MSE isn't really that good at dealing with PUP though.

I've found doing scans with Malwarebytes, but NOT keeping it running in the background to be rather effective and unobtrusive

Yeah, I'm not surprised. Still, its silly to think that these guys have pure motives.

Third party trackers, like Google Analytics, go against the Privacy Statement of this site and will never be seen here.

Amazing!

Insightful and interesting are very similar and have lots of overlap. Those two also have some overlap with interesting. However informative is usually completely different from funny; a comment may be both, but if you look at slashdot, the difference in the sort of posts that get modded funny is obvious in practice. So basically, the descriptors are still useful, and probably shouldn't be discarded. That said, I think the main reason slashdot has insightful, interesting and informative is just in case someone with mod points thinks a post is informative but not interesting, or interesting but not insightful.

This is in very early development and some critical required supporting technologies for it have not yet been created. In fact, a significant part of this is merely research to improve kevlar. The thing that suppossedly makes this suit "Iron man" like is a "powered exoskeleton", which has yet to be developed and I can't find any details about that.

Wow, deslided is awesome, I'll have to remember that one.

Hrm. I think "locking things down" can only be a serious problem in languages that compile to bytecode (a hard case of The Java Trap ), or languages that undergo regular breaks in compatibillity (I don't think I've ever been aware of a case of this, because that can cause languages to disappear rather fast, if only due to ruining the language's library ecosystem). It can be a problem under other circumstances as well, if the only compiler costs money to buy or it only has a working compiler for certain operating systems. That said, these are lesser problems. The former I believe has generally been recognized as incredibly unwise for anyone seeking to promote a language, and the latter is a problem that will solve itself if the language actually gets used outside of niche domains (in addition to being a significant hurdle to language adoption in its own right).

This doesn't apply to google's languages. This *can* definitely apply to Swift, if they are ultra aggressive about keeping their compiler running on apple-operating systems only. If the API is fully published, and not subject to copyright (Oracle just needs to die), then only (deliberate) implementation quirks, breaks in compatibillity and feature creep can keep someone (especially google) from creating a perfectly fine, working compiler for android, linux, and windows. But if apple doens't delibrately sabotage their language, then that language can really only be good for us.

Finally, to address a side-issue here; ultimately I'm not sure community (especially if run like a standard's committee) development for languages is necessarily the best way to make a language. Sure it has advantages, but I have no problem with someone unilaterally deciding the features of a language as long as I don't have to use it.

And that's why the polls ha ve comments sections :)

I'd say this site, and similar sites as well, have more in common with reddit than a list of recent news stories. Sure you get the news, but the important thing here is the groupthink's reaction to the news. If you wanted an RSS feed, you'd use an RRS feed. But then, that's just how I use the site.

Thanks for that. The list of affected packages is small, the list of affected systems...quite something else really.

While perhaps this is just NIH syndrome, I think we *need* new programming languages to replace the ones we already have. And especially new languages that can replace C.

I largely agree with the C/Python language stack. But C isn't by any means perfect and I feel that some things could really benefit from some re-thinking. C is good, but if thousands and millions of hours are being spent coding in it, even small improvements are worth a lot. Objective-C seemed to me like a good thing, except for being limited to apple-products, because adding classes to C is both simple and powerful. For this reason I've been telling myself I need to check out D for some time. C has a great theme, and I doubt I'll give it up for some time, but I admantly believe people can do better.

And lets not forget ADA, a language that as far as I can tell has never seen its equal. It may not always be what you want, but the sheer power of compile-time checking in that language is amazingly useful. Honestly I think a language like this really needs to come back for coding mission-critical software. Oh how many failures could have been prevented if only people used a tool like ADA! Unfortunately, ADA just isn't as useful as other languages atm, for sheer lack of library and community support.

In short, when programming languages are being used so widely and when so much time is being spent using them, it is completely unreasonable to *not* look for improvements. Improvements in performance (though at the moment that isn't as much of an issue), improvements in error checking and robustness, and improvements in ease of use for faster development time. Even small improvements in any of these can be so valuable. With that in mind, does it really seem so strange that companies on the cutting edge would look to take advantage of their position to try to improve their own abillity to develop programs?

I've tended to find PBS Front-line to be rather insightful on many other issues, so I'm definitely looking forward to what they do with this.

Hrm. While what I wrote makes sense, I should have added that ultimately it is highly difficult and truly unreasonable to retain control of every single piece of code that runs on your machine. All that needs to happen in this case is for some code somewhere to write a single line into an easily writable file in someone's home directory to start logging. That is a flaw, we can do better than that.

Eh, I disagree. It is expected behavior, and it is indeed well known. Nonetheless, it is wrong. An application with user privilege should never have such complete control of an application running with root privileges in a sane, secure environment. Allowing that is asking for privilege escalation. The fact that input information is made so readily available to otherwise unrelated programs just makes it worse.

Back in ~2009 there was a bit of a stir involving the sheer ease of getting the window managers KDE and GNOME to run unintended programs using .desktop files . As far as I can tell, it still works. This is a real problem, with potentially nasty consequences.

Indeed, I presume the unlimited mod points is a temporary measure. If it was not, the scoring system would have to cap out much higher. The site that pipedot is inspired by really did - and still does for the moment - have the best moderation system I have yet seen.

I fully expect drama to come to this site once more people arrive. That said, we are fortunate to not have any major drama even with the amount of people that we have here.

The larger section of the community may not be here, but that can change over time. In the meantime, I'll continue to follow Pipedot closely.

Congratulations on getting this up and running so quickly. From the summary it seems very robust. I look forward to becoming a regular commenter/reader.