Agreed, it’s a very bad design. If your school speed limit covers most of the daylight hours on weekdays, is the implicit suggestion that it’s fine to drive faster on weekends and during nighttime? The street should be rebuilt to enforce the desired speed limits, not with paint or signs.
Oh, we’re talking about the letters on the glass. My bad lol
A few months ago, my library gained a copy of Cybersecurity For Small Networks by Seth Enoka, published by No Starch Press in 2022. So I figured I’d have a look and see if it it included modern best-practices for networks.
It was alright, in that it’s a decent how-to guide for a novice to set up sensible, minimum network fortifications. But it only includes an overview of how those fortifications work, without going into the additional depth needed to fine-tune or optimize them for specific environments. So if the reader has zero experience with network security, it’s a worthwhile read. But if you’ve already been operating a network with defenses for a while, there’s not much to gain from this particular text.
Also, the author suggests that IPv6 should be disabled, which is a terrible idea. Modern best-practice is not to pretend IPv6 doesn’t exist, but to assure that firewalls and other defenses are configured to handle this traffic. There’s a vast difference between “administratively reject IPv6 traffic in/out of the WAN” and “disable IPv6 on all devices and pray no one ever connects an IPv6-enabled device”.
You might have a look at other books available from No Starch Press, though.
I lost it when coming across this commit: https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/commit/67c68e6dc24f36b266427034d016fb86ef4d486c
It’s also worth noting that switching from ANSI to ISO 216 paper would not be a substantial physical undertaking, as the short-side of even-numbered ISO 216 paper (eg A2, A4, A6, etc) is narrower than for ANSI equivalents. And for the odd-numbered sizes, I’ve seen Tabloid-size printers in America which generously accommodate A3.
For comparison, the standard “Letter” paper size (aka ANSI A) is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. (note: I’m sticking with American units because I hope Americans read this). Whereas the similar A4 paper size is 8.3 inches by 11.7 inches. Unless you have the rare, oddball printer which takes paper long-edge first, this means all domestic and small-business printers could start printing A4 today.
In fact, for businesses with an excess stock of company-labeled #10 envelopes – a common size of envelope, measuring 4.125 inches by 9.5 inches – a sheet of A4 folded into thirds will still (just barely) fit. Although this would require precision folding, that’s no problem for automated letter mailing systems. Note that the common #9 envelope (3.875 inches by 8.875 inches) used for return envelopes will not fit an A4 sheet folded in thirds. It would be advisable to switch entirely to A series paper and C series envelopes at the same time.
Confusingly, North America has an A-series of envelopes, which bear no relation to the ISO 216 paper series. Fortunately, the overlap is only for the less-common A2, A6, and A7.
TL;DR: bring reams of A4 to the USA and we can use it. And Tabloid-size printers often accept A3.
That book sounds very insightful. I hope my public library accepts my purchase suggestion.
I will admit that my familiarity with private law outside the USA is almost non-existent, except for what I skimmed from the Wikipedia article for the Inquisitorial system. So I had assumed that private law in European jurisdictions would follow the same judge-intensive approach. Rereading the article more closely, I do see that it really only talks about criminal proceedings.
But I did some more web searching, and found this – honestly, extremely convenient – article comparing civil litigation procedure in Germany and California (the jurisdiction I’m most familiar with; IANAL). The three most substantial differences I could identify were the judge’s involvement in: serving papers, discovery, and depositions.
Serving legal notice is the least consequential difference between California and Germany, but it seems that the former allows any qualified adult to chase down the respondent (ie person being sued) and deliver the notice of a lawsuit – hence the trope of yelling “you have been served” and then throwing a stack of papers at someone’s porch – on behalf of the complainant (person who filed the lawsuit). Whereas German courts take up the role themselves for notifying the complainant. Small difference, but notable.
In Germany, the court, and not the plaintiff, is required to serve the complaint on the defendant without undue delay, which is usually immediately after it has been filed with the court.
Next, discovery and pleadings in Germany appear to be different from the California custom. It seems that German courts require parties to thoroughly plead their positions first, and only afterwards will discovery begin, with the court deciding what topics can be investigated. Whereas California allows parties to make broad assertions that can later be proven or disproven during discovery. This is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and a big reason this is done is because any argument that isn’t raised during trial cannot be reargued during a later appeal.
I believe that discovery in California and other US States can get rather invasive, as each party’s lawyers are on a fact-finding mission where the truth will out. The general limitation on the pleadings in California is that they still must be germane to the complaint and at least be colorable. This obviously leads to a lot of pre-trial motions, as the targeted party will naturally want to resist a fishing expedition during discovery.
Lastly, depositions in Germany involve the judge(s) a lot more than they would in California. Here, depositions are off-site from the court and conducted by the deposing party, usually video-taped and with all attorneys present, plus a privately hired stenographer, with the deposing attorney asking questions. Basically, after a deposition order is granted by the judge, the judge isn’t involved unless during the deposition, the process is interrupted in a way that would violate the judge’s order. But the solution to that is to simply phone the judge and ask for clarification or a new order to force the deposition to continue.
Whereas that article describes the German deposition process as always occuring in court, during trial, and with questions asked by the judge(s). The parties may suggest certain questions by way of constructing arguments which require the judge(s) to probe in a particular direction. But it’s not clear that the lawyers get to dictate the exact questions asked.
In contrast, depositions in Germany are conducted by the judge or the panel of judges and only during trial.
I grant you that this is just an examination of the German court proceedings for private law. And perhaps Germany may be an outlier, with other European counterparts adopting civil law but with a more adversarial flavor for private law. But I would say that for Germany, these differences indicate that their private law is more inquisitorial overall, in stark contrast to the California or USA adversarial procedure for private litigation.
You are absolutely correct: this fragile experiment called democracy will not survive if the citizenry becomes ambivalent about its institutions, allowing corrupt officials and other enablers of authoritarianism to take root.
If you are an American and that prospect disturbs you, then you need to help strengthen and guard the institutions that protect the core American values. Nobody owes you a democracy.
For some ideas of what to do, this post by Teri Kanefield has a list of concrete actions that you can take: https://terikanefield.com/things-to-do/
I am usually not wont to defend the dysfunction presently found in the USA federal (and state-level) judiciary, but I think this comparison to the German courts requires a bit more context. Generally speaking, the USA federal courts and US States adopt the adversarial system, originally following the English practice in both common law and equity. This means the judge takes on a referee role, and a plaintiff and a defendant will make their best, most convincing arguments.
I should clarify that “common law” in this context refers to the criminal matters (akin to public law), and “equity” refers to person-versus-person disputes (akin to private law), such as contracts.
For the adversarial system to work, the plaintiff and defendant need to be sufficiently motivated (and nowadays, well-monied) to put on good arguments, or else they’re just wasting the court’s time. Hence, there is a requirement (known as “standing”) where – grossly oversimplifying – the plaintiff must be the person with the most to gain, and the defendant must be the person with the most to lose. They are interested parties who will argue vigorously.
Of course, that’s legal fiction, because oftentimes, a defendant might be unable to able to afford excellent legal counsel. Or plaintiffs will half-ass or drag out a lawsuit, so that it’s more an annoyance to the opposite party.
In an adversarial system, it is each party’s responsibility to obtain subject-matter experts and their opinions to present to the court. The judge is just there to listen and evaluate the evidence – exception: criminal trials leave the evaluation of evidence to the jury.
Why is the USA like this? For the USA federal courts, it’s because it’s part of our constitution, in the Case or Controversy Clause. One of the key driving forces for drafters of the USA Constitution was to restrict the powers of government officials and bureaucrats, after seeing the abuses committed during the Colonial Era. The Clause above is meant to constrain the unelected judiciary – which otherwise has awe-inducing powers such as jailing people, undoing legislation, and assigning wardship or custody of children – from doing anything unless some controversy actually needed addressing.
With all that history in mind, if the judiciary kept their own in-house subject-matter experts, then that could be viewed as more unelected officials trying to tip the scale in matters of science, medicine, computer science, or any other field. Suddenly, landing a position as the judiciary’s go-to expert could have broad reaching impacts, despite no one in the federal judiciary being elected.
In a sense, because of the fear of officials potentially running amok, the USA essentially “privatizes” subject matter experts, to be paid by the plaintiff or defendant, rather than employed by the judiciary. The adversarial system is thus an intentional value judgement, rather than “whoopsie” type of thing that we walked into.
Small note: the federal executive (the US President and all the agencies) do keep subject matter experts, for the limited purpose of implementing regulations (aka secondary legislation). But at least they all report indirectly to the US President, who is term-limited and only stays 4 years at a time.
This system isn’t perfect, but it’s also not totally insane.
Can you please kindly link to that article, if it’s publicly available?
For other people’s benefit and my own:
PWA: Progressive Web App
I’m a fan of Pelican for static blog generation from Markdown files. Separating template and content into CSS/HTML and md files, and having it all in a Git repo for version control, is only a few hundreds of kilobytes. Lightweight to work on, and lightweight to deploy. It’s so uncomplicated, I can probably pick right back up if I left it alone for ten years.
I’ve always wanted a power switch on my hot glue gun but after seeing that, I think I’m now perfectly fine with the existing situation, lest I monkey’s paw my way to an even worse implementation.
I agree with the accepted answer that a toggle button UI – when unadorned with any other indicators – should be avoided due to the ambiguity. The fact that this question is being asked is an indicator of non-uniform consensus.
In American English, the verb “to table” means “to remove from discussion entirely”, which is almost entirely the opposite meaning from English spoken anywhere else in the world, where it means “to bring forward for discussion”. As a result of this US-specific confusion, there’s not much choice besides either clarifying through context or avoiding sentence constructions using that verb, at least when speaking to or with other Americans.
I think the same applies here: the small UI space savings is not worth the inevitable UX confusion this would cause, without modifications.
Yay Colemak!
I use both Colemak and Qwerty, with one layout at home and the other at work. I have carried the caps lock remapping to Qwerty, although I’ve been mulling whether to replace that with the Esc function, since I use vim a lot. I never learned vim arrow keys, so no change needed there.
Agreed that it works well for other languages besides English.
I almost wanted to call the linked post as clickbait, based on its terse title and the bold claim made in the subheader (“I’m not going to cryptographically sign my git commits, and you shouldn’t either”). But there was just enough substance to present and justify a colorable argument in the post. It just wasn’t the same argument presented in the title, and took me way too long to determine what the grievance was directed at.
Worthwhile read? Eh, not until its position is clarified to not be confusing.
Just to be clear, this is about how signed commits appear in GitHub, right? Native Git signing is as robust – and complex – as it’s always been, with the user having to keep their own GPG private and public keys. Managing these keys is the same process for signing outbound emails or preparing to receive inbound encrypted emails, with the attendant usability quirks like dealing with key revocation.
The author’s main gripe appears to be with how GitHub presents a veneer of trust based on the commit signature, but not in pursuit of a cognizance security objective. That the veneer of “verified” could be confused with “safe to compile/execute” could regress overall security of users. I think this position is well-supported by the examples given.
But what I don’t see is how this relates to Git signing at-large, when GitHub is not involved. The title of this Lemmy post and the blog post is “Unsigned Commits” and the author only ever mentions the consequences as they pertain to GitHub. Yet the same concern as the author’s post can apply here: users who don’t recognize that this is a GitHub-specific grievance might think ALL Git commit signing is useless, which is wrong. And that mistake would regress overall security of all Git users.
An example of Git signing outside of GitHub is the Linux kernel. Note that “PGP keys” are what GPG uses to sign the commits; that’s not confusing at all.
PGP helps ensure the integrity of the code that is produced by the Linux kernel development community and, to a lesser degree, establish trusted communication channels between developers via PGP-signed email exchange.
Ever since the 2011 compromise of core kernel.org systems, the main operating principle of the Kernel Archives project has been to assume that any part of the infrastructure can be compromised at any time. For this reason, the administrators have taken deliberate steps to emphasize that trust must always be placed with developers and never with the code hosting infrastructure, regardless of how good the security practices for the latter may be.
As the Linux folks so eloquently put it, and in firm agreement with the author of this post, the infrastructure (kernel.org or GitHub) cannot be trusted over indefinite timescales, and problems will arise eventually. In disagreement with the author but in agreement with the Linux people, signed commits decentralize the trust, making the infra less useful to attack.
I personally still encourage Git signing, just like I would encourage email signing and encryption. But not just because GitHub is telling me I should. Every email and commit I produce, I should sign; the author here says I shouldn’t, and I disagree. Signatures are valid for a specific purpose, until the day the signature key is revoked, which I can always do, however annoying.
TL;DR: Git signing is fine. What GitHub built atop native Git signing is questionable. Do sign stuff, but for real reasons, not just because GitHub tells you to.
TIL F5 iRules. I suppose I’m glad my career didn’t into NetOps.
This reminds me of a post I once saw, describing a person who (ab)used the C preprocessor to make an Old English version of C. It was clever, but obviously unmaintainable in a collaborative setting.
If this DreamBerd language is statically compiled, then it might still rank slightly above Tcl, a language I’ve had to use in production and despised every moment of it.
There will always be some instructors that are more dogmatic than pragmatic. All the same, there will be instructors that have pearls of wisdom to offer. Regarding the “break” and “continue” keywords, this lays somewhere in the middle.
One of the purposes of higher-level programming language is to remove from the low-level, machine-specific language of assembly, by offering other, more descriptive constructs, like “while”, “for”, and “switch”. In the C language, “break” is almost mandatory in a “switch” statement but only occasionally shows up in a “for” loop, excepting drivers. In Python, “break” only exists in loops, but there are lots of loops which can be replaced more efficiently with comprehensions, so “break” can be a sign of poorly organized logic.
If you can specify which programming language you’re learning, it would help to understand what your instructor might have meant to teach.
On one hand, I’m pleased that C++ is answering the call for what I’ll call “safety as default”, since as The Register and everyone else since pointed out, if safety constructs are “bolted on” like an afterthought, then of course it’s not going to have very high adoption. Contrast this to Rust and its “unsafe” keyword that marks all the places where the minimum safety of the language might not hold.
On the other hand, while this Safe C++ proposal adopts a similar notion of an “unsafe” context, it also adds a “safe” keyword, to specify that a function will conform to compile-time safety checks. But as the proposal readily admits:
While the proposal will surely continue to evolve before being implemented, I forsee a similar situation as in C where code that lacked initial const-correctness will struggle to work with newer code and libraries. In this case, it would be the “unsafe” keyword that proliferates everywhere just to call older, unsafe code from newer, safe callers.
Rust has the advantage that there isn’t much/any legacy Rust to upkeep, and that means the volume of unsafe code in Rust proframs is minimal, making them safer overall today. But for Safe C++ code, there’s going to be a lot of unsafe legacy C++ code and that reduces the safety benefit for programs overall, for the time being
Even as this proposal progresses, the question of whether to start rewriting some code anew in Rust remains relevant. But this is still exciting as a new option to raise the bar in memory safety in C++.