throwaway7767

Most likely it's different normalization. I've seen this before with Mac systems.

Renaming the files to use NFKC normalization fixed it. In python, you could loop through the files and do something like:

  os.rename(originalfilename, unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', originalfilename.decode('utf8')))

I don't think any backup software actually can do the right thing(tm).

Sure it can. In this case, I'd say treating the filename as a bag of bytes is the correct way to go, as that's the way the OS treats them. Translating filenames between character sets should not be part of a backup systems job.

There are valid setups where different software on the same machine might be running with different character sets for legacy reasons. In that case there is no correct way to handle the filenames as text. But treating it as a bag-of-bytes will always work consistently.

Also, the one purpose of a backup system is to back up the files on the filesystem. If it can't back up some files that the OS considers valid, it's the backup software that failed.

IBM's backup software TSM/Spectrum Protect messes this up as well.

If the machine has a UTF-8 encoding (like, say, every modern system), it will try to treat filenames as valid UTF-8 strings and fail to back up files which don't fulfill that assumption. The "solution" is to run the TSM software with a single-byte locale like en_US.

I've seen a number of shops that were silently missing files from backup from old systems because of this problem.

When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the feeling that I don’t want to read it. Sometimes I actually contemplate creating a filter for them so that they bypass my inbox entirely, but for now I sigh, unlock my key, start reading, and with a faint glimmer of hope am typically disappointed.

I wonder what proportion of his plaintext email from strangers is interesting. For me it's close to 0%, mostly spam or people demanding I do free work to fix issues in open source code. I really doubt this has much to do with GPG mails specifically.

Iceland: FRISK (F-PROT)

FRISK was bought by Israeli company Commtouch several years ago. They wound down operations in Iceland to the point that I doubt any real technical work goes on there.

I've been thinking I'd love to have a WARC archive of all my browsing. So many times sites I remember seeing have gone offline, and didn't get archived by the big services. Ideally this has to happen with browser cooperation, so it can save resources from complex dynamic pages, including responses to user action.

This must happen either in the browser or in a proxy like the linked warcprox, in order to catch everything. But the proxy solution is getting less practical every day with key pinning and HSTS.

Maybe a future firefox will have an option to export everything to WARC?

I'm sure it does, but every farmer I've ever met drank raw milk, so I'm not convinced it's so terribly unsafe.

For the record, I don't live in the US, and here they don't pump cattle full of antibacterials. I buy my raw milk at the grocery store, it's legal and vetted by the health authorities.

Also, yes, it is addictive levels of goodness. :)

I find that for many things in life where there are similar but not exact variants, one tends to prefer the variant one first tried despite both variants being potentially equivalent.

I grew up with pasteurized milk. As an adult, I tried unpasteurized milk. The taste is different, was a bit weird at first. After a couple of glasses, I much preferred it over the kind I grew up with (it's just so much better), and it's all I drink now. Normal pasteurized milk tastes like low-fat now (i.e., it tastes like drinking water from a glass that had a little milk in it already).

So I don't think it's quite so simple that everyone always prefers what they grew up with. But you're right that we often need to get used to new kinds of food before we accept it.

The part that you're missing is that HN is not just for tech news, and never has been.

It's quite possible that exterior damage was covered by the insurance of the homeowners/building association. I'd love more information on this case to see if that's true.

If that's the case, it's another example of negative externalities from AirBNB being dumped on the neighbors of a host.

Just as an FYI: Don't watch those videos if you like stuff like leather for example...I love the feeling of leather seats, but I'm looking for synthetic leather in my next car.

Genuinely curious: are animals slaughtered specifically for their leather? I always assumed that cattle raised for food would supply more than enough. If that's the case, buying leather in the current situation should not cause any extra suffering.

As a counter-anecdote, I know a mentally ill person (mostly functional, luckily, but he gets paranoid delusions during the worst times). His family pressed the doctors hard to have him involuntarily committed one time since he refused to go. From what I can tell, the primary effect of that is that he now has an intense distrust of doctors and those family members, and it would be a lot harder for doctors to help him now, even if they tried to approach him with more empathy.

The only people now who can sometimes talk him down when he's having problems are me and a couple of other family members that did not participate in pushing for involuntary committal.

Thats great, but certain populations are being demonstrably soft-genocided in that their birth rates are below replacement level, and internet porn is a leading cause.

So, by deciding not to have children, people are guilty of "soft genocide"?

I've seen some crazy beliefs and weird moral systems on HN but this one takes the cake.

From the same link:

As mentioned, satellites measuring the ice sheet mass have observed a loss of around 200 Gt/year over the last decade.

Looking at the data for one year is not very useful. This is a long term process, as the long article you didn't read went to great pains to explain.

On recent android versions you can allow calling from the lock screen. So just lock your phone and switch to the dialer before handing it over.

You modify the bootloader to grab the password on next decryption. The bootloader is in cleartext on the disk, otherwise the machine couldn't boot.

More advanced versions would involve modifying the BIOS to add a SMM-mode hook. That way the malware runs completely outside the view of the OS. Alternatively, any device with DMA access could have its firmware altered to read sensitive information from memory.

Physical security is an unsolved problem.

Also, yes, we need to make sure photosensitive people can browse more safely (for the same reason we put airbags in cars).

I'm kind of surprised that we don't have "epilepsy mode" in a browser somewhere. Just limit the redraw speed. It'd mess with the browsing experience but much less than a seizure.

Same for TVs, for an epileptic user it's much better for a highly dynamic scene to look washed out or just blur to a whitish color than to show it accurately and potentially cause a seizure.

Interesting. Was this data loss of CrashPlan announced publicly? Did it affect more users?

It's concerning to hear, since I know people using it for backups.

Ah, that's good to hear. It's been a while since I've used SuSE.

Of course, someone has to go first and filesystems never truly get battle-hardened until distros start pushing them. I appreciate that SuSE does this from that perspective. It means when I switch over there will be less bugs. :)

I'm using btrfs as a daily driver on my workstations so I get some experience with the tooling, and also because features like consistent snapshots are really nice to have. Still haven't taken the plunge on the server side, I expect I'll give it a few years until it's considered "boring".

Tor does nothing of the sort. In order to throttle a client, there would need to be a central authority that could identify connections by client, which would very much defeat the purpose of Tor. And besides, how would it deal with multiple Tor clients for the same user?

That said, it's not particularly effective a as a brute-force DoS machine due to the limited bandwidth capacity and high pre-existing utilisation. Higher level DoS by calling heavy dynamic pages is still possible.

The parent didn't specify that the outages were during the period that the scraping was coming from Tor. It's equally possible that it only started affecting availability after they blocked Tor and switched to cloud machines.

All that said, screw people who use Tor for this kind of thing. They're ruining a critical internet service for real users.

Locking it to the bike isn't a good solution if you live in a place where it rains or snows a lot. So you end up having to carry it with you on errands. If you bike a lot, those small inconveniences add up.

I can't imagine fashion sense is much of a reason, that seems like a strawman argument commonly conjured up by helmet laws advocates.

Out of curiosity, is cycling a common mode of transportation where you are from?

I recall seeing studies showing that helmet-laws generally coincided with low use of bicycles. Places where cycling is extremely common (like Denmark and Holland) never seem to have them, and it's uncommon to see cyclists using them unless they're doing something particularly dangerous (riding in traffic, off-road, etc).

No disrespect intended, but my experience is that SuSE has always played fast and loose with the filesystem defaults.

I recall they switched to reiserfs as default at one point. reiserfs was never a good choice for data consistency - the fact that storing a reiserfs image in a file on the host reiserfs filesystem and then doing an fsck on the host FS would corrupt the FS should be a clear signal that there are fundamental problems remaining to be solved.

That said, I'm playing with btrfs on some of my machines, and it seems quite nice. But no way would I risk using it on a production server at this time.

One good argument for it is that a conscript army is unlikely to stage a military coup in a democracy. If the soldiers are more or less random people, they will more or less support the elected government, at least a portion of them.

At the same time, military training involves quite a lot of indoctrination as part of getting people to shut up and follow orders. I'm not sure it's particularly healthy for democracy to send a large part of its citizens to indoctrination camps.

Russia does send military jets regularly into other countries airspace. It happens regularly over Iceland for example[0]. The lie is not in saying it happens, the lie is by omission by selectively reporting it when convenient to make it seem that it's something new or surprising. We always see these stories during periods of increased tensions, suggesting that these flights are a response to recent events, when in fact they have been a standard thing for decades. The other omission is that NATO countries (yes, I know Sweden is not in NATO, I'm talking generally here) do the same for the Russians, and western media never reports on that.

I mean, it's understandable, right? The military has to be prepared for lots of different situations, and in order to properly prepare you need to know your neighbors defenses. Finding out at what point your jets get intercepted tells you a lot about what you can get away with. It would practically be negligent of them not to do it.

As for the submarine issue, I'm not familiar enough with it, but I believe you are right that there are no confirmed cases in recent history. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it's common for Russia and NATO to send subs to probe each others defenses for similar reasons.

[0] http://icelandreview.com/news/2016/09/26/russian-bombers-fly...

Still sounds like a standard customer service response to me, just from a good CSR. "Please feel like you have been heard"? I think that captures it.

I'd love it if this happened, it would make me change my purchasing habits to prefer AMD over Intel. But I'll believe it when I see it, and I can't say this post on their forums changes my assessment of the probabilities at all.

I like to imagine good things too, but I suspect if that happened it would be because company would be in bankruptcy proceedings. The trustee appointed will have a mandate to extract the most money from the carcass of the company, and arranging for work to be done to release a DRM-free patch is definitely not part of that, and I doubt he could legally do it even if he wanted to.

There is also quite some history showing that DRM-content providers do go under, and people do lose access to their "purchased" (rented) items.

Surprisingly, when I tried it, NFS outperformed virtio-9p handily across the board. I really was not expecting that result. Perhaps there is a way to tell the host to assume the VM is the only writer to that the exposed path, so the client can do efficient caching?

My experience using thunderbird on linux is that it's a decent mail client, but I've found it corrupts its search index every few months. Rebuilding the index with my mailbox takes several days.

Also, sometimes it'll just not find certain messages. That also means it's time to clear out and rebuild indexes.

This has been my experience every time I use thunderbird, over many years. I'm not sure what it is about my mailbox that makes me see these issues when others don't.

It's a good program but could use some maintenance loving.

As I understand it, growing tobacco takes a lot of time and effort. You need to bury it and store for some time before it gets good. If growing good quality tobacco was as easy as growing good quality marijuana, I suspect a lot more smokers would do so.