My grandmother's ISP offered games and such that could be played over dial up and would incur additional fees on the phone bill, per minute... Crazy times.
Readit NewsSpaceL10n commented on What the Internet Was Like in 1998 cybercultural.com/p/inter... · Posted by u/herbertl
SpaceL10n commented on Inspect ANSI control codes and escape sequences ansi.tools... · Posted by u/webpro
The things they don't prepare you for in school...
I was working at my first job and we had a ColdFusion app that was displaying some data from the database. I get a ticket one day saying our search page would crash when searching for a very specific document. The other 1 million+ documents all loaded fine to our knowledge, so why this one?
I was pretty junior back then and feeling mighty defeated as to why I couldn't figure it out. I debugged every single line and condition, trying to find some reason. After ruling out the code as a culprit, I took the data we were loading and placed it into Notepad++. Don't remember why exactly. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with explanation and lazily moving the text cursor left and right through the text, mostly out of boredom and despair.
That's when I noticed that I had pressed the right arrow key in my keyboard and the text cursor position hadn't changed! I pressed it again and nothing. Again, nothin. It took eight key presses to move the text cursor from one letter in a word to the adjacent letter. I was utterly bamboozled. Why was the text cursor getting stuck in the middle of this word?!
Shortly thereafter, I discovered "Show all hidden characters" setting in the menu. I toggled it and sure enough there were little black boxes with weird three letter strings in them. NUL, ESC, and others - right where my cursor was getting hung up.
That was the day I learned about ANSI control characters and the importance of data sanitization.
This feels like a made up story just like so many other stories that get published to scare people from visiting China, India, Mexico, Columbia, etc.
Could be. The only information I can find about this is that the young man told his local newspaper what happened and then other news outlets just regurgitated the young man's account of what happened with zero fact-checking or corroborating evidence. Many people are taking one man's word as truth. I'd like more proof before coming to any conclusions.
Obviously if it is true this is ridiculous and condemnable but it would be nice to have more supporting evidence than this report.
Indeed. The only information we seem to have is the report this young man provided to his local newspaper. There are no corroborating witnesses or evidence thus far that I can find that confirm this incident actually occurred.
SpaceL10n commented on EBCDIC Is Incompatible with GDPR (2021) shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/... · Posted by u/fanf2
For those who don't know...
EBCDIC can be pronounced as ebb-sid-ick in conversation
This highlights a significance today's cloud-addicted generation seems to completely ignore: who has control of your data.
I'm not talking about contractual control (which is largely mooted as pretty much every cloud service has a ToS that's grossly skewed toward their own interests over yours, with clauses like indemnifications, blanket grants to share your data with "partners" without specifying who they are or precisely what details are conveyed, mandatory arbitration, and all kinds of other exceptions to what you'd consider respectful decency), but rather where your data lives and is processed.
If you truly want to maintain confidence it'll remain private, don't send it to the cloud in the first place.
> who has control of your data
As frustrating as it is, the answer seems to be everyone and no one. Data in some respects is just an observation. If I walk through a park, and I see someone with red hair, I just collected some data about them. If I see them again, perhaps strike up a conversation, I learn more. In some sense, I own that data because I observed it.
On the other other hand, I think most decent people would agree that respecting each other's right to privacy is important. Should the owner of the red hair ask me to not share personal details about them, I would gladly accept, because I personally recognize them as the owner of the source data. I may possess an artifact or snapshot of that data, but it's their hair.
In a digital world where access controls exist, we have an opportunity to control the flow of our data through the public space. Unfortunately, a lot of work is still needed to make this a reality...if it's even possible. I like the Solid Project for it's attempt to rewrite the internet to put more control in the hands of the true data owners. But, I wonder if my observation metaphor is still possible even in a system like Solid.
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SpaceL10n commented on Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust desktopdocs.com/?v=2025... · Posted by u/katrinarodri
What is the difference between Tauri and Electron. From what I understand both use browser for rendering, except electron ships the whole browser while Tauri use the browser already there on the system.
That's part of it, but also Tauri uses Rust on the backend while Electron uses Node. Electron is way more mature with a larger developer community, but Tauri keeps gaining momentum. If memory safety, bundle size, and performance are important to you, Tauri is a nice choice. Electron is not bad but there's a reason there are so many new players.
The only software project I donate to is NVDA[1]. It's an open source screen reader, AKA software that makes it possible for the blind to use computers through synthesized speech.
It's one of the few open source projects (besides Blender and GIMP) that is used directly by non-technical end-users and that has managed to surpass its commercial brethren , both in features and popularity. This is partly due to its extreme, almost Emacs-like hackability and a vibrant plugin ecosystem, which provides everything from better speech synthesizers to accessibility enhancements for other apps.
It has been created by two guys in Australia, mostly in response to the outrageous prices of commercial screen readers (~$1500 for noncommercial use). The situation has gotten better since then, Windows now comes with Narrator, which is... usable, but NVDA is still the top contender for most (non-enterprise) use cases.
I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the founders at NVDA. We were integrating it into to our computer kiosks and Michael Curran joined the call and helped guide us on how best to achieve our goal. It is obvious to me that the NVDA team cares deeply about equal access. Their goal is a noble one worthy of donations. We did not have the same experience swimming around the waters of Martha's Vineyard.
I worry about my own liability sometimes as an engineer at a small company. So many businesses operate outside of regulated industries where PCI or HIPAA don't apply. For smaller organizations, security is just an engineering concern - not an organizational mandate. The product team is focused on the features, the PM is focused on the timeline, QA is focused on finding bugs, and it goes on and on, but rarely is there a voice of reason speaking about security. Engineers are expected to deliver tasks on the board and litte else. If the engineers can make the product secure without hurting the timeline, then great. If not, the engineers end up catching heat from the PM or whomever.
They'll say things like...
"Well, how long will that take?"
or, "What's really the risk of that happening?"
or, "We can secure it later, let's just get the MVP out to the customer now"
So, as an employee, I do what my employer asks of me. But, if somebody sues my employer because of some hack or data breach, am I going to be personally liable because I'm the only one who "should have known better"?