Would love it if there were some kind of markup standard that password managers could read to determine the site's password rules when generating strong passwords.
I have the problem now with sites that don't tell you their password policy - I'll try several times to generate a password in LastPass and then end up with several entries for the same site, which I now need to inspect to determine which one is the one I don't want to delete. Hugely annoying.
I would love it if there were FCC-mandated password handling standards, like a (long) minimum max length, a (wide) mimimum permissible charset, and forbidden plaintext storage. It's arguably an issue of national security.
Jurisdiction over which agency gets to do "cyber" stuff has been an open question for the last thirty years. You can make good arguments that it should be covered by the FBI, NSA, DHS, ATF, the secret service, etc etc.
(Yes, the Secret Service! The famous raid on Steve Jackson Games back in 1990 was actually carried out by Secret Service agents, who thought that GURPS Cyberpunk was an actual hacking manual.)
There sort of is. In HTML5, text-based form elements have a new "pattern" attribute which takes a regular expression that matches valid input, so the browser can do client-side validation without using JavaScript to intercept the form before it's posted and such. Assuming the site developers have bothered to implement it on their site, then theoretically a password manager could use that to determine valid characters for generated passwords (or, at least, invalid ones). I don't know if any of them actually do this, though.
The thing is, how many sites are going to have developers clued-up enough to incorporate this markup, but not clued-up enough to avoid stupid password policies that break password managers?
We only run into trouble because sites incorporate silly requirements like "you must have at least one symbol, even if your password is 48 characters long." Fixing that really seems like the better and more attainable goal.
This is odd, but not catastrophic. If I understand right, Zigbee is open, so what's to stop the bulbs working with a third-party controller hub? Say, a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee interface?
It's the other way around. People want to use their non-Hue lights with the Hue bridge, which is no longer possible. Now it means having to buy another bridge that supports both.
Yes, you can do this. And for the most part you can control your lights from your own software. I was looking at the protocol using a HackRF One to see how easy or hard it would be to build a replacement hub controller. I don't know if there are any patent issues however, that would be something that you couldn't really code around.
It's an open standard, which Philips hypocritically helped write, so there shouldn't be any patent issues other than the normal ones. You can even get it online from http://www.zigbee.org/zigbee-for-developers/applicationstand... . It's clickwrapped, but rather extant.
I love the battery-less Hue Tap switches, but the Hue hub's REST API doesn't let me subscribe to button presses. My plan is to make my own controller software and take the Hue hub out of the system.
Unfortunately, the manufacturer of the RaspBee neglected to document how to talk to the stock firmware. When I asked support, they suggested running their (closed-source) software on my Pi and then using its REST API, which doesn't support subscribing to events either.
The RaspBee does support loading custom firmware, so my next step might be writing some.
I'm always utterly blown away by the humility that John shows in his questions and his answers. The development world would be a better place with a much larger proportion of developers like him.
I've worked with some real ego-centric assholes that think of themselves as rock-star developers yet probably haven't done a tenth of what this guy has done.
I disagree with these points on some general levels, even though for this particular product at this particular price point I can see the raionale somewhat:
1) Consumers might be moving away from desktops, but I don't know that creators are so much yet. However I think that's a moot point - desktop, laptop, tablet, whatever. It's not about form factor it's about computing power and it wouldn't surprise me if the latest iPad Pro or even top-end smartphone had the computing power to do these calculations locally.
2) My 3D Printing Systems UP Mini does the heavy lifting on my local PC and then sends that data off to the printer where the printer stores it in memory. Once the print job is sent off and the printer starts going, there's no longer any need for the PC - you can shut the PC down and leave the printer going.
3) Easily solved with a local Wi-Fi connection. Printers (the paper kind) have had this problem solved for ages now. There was no complicated setup for my cheap printer with Wi-Fi; my desktop just found it.
4) Job queue time may vary sure, but once it's sent to the printer it shouldn't matter.
5) This isn't all-or-nothing. What's stopping this from being an optional feature?
"Now that my 3D printer is driven from the cloud...." That doesn't preclude core functionality being available locally. It does mean that if this start-up doesn't succeed, you'll be left with an expensive paperweight until someone writes open backend firmware.
I really love the idea of this product and I can see how cloud connection can be a real enabler (look at what it's done for voice recognition on low-power devices, for example). I'm just really sceptical of this type of cloud-connected device as a general good thing for consumers - there are both good and bad sides to this. We really do need to be asking these questions and getting proper answers and assurances that as consumers we're getting something that's of benefit to us and that we won't be abandoned.
I've just had a look at the Marfan page (http://www.marfan.org/about/signs) and there's a lot that I seem to match there: long skinny body type, all my fingers are double jointed (not as flexible though as in some of those photos), flat feet, crowded teeth, I had congenital cataracts and also early-onset (around 2 years of age) glaucoma and had a spontaneous pneumothorax when I was around 18 (which wasn't severe but did recur once).
Wondering if I should have the test. Well aware of the tendency to see oneself in medical articles though!
I have the problem now with sites that don't tell you their password policy - I'll try several times to generate a password in LastPass and then end up with several entries for the same site, which I now need to inspect to determine which one is the one I don't want to delete. Hugely annoying.