jamoes

Like most other readers here, my initial reaction is "Thanks, I hate it." I especially hate the assertion that they're increasing customization when in reality they've steadily been removing/hiding real customization options (e.g. compact theme, UrlBar.preventClickSelectsAll).

But, on further consideration I see the value. This feature isn't for power users. The goal of this feature is to increase chances that normal everyday users will make Firefox their daily-driver browser. For many people, having a custom colored browser will be a deciding factor to keep them using Firefox. This is why they didn't call it "themes", which is a techy word that would cause many people to gloss-over and ignore it altogether.

And, in reality, Firefox is still the most customizable browser for power-users. This feature doesn't remove userChrome.css, it doesn't stop users from editing thousands of options via about:config. It doesn't prevent hardcore power users from editing omni.ja to restore preventClickSelectsAll functionality.

So frankly, I hope this feature can help increase Firefox's market share by even a little bit. The more people using Firefox - even if they're not power-users - the better for the future of the open web.

I just checked a half dozen exchanges-- none call it "Bitcoin Cash" in their interfaces

Which exchanges did you check? I just checked some myself, and Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Gemini all use the full name "Bitcoin Cash".

Open source projects often fork. To take one such example, years ago X.org forked from XFree86. Both projects considered themselves implementations of the X Window System. Can you imagine if XFree86 supporters insisted that X.org not be allowed to use "X" in their name? If these supporters invented their own name for X.org, say "Zorg", made outlandish claims that "X.org" sounded offensive to them, and that they earnestly believed that "Zorg" was a better name for the project, even though no one in the project itself referred to it by that name. Would you not agree that those using the term "Zorg" in this example are using manipulative language?

Another way to look at this: the difference between small-blockers and big-blockers is a deep philosophical divide, much like what often occurs in politics. Imagine trying to have a civil political discussion with someone that has different political beliefs than you, and that person keeps using loaded terminology, rather than neutral terminology. You can imagine that under these circumstances, it would be increasingly difficult to keep the conversation civil, and you'd be well within your rights to ask your interlocutor to use neutral terminology. If they refused, it would be a reflection on their lack of civility, not yours.

Gold has had a widely agreed upon definition for thousands of years. Bitcoin is a ~decade old open source project with a clearly established philosophical divide between small-blockers and big-blockers. In other open source project variants, small name changes like adding/changing a suffix or prefix are common, why would Bitcoin be the exception?

Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.

Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.

The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.

a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash"

"Knock-off" is a curious word choice. Are you under the impression that someone owns the term "Bitcoin"?

I'm curious why you chose to use the term "bcash" to refer to BCH. No exchanges or mainstream projects use that term to refer to BCH. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used as a pejorative, so it seems strange that you'd use it here.

As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

And likewise, BTC fees are also at a local maximum[1]. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to actually scale the BTC blockchain since the last bull run. Onchain transactional capacity is the same as it was 2 years ago (limited to ~400k tx/day globally). Major n^2 transaction validation bottlenecks still remain within the Bitcoin Core software. With no plans to address these bottlenecks and increase onchain capacity, the fundamentals of BTC scaling haven't changed at all since the last time the market went boom and then bust.

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Also see https://superuser.com/questions/540851/go-back-to-not-select... for details on how to disable the clickSelectsAll behavior.

This issue is frankly far more important than the style changes they made. It's a muscle-memory issue that drastically affects daily usage. I was so desperate to restore the sane behavior of not selecting everything on a single click that I was recompiling firefox prior to discovering this workaround.

My interpretation is they're saying that Chromium's address bar code is complex deeply integrated with many other parts of the code-base (including many parts that interact with Google's search APIs). On the other hand, Firefox's address bar code exposes a simple javascript API. This means that making and maintaining custom modifications to the address bar is easier with Firefox.

All I did was post a picture which provides direct evidence of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

A government killing thousands of people absolutely has a bearing on reality, and nothing about it is "meme-like".

This does a a good job at showing the huge number of people protesting in Hong Kong: https://gfycat.com/relievedcornychrysomelid-timelapse

Here's some direct evidence of the atrocity that is the Tiananmen Square massacre: https://i.imgur.com/E3D9BuH.jpg.

I'm sure you've seen the infamous "tank man" picture, which provides direct evidence that the PRC rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square. The above picture isn't as iconic, but it shows what the PRC did with those tanks: they crushed and killed anyone in their path.

Ulbricht never presented a defense for the murder-for-hire charge because the charge was dropped and never went to trial. Ulbricht has been sentenced to double-life in prison for all non-violent charges.

Looking at libgcrypt's patch [1], it looks like the mitigation technique they're using is to blind the private key and message hash with a random number before performing point addition, and then unblinding the result of the point addition. This unfortunately requires an extra 3 point multiplication operations, so it probably isn't a good solution where performance is critical.

According to the article, the private key information is leaked through memory caches, so it looks like libgcrypt's solution just ensures that the data written to memory caches is random, rather than leaking the private key.

Also according to the article, libsecp256k1 isn't vulnerable, and they still only do 2 point multiplications [2] (compared to libgcrypt's 5 point multiplications). So it is possible to mitigate this attack efficiently.

[1] https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2018q2/0004...

[2] https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/blob/master/src/ec...

These are the same tired arguments that have been brought many times before in the previous few years. What's the point of an article like this that contributes nothing to the discourse?

It’s the job of the SEC and other regulators to protect ordinary investors from misleading and fraudulent schemes. It’s time we gave them the legislative authority to do their job.

Ah, I see, it looks like he's trying to drum up support for regulations that would help the banking-industrial complex that he's a part of.

They actively censored and silenced people who were complaining.

Forget the issues with design. The active censorship by both Reddit admins and power-hungry moderators is the real issue that Reddit is facing. Reddit used to be a bastion of free-flowing ideas and discussion. Now it's a hive of groupthink and curated brand-friendly content.

I still frequent Reddit because it has enough network-effect to still be worthwhile to me. But that can change on a dime, often triggered by something unrelated, like a UI re-design (e.g. like what happened Digg).

Yep, this is exactly the point economist Julian Simon made in his essay, "Can the Supply of Natural Resources - Especially Energy - Really Be Infinite? Yes!" [1]

This exert from the conclusion sums up his argument well:

Incredible as it may seem at first, the term "finite" is not only inappropriate but is downright misleading when applied to natural resources, from both the practical and philosophical points of view. As with many important arguments, the finiteness issue is "just semantic." Yet the semantics of resource scarcity muddle public discussion and bring about wrongheaded policy decisions.

[1] http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...

LN tx's are actually bitcoin tx's.

This is an oversimplification. LN transactions have much different properties than regular bitcoin transactions. Most notably, LN transactions require the user (or someone they trust) to be online in order to verify that they aren't being defrauded by someone broadcasting and earlier state of the payment channel.

Bitcoin Cash is fast and as low fees but if it manages to scale to something like a Visa network number of transactions, it will be centralized

This just isn't true. Today's commodity hardware can already process gigabyte blocks[1], which corresponds to approximately 3000 tx/s globally. In addition, Moore's and Nielsen's laws will bring down the cost of cpu power and bandwidth, and will enable terrabyte-sized blocks within the next decade or two - all while still running on commodity hardware.

[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-...

The exact order of trustworthiness for the Big Five is irrelevant, because it rounds down to zero for all of them. They all have an NSA backdoor through PRISM - this trumps all other privacy concerns.

It seriously boggles my mind. Snowden revealed that these companies have all given direct access to their data to the NSA. The public's response is to forget about within a few years and to go out an buy microphones and cameras from these companies to put into their homes.

As far as I'm aware, a gun can't shoot a projectile into orbit - no matter how high it shoots a ballistic, the ballistic will eventually come back to earth (unless it gets captured by another body's gravitational field). In order to achieve orbit, you need to impart additional energy onto the object in order for it to get enough velocity to actually orbit.

Soylent hasn't had any quality struggles in the past 6 months that I'm aware of.

12-18 months ago they had multiple issues: sporadic mold under the caps, some people severely allergic to the algae-based ingredient they used, and occasional long shipping delays. But all of those issues have been ironed out while Rhinehart was still CEO.

I honestly think this situation is closer to young Larry Page stepping aside for 10 years while Eric Schmidt ran Google than it is to anything particularly bad that Rhinehart has done. By all measures I've seen, Rosa Labs is highly successful and growing fast.

I don't understand why they don't just create an API that allows extensions to modify userChrome.css. It seems like this would solve a lot of the complaints people have about the new extension framework, and it would be a way better experience for non-tech-savvy users.

good to see justice served

I believe his participation in fraud should have repercussions, but I hardly feel like caging him up for 7 years is "justice". I'm not saying I know what the perfect justice would be, but I think it should be closer to restitution to those he harmed, rather than just punishment.

Ultimately, I think incarceration is a savage practice, and I hope for the day we're able to deliver justice without resorting to locking someone up. I think humanity will eventually look back at our practice of mass incarceration as quite primitive.

The talk really put Karpeles in a slightly better light.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Karpeles bought an insolvent exchange, and specifically chose not to invest the money necessary to bring it back to solvency. He could have simply bought 80,000 BTC in order to make the exchange solvent (Bitcoin was trading at less than a dollar per coin at that time). Instead, he chose to defraud his customers by attempting to make up the missing money by front-running trades and other dishonest tactics.

In addition, he failed to implement basic accounting measures which resulted in him not even being aware of the fact that he would go on to be hacked multiple more times.

Still, it seems like if he had gotten there sooner maybe that weird arbitrage bot could have made up the difference somehow and actually bailed out the company.

The "weird arbitrage bot" was fraud, plain and simple. If it had worked, it would have worked by effectively stealing value from active traders on Mt. Gox. Of course, Karpeles was too incompetent to even implement this fraud correctly, and he ended up inadvertently subsidizing traders rather than stealing from them.

The earth rocket had a significantly larger payload than the lander. IIRC, the lander only carried a crew of ~3 people, whereas the earth rocket had to launch with a larger crew, life-support for an extended stay in space, and enough fuel to get to and from Jupiter.

edit: I forgot that they had another ship waiting for them in LEO already, so maybe the fuel point doesn't apply. But, it's still plausible that the earth rocket had to carry a much larger payload than the lander had to carry.

You can always switch back to upstart if you rely on it. It's a simple process: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers

The reasoning I've heard is that back then memory and disk space were limited and they couldn't sacrifice the extra bytes.

For example, if every file stores three timestamps (mtime, ctime, and atime), then that's an extra 12 bytes per file to store a 64 bit timestamp vs a 32 bit timestamp. If your system has five thousand files on it, that's an extra 60 KB just for timestamps. In 1970, RAM cost hundreds of dollars per KB [1], so this savings was significant.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-historic-price-of-ram/

On the minus side, they can install malware on your machine without your knowledge (even if your disk is encrypted).

If she's 'X', then playing in the bottom-center square will put the game on the path toward a cat's game. Perhaps the puppet is strong AI, and she's trying to teach it that in some games, the only winning move is not to play.