Recent Comments

Totally agree. Since Microsoft is deprecating or phasing out Silverlight, I can hardly imagine they'd be arsed enough to actually deal with these flaws in a serious, long-term way. More likely, they'll fix the issues long enough to make the bad press go away, and then wash, rinse, repeat when the next flaw comes up. Who wants to work on the team that has to patch and protect the product your company has decided they'll eventually - and soon - kill off? Assign that crappy responsibility to the new team of interns - it will be good for their resumes! ha ha.

I've never used Win 8.1, and am trying hard to keep it that way. But I thought people mostly agreed the tablet was the one form factor for which that terrible interface actually made sense?

I'll thank you for the compliment, then!

It's working its hardest to kill off Windows PCs, and phones, and now tablet hybrids.

Seriously, I'm using Win8 right now and I still hate it. First I thought that the pervasive ugliness was because I had installed ClassicShell and somehow Explorer had reverted to something basic.

But no, even on a virgin installation of Win8 all the windows are as primitive and ugly as possible. They resemble nothing so much as the Windows 1.x I played with years ago, squared corners with no style at all, as if someone were assigned to write a GUI using only Turtle Basic. Just ugly ugly design as far as the eye can see, and that's WITHOUT getting into the horror of the start screen.

Interesting -- searching on his name returns news of the tantrum no higher than 5th place.

When other minor celebrities have scandals in the news, the results are usually in the top two (try Donald Sterling for example).

And it's had two weeks to percolate.

#IamPipedot

No zafiro, I of course had read the summary, where you admitted the links were from "March". But you did NOT say March of 2013!

I think that's a major oversight, and not up to your usual standard, that's all.

It would be nice to get native HTML5 DRM Netflix support into Chrome or Firefox so I can torch any incarnation of silverlight from my box. I'm using pipelight, but it still loads some silverlight dlls. :(

probably just acquired its first champion within the Googleplex.

WTF type of holidays do you take AC?

Or in the case where these are perhaps innocent baby pictures, the kind most parents have of their baby with it's cloud** up in the air, which they shall use to embarass their future adolecent when of the dating age, then perhaps I should say to the marking individual, WTF.

** See previous article of the week

To be fair, it was originally young adult fiction, so they had to keep the plot simple, include a couple characters who harrass the protagonist and then die horrible deaths, and a love story. Otherwise, who would read it? Besides, we were all to entranced by the lovely Jennifer Lawrence kicking ass with a bow and arrow to notice the plot sucked. :)

Who's "they"? You mean, your anonymously cowardly fellow-contributor? Anonymous posting: them's the breaks. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term= ButtHurt

Totally agree. Politics takes the brains out of what should otherwise be totally obvious, technical solutions.

I know there are people out there working for law enforcement agencies whose job it is to pore over tons and tons of child abuse images attempting to discern trends, identify sources or victims, and so on. Most of them don't last long, since it's so horrifically upsetting to anyone who cares about children. So, can we assume someone out there has the job of squirrel butt censor? That would be like the worst intership ever.

An interesting study would be for some journalist to open up different cloud backup accounts and post different things to see what gets flagged and what doesn't.

It still reinforces my idea that I'm going to buy a second NAS and back stuff up between the two NASes instead of backing up my NAS to some cloud provider. It seems interesting and useful from a technical point of view, but given the current legal and political environment, it hardly seems worth it.

You get credit for reading the article, but not the summary, in which I myself stated these are old articles but still relevant because it's an interesting topic. Pipedot is not necessarily going to be a source of breaking news; neither is Soylent; neither was Slashdot, neither was/is OSNews. Everything you ever see posted at a site like these is going to contain a URL linking to some site where the news 'broke.' It is however a great place to gather with like-minded nerds and discuss things of interest to us. Me, I prefer interesting topics that examine the big picture of trends and happenings, over a new article and 3-4 comments for every little event. It's more interesting to me to examine the forest for the forest, instead of every single tree.

If you need breaking news scoops, you may either crowdfund my investigative journalism career (I'm going to need an apartment in Silicon Valley, daily living expenses, etc.) - joke - or stuff your RSS reader with the feeds of dozens of major and minor news sources and bloggers, or stay glued to Twitter. Alternatively, if you come across those breaking stories yourself, the "Submit" button is at the upper right.

Wish I could assign you more than one category for moderation. It's completely true. I would have included laptops in the desktop category, although they're mobile, it's not like I can, or at least not like I would, whip out mine on the bus to check Facebook like I do with my phone. Also with a mouse and keyboard they're just as versatile as a desktop and they can be as powerful. I use mine for modeling in Blender3D.

It's "Battle Royale", and you've had your movie review privileges revoked!

1) Go on hoiliday and take lots of photos
2) Have photos auto backed up online
3) Have several photos marked as child porn
4) Get arrested

I never understood that movie. Granted, I haven't seen the 2nd movie (not released on Netflix yet)

• The "Happy Ending" is when all but one (or two) of the kids are dead? (That's a pretty f**ked up plot resolution)
• Everyone seems content on playing "the game" instead of fixing the real problem
• No one ever seems to be hungry

Then again, I hated both Battle Royal movies just as much.

nt

I'm amazed we haven't heard more howling about it from certain quarters, though. I mean ... BENGHAZI!

Both linked articles are from March 2013, well over a year old!

It's decent (npi) content, but....

So, lets say after reading http://pipedot.org/story/2014-05-16/what-is-your-offsite-storage-solution you pick a cloud storage provider with a family plan and set up everyone's desktops to automatically back up to the service. As what happens (all too often with non-technical family members), someone is tricked into running dancing_pigs.exe which downloads a whole slew of malware and viruses to the computer. Pretty soon, anything you do on this computer spawns a porn popup. Trying to close the popup, of course, spawn three more popups.

What if one of these malware ads includes an image from the forbidden list and then gets backed up to the cloud because it's in the temporary Internet files? FBI comes and knocks on their door? Or my door if I'm the account holder of the family plan, even though it's not my computer?

Because Bugs Bunny wears no clothes, I guess he's off limits, too.

A relative of mine often posts on Flickr pictures of a squirrel that visits his garden daily. On one single image, amongst those many pictures, the squirrel presented his back to the camera. That picture was censored!

Either somewhere, there is someone who, every-day, looks for photos of squirrel butts and reports them, or someone has programmed a squirrel butt detector... I am not sure which hypothesis is the most disturbing.

2 trolls. We get it.

i like how they answer a question with a question, like a suspect, criminal or politician would.

can you disprove the information within the Infowars article? If not, please pipe down. (lol!)

Wow - what a well-reasoned, measured, and carefully contemplated opinion! You'd make a lousy tech journalist! Take that as a compliment. I agree with you - it's fun to talk about a new age of gadgets, because we're bored using and writing about the old ones. But those old gadgets worked marvelously well for some tasks the new ones are perfectly unsuited. Welcome to the new world.

I wouldn't want to do any CAD or design on my ipad, that's for damn sure. But I'm happy to have one so I don't have to boot up "the beast" every time I want to see if there's a new Pipedot post.

People's claims that desktops would die seems to me to be more of an attempt to click-bait than anything. I understand that people like new things, and new is mobile right now, but as long as the desktop can accomplish things that laptops and mobile devices can't, of course it will stay alive.

Gamers, artists, programmers and other professionals still need desktops, so people will keep fabricating them.

Hey, all: the pipe is currently empty. If you have good ideas of what should go up on this tech news site, please post. Because it's a hell of a lot of work for just one person. This is an all volunteer site, so we don't exactly have paid journalists out walking the beat. When that pipe is choked with interesting articles, we'll be happy to cherry pick and make sure only the great ones make it to the front page. Right now the pipe is empty: do the math.

Here's a good article about Microsoft's service agreement: http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/19/cloud-restrictions-porn-xxx/

None is more restrictive than Microsoft's SkyDrive . Check out the first two parts of the Windows Live code of conduct that governs SkyDrive:

You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, distribute, or facilitate distribution of any content (including text, images, sound, video, data, information or software) or otherwise use the service in a way that:
"¢ depicts nudity of any sort, including full or partial human nudity, or nudity in nonhuman forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga.
"¢ incites, advocates, or expresses pornography, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, hatred, bigotry, racism, or gratuitous violence.

The code of conduct is much larger than this, but already this list has some serious issues. From the looks of it, you can't store nude or partially nude drawings (sorry, Titanic fans and fine art lovers ) or your favorite legally purchased adult porn movie. Because Bugs Bunny wears no clothes, I guess he's off limits, too.

There's a lot of has-beens and old fashioned losers out there!

...JAZZ (the 1GB version) on the other hand, not really. But if you want crappy storage, besides the 2.88Mb 3.5" floppy disks, I'd recommend the plethora of magneto-optical drives and media. The media itself wasn't as crappy as the drives, that tended to last a year or so.

We get it. You're a conspiracy freak. And we're politely asking that you keep your insanity off of this tech news site.

Thank you. Now go away.

Can you disprove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is controlling your arm right now? No, you can't.

What a tool. Be at least a LITTLE choosy in the garbage you allow to enter your brain.

National Geographic has a series of posts about the Colorado River Delta with a lot more information.

You can run old news with an update, but there hasn't even been any change to this. I don't know any news site that just republishes old articles without any change to them. Then the citation of infowars as the source makes the article loose all it's credibility for anyone who didn't know about it before.

Should've perhaps added Hunger Games to the list as well.

can't trust any image from the net - especially from techies, can possibly contain stego messages, subliminals.

unless it's still relevant today, which it is.

I guess you never read old news articles or books from the past.

can you disprove the information within the Infowars article? If not, please pipe down. (lol!)

I use photographs that I take myself, and scans of old photos, taken from books.

As my desktop is usually cluttered with windows, the only time I get to see these images is when I boot the computer. Using an application that randomly selects a wallpaper at boot time, I get a nice surprise each morning.

Interesting and good point. First time I've even heard that acronym, but I'm not a crypto guy, either. Should be probably, the way things are going. Best I've got so far is Michael Lucas' GPG book (and it's not that good).

Yes..common core is a great example of destroying our education. I've been given the example that knowing how to solve a problem isn't enough: You need to be able to solve it in a few completely irrelevant ways that have absolutely no use later in mathematics. Some crap about number lines? Anyway..Yeah.

Not all SSL algorithms support PFS . If they did, at least forced private key revealing wouldn't compromise past sessions.

Because I get the distinct impression the NSA has broken Internet encryption protocols and is busy getting all up in your stuff.

The fact that they pressured Lavabit to give them the private keys suggests that they couldn't just break the crypto using only their math skills.

The first company to change their factory to market plan and deliver to market with an unbroken, documented, chain of custody might make some decent money while securing the nation's infrastructure. It kills me to hear about this stuff. If the good guys know about this stuff and use it, the bad guys could as well.

besides that, the article is dated September 2013. This stuff should not make the frontpage

Pipedotted?

Let me see if I can work some magic. I really want to encourage people to post articles and anyone who takes the time to do so clearly feels it's a worthwhile thing to discuss. When editors start deleting articles, readers stop taking the time to contribute and the sense of cameraderie takes a hit.

Yes, you're quite right. :) But at least this one is real, involving someone who really did (it seems) get pressured by the feds.

Still, please don't publish it if you don't like it / think it's worthy. No skin off my nose. I'd rather see this place keep good editorial control. I was mainly impressed by the crypto angle. Delete away!