Presumably you have historically signed in to their website, and have a cookie that lets you get past their block. I have not, and therefore do not. Even people on /., the IQ level of which I was hoping |. would exceed, understood this. Do you really not remember the annoyance that NYT links used to cause? Often, someone would post an alternative URL with whatever affiliate/partner field in the query was sufficient for getting past their block. Alas those parameters were whack-a-mole.

It is not good. It redirects:

"""
$ HEAD 'http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/794-ways-in-which-buzzfeed-reminds-us-of-impending-death.html?src=twr&_r=1&referrer='
...
Client-Warning: Redirect loop detected (max_redirect = 7)
"""

And here's the redirect:
"""
$ echo -e 'GET http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/794-ways-in-which-buzzfeed-reminds-us-of-impending-death.html?src=twr&_r=1&referrer= HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc mobile.nytimes.com 80
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Server: Varnish
x-r: 2
location: http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?mobile=1&URI=http%3A%2F%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fmobile.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F07%2F06%2Fmagazine%2F794-ways-in-which-buzzfeed-reminds-us-of-impending-death.html%3Fsrc%3Dtwr%26_r%3D2%26referrer%3D
"""

How embarassing. s/lead/led/

Well, if you're interested in the onion parody,
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/clickhole_the_onion_s_new_site_is_more_than_a_buzzfeed_parody.html
lead me to:
http://www.clickhole.com/

I just get a login redirect.

It was slang for "orgasms".

That is "selling you more junk", as it's selling you a loan, on top of the junk you're buying that requires you to take the loan.

For the same reason that people run phpadmin (or whatever it's called) on a public network. The number of probes to my webserver tell me that a lot of people (or at least a lot of scripted clients) expect there to be administrative tools publicly accessible.

However, it should have been obvious that there would be problems - the fact that it's called the "Intelligent" Platform Management Interface implies that there'll be something totally braindead about it or its implementation.

Joy, I have an anonymous stalker who contributes less than zero to every thread I post to.

Yay for gopher!

As of a few weeks ago, I now run a minimal gopher server. All it serves is some limited information on the state of a customised IdleRPG
gopher://fatphil.org:7071/
I notice that there are very few compliant gopher clients. I'm writing some patches for w3m presently to fix the bugs in its implementation (it directly disobeys some "the client must" and "must not"s).

While sniffing around that machine, I notice that my fucking apache server has been rooted, so I'll be decomissioning it, and rebuilding as soon as I can. However, I plan to have the gopher service running again ASAP afterwards.

Micropayment systems, things like hashcash, and some anti-spam proposals, always depended on these kinds of computations being done. They weren't new 20+ years ago when I first heard of them, so they definitely aren't new now.

And the concept of subversively getting large numbers of unknowing volunteers to contribute to the efforts is even older - it was originally called the "chinese television" (the idea being that there are hundreds of millions of them, so great for embarassingly parallel tasks).

So git orf moi larn!

Are you really so dimwitted that you think that everyone sees the photos?
Silly question, as obviously you are, as you were the one who demonstrated the confusion before I had to explain reality to you.

How many hours did it take you to pen your reply? You still have errors in it, for reference.

... upgrading

ii libgnutls26 2.8.6-1+squeeze3 the GNU TLS library - runtime library

I'm talking about the *icon*. You're confusing the photo with the icon. This should be clear from the fact that you used the term "photo/icon". Look at your settings for the image preferences and re-evaluate what you wrote.

Then stop starting sentences with "Uh".

Eventually, you may be coherent enough to be able to post under a real identity without bringing shame upon yourself. But that might be years away, you have a long way to go.

Any system which is designed to give you plausible deniability is guaranteed to give you no plausibible deniability at all.

You show them one thing, they say "yeah, yeah, you're running something which permits you to have multiple views - now show us the other one", and get out a bigger wrench.

Getting over the obstacles? No hassle? Did you not see its tether go taught? Without that tether it would have fallen asimo over tit.

However, more importantly, it's a planar biped.

Planar bipeds are not interesting. Everyone in the robots community, apart from students who work on planar bipeds, will be cringing at this "advance". The little robot in the icon at the corner of the summary is more interesting, from a robotics perspective.

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

99% of the way there already.

I would have taken a new photo with pipedot in the background, but that would have required me going to one corner of the room to pick up the box of floppies, another corner of the room to get my camera, and all kinds of hard work like that. Ain't noone got time for that shit!

http://fatphil.org/images/floppy_pipe.jpg

I used to play things like card games on IRC back in the early 90s. That seemed to be more popular than MUDs as it was social as well as competitive.

One single continuous piece of tape, no spool, all zig-zaggy inside the case, that was quite literally shoved back into the cartridge as fast as it was being tugged out. 85KB capacity, IIRC. Innards of the drives visible here: http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/scripts/picshow.php?image=qlmicrodrives.jpg&folder=/Museum/Sinclair/ql&back=/Museum/Sinclair/ql/index.php . Although initially developed for the BT Merlin and the Sinclail QL, I had one on my ZX Spectrum as I splashed out on Interface 1.

Dire is the only word for them.

However, the drives were significantly lighter than the 40kg unit which I used to read these: http://fatphil.org/images/im_floppier.jpg

There seems to be a bug which appears related to such a change:

Notice: Undefined index: last_time in /var/pipedot/lib/tools/tools.php on line 768 error: sql [insert into story_history (sid, zid, time, last_time) values (?, ?, ?, ?)] arg [183, fatphil@pipedot.org, 1400437667, ] msg [SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column 'last_time' cannot be null]

Looks like it's just a very short term effective downtime measurement. Day-to-day, 5-nines is easy; I do it for my company servers 99% of days.
If these providers have only two clients, then it doesn't matter how reliable they are, they are not "top ten" in anything significant.

MS fans could come up with another equally useless statistic that showed windows in 9 out of the "top ten", I'm sure.

Any rogue/moria/angband love out there?

When I'm feeling "modern", I occasionally play a Freedom/PrBoom (doom clone).

(a) It's being distributed by an idiot, as zips are unable to preserve important file-system-related information (such as file permissions, including executability). Tar exists for a reason, and in fact predates zip by pretty much a whole decade. The fact that the instructions for use include a preparatory "install a package which will help you cope with our bizarre distribution medium" step is a tell-tale sign that it's not been designed particularly sensibly.
(b) actually, I don't hate to be a unix snob, I revel in it.

The problem is that nowadays TV sports reporting (such as I know it, which is a whisker-thin slice - basically only Formula 1) seems to be more concerned about how people *feel* about their victory or second place, and not about the technical aspects of the event itself. They don't want sport for sportos/stattos/fans - they want sport dumbed-down and emotived-up for the huge bottom layer of the pyramid. Blame marketeers. (And you may read into that sentence the obligatory Hicksian "... who should kill themselves".)

So gays have no hope in that jungle. It's going to be "did you carry an extra pack of pink frilly hankies with you, in case a hard tackle made you cry?" all the freaking way, at least on some channels, and it's going to suck for *everyone*.

This is one reason I like sports "personalities" like Kimi Raikkonen (on a keyboard with no diacriticals, pretend they're there, please). If someone asks a stupid question, he'll give the shortest dismissive answer which almost always makes the interview look stupid. And of course, Kimi was a big fan of James Hunt who had his moments too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjSvfgA6tk

However, there's a bug :-(

If you reply to a post at the top of the thread, before reading the whole thread, then when you return to the thread after clicking "post", all those things you've not read are greyed out.

I presume this is just timestamp-based? If so, perhaps don't commit the "thread last rendered" timestamp until some affirmative thread-leaving action is performed. Posting a reply would not be classified as a thread-leaving action. This might require some significantly trickier smarts to implement than just the naive situation we have at the moment.

Simpler Workaround: middle-click the "reply" link to get it in a new tab, and then just close after posting.

It's totally freaking awesome!

Of course, it's been seen before in the environment called "Usenet" (and also "email"), but on something that's a web-forum, it indeed does seem to be new.

Which reminds me - I look forward to the NNTP interface ;-)

Nice addition, as it didn't break anything that I'm familiar with. (Namely being a non-JS luddite.)

KUTGWYSIWYG, Bryan!

You're a dude, Bryan - many thanks!

It looks written from scratch. There don't seem to be any crappy old boondoggles cluttering it up and useless "feature" slowing it down.

Yet again, many thanks Bryan!

That Forbes article flows like honey compared to BBC News online article. By policy, every single sentence is a separate paragraph. This shows a disgusting disregard for all the principles of good writing that I was taught back when the UK had an education system that actually taught you something, and shows either the same disregard for the readers or is simply patronising to them.

Anyway, back on topic, I think a lot of it is simply fashion. Is there any reason to think that facebook or twitter will follow a different-shaped popularity curve from myspace's from last decade? I can't pretend to be an expert in any of the individual social media platforms, as I've never been a member of any of them, never seeing them as just stupid flashes in the pan pandering to people who weren't using the internet back in the 1980, and the web in the early 90s, say, and who want strokes from as many different directions as possible. And like other fashions, when you see your kid brother wearing the same types of clothes as you, and listening to the same music, you cringe and find anything exclusive and new to differentiate yourself from the likes of him. So your next hang-out was a pub, rather than the multi-story carpark. The bottom line is that both actually smell of piss, but you're briefly happy while you're there with like-minded individuals. Of course, as seen in platforms closer to home, it's just as easy to get fed up of the platform by it changing under your feet. I stopped listening to some metal radio stations when all they played was industrial sequenced synth shit^W^W^Wmetal. There's little reason to think that the users have any more loyalty to the platforms than the platforms have respect for the users. So in some ways, it's a non-story, as it's so predictable.

(Bryan: feature request - when looking at an prior post linked to from the mail messages, can it be given a "parent" link, and the option to see its whole subtree?)

(And fuck beta!)

This is basically the only website that I use as a resource for info on lenses, as they have no perceptable bias:
http://www.photozone.de/Reviews/194-canon-ef-s-55-250mm-f4-56-is-test-report--review

If your bro-in-law wants some fun, then there's plenty to be had with this little puppy:
http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/254-peleng-8mm-f35-fisheye-converted-to-eos-mount-test-report--review
(which is available in native EOS mount, I don't know why they had to kludge it)

Does not programming for a while bring your memory back?
You might simply be getting older. My short term memory was never up to much, but as I get older it gets noticeably worse.

... please use other more nefarious methods of tracking me rather than the easily worked-around ones.

Thanks! For reference, it was a Canon EOS 500D (1.6x crop sensor), Canon 55-250mm zoom at 250mm, IIRC stopped down to ~f7.2, 1/60s, image stabilisation on (and worth every penny at that zoom), and is a 100% crop from centre frame (hence no CA!).

I love that zoom lens, it's made me happier than any other camera kit I've ever bought.

Agree with all the above.

I've been offered one, but I certainly don't want pipedot to undergo any unnecessary expense in these early days, so shall gracefully decline. If Bryan sends me his postal address, I'll happily send him a postcard of where I live as a thank-you!

As someone who disagrees with almost everything that comes out of Netanyahu's mouth, I shocked myself by immediately noticing some wisdom in his outburst.

Regarding the camera thing - to be honest, cameras enhance my experience. I've got horrible astigmatism which turns all distant details into a mess. My camera, with its telephoto lens on, lets me see those things in a way that would otherwise be impossible. (I've never seen this much detail with my naked eye, for example: http://fatphil.org/images/moon.jpg (that was without a tripod, believe it or not, I just managed to wedge myself firmly against something rigid)) However, the full immersion of the experience - the full context and the sounds, and smells, are sometimes a bigger experience than the narrow zoomed-in ones that the camera gives. Shitty cameras? No comparison at all. Anyone wasting time with a camphone on a safari should be fed to the animals.

There were many many problems, Alax Cox worked miracles. I'm not pretending it was anything apart from Finnish homerism that made the guys I was working around so keen on using Linux. It wasn't ready for the bigtime for a couple of years, but that didn't stop people using it. Budgets were tight, and students would happily admin things pretty much for free.

AH - they're multiplying. I've just got 3 mails telling me about the post I've just made. If the thread continues much longer, then I predict things could get even worse! It'll be an O(N^2) inbox from N posts in the thread!

The job editing the English language webpages for the department was from Oct 1993 to Nov 1993 (a hard end-point, I never spent more than 2 months at each site). And for that, I definitely used rlogin from my desktop linux box into another linux box and edited the files there. I didn't get friendly with all the sysadmins from that place until about Feb 1994, and when we were talking infra issues, I found out they were running a small cluster of linux machines for the webserver (and my pages were still visible there). That would have been May 1994 at the absolute latest. Maybe they had migrated in those 6 months, but I doubt it, as the biggest linux loons had been there the whole time.

Linux's net/ethernet/eth.c has an interesting comment:
* Version: @(#)eth.c 1.0.7 05/25/93
and that version number and date's after Alan had already done a whole bunch of fixes.

Can you really not guess what webserver? httpd. Sheesh, was your head in a hole in the ground at the time?
Protocol? Erm, HTTP over a TCP transport over IP - does that really surprise you?

It seems people who are unwilling to associate themselves with their comments are as useless here as everywhere else.

The original AC thought an RFC created in 1984 didn't exist until 10 years later. If you think I'm less credible than that, you're just as clueless as your anonymity implies.

The figure I've seen for active www sites was 1000 rather than 500, but yes, the site was almost certainly in that first 1000 as I remember in 1995-ish trying to extrapolate back to what the figure would have been, just as the web was beginning to catch on more widely.

I'm sorry that a poor little country of only 5 million people might just possibly be better at being at the cutting edge than wherever you live.

There's no polite way of putting this, so I won't mince words - you're full of crap.

I'm wondering how I was hanging around on the same IRC network as the likes of Jarkko Oikkarinen, and posting to usenet back in 1993 from my linux machine at work, without the technologies you claim you don't exist. Next time I'm having a beer with Ari Lemmke, I'll ask him if he shares this hallucination too, of a mystical wonderous land that actually has RFC 894 unlike the universe you exist in which doesn't appear to have it.

Great stuff, Bryan - thanks!

One issue - when I reply to someone who replied to me, I get notified about a new reply, namely my own. I don't need to know I've just replied to (a reply to) myself.

The only thing I use(d) yahoo for was email, have done for a very long time. I never felt shamed by having such an address. As someone who had their first website in 1993 (yes, hosted on a linux machine), I really don't think "noob" particularly applies.

However, the reason I don't trust them further than I can spit them is that as of about a year ago, they made it impossible for me to log into my account. Initially, due to me not wanting to run their shitty javascript, and not wanting to upgrade to their shitty beta site, but now, even if I drop my scripting prejudices, I still can't get in. So fuck'em, if they can't do something as simple as letting me log in, they I don't trust them to do *anything* correctly, even if their intentions are good, which is a premise I've seen no basis for.

Ah, OK, I had misinterpreted the explanation (if high is low, and low is high - what's nothing?). Thanks.

But why Borda anyway? There's no way to say "1" for X, "4" for Y, and "8" for everything else.

Honestly, I have *zero* trust in almost all of those other ones, why should I be expected to distinguish between them?

"... expected standards for secure code. This includes issues such as lack of comments ..."

I've worked in some security-related areas, and I hate 99% of comments. Make the code intrinsically readable and obvious. If you have to explain your code, then it's not written clearly enough. And heaven forfend that the comment says something nice and reassuring, yet the code itself actually has a flaw - that comment would be worse than useless, it's downright dangerous.

Whilst it doesn't apply to heartbleed, large number of problems can be detected with static analysis.

OK, Coverity doesn't (yet) spot heartbleed, but it soon will:
: http://security.coverity.com/blog/2014/Apr/on-detecting-heartbleed-with-static-analysis.html

OpenSSL have a history of deliberately ignoring the results of such scans:
: http://openssl.6102.n7.nabble.com/Coverity-coverage-of-OpenSSL-td42651.html

I agree that the false positives are annoying, but you can mark them as false positives, and you won't be warned about them again.