the other sites' original posters or whoever may not accurately reflect the news either. Perfection in anything may never be reached, options are excellent. :)

....and did I mention the need to be able to edit comments to put in that closing quotation mark we really were intending to include before we got distracted doublechecking the spelling of something?