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Unroll.me sells your personal data - stop using them
The company unroll.me that aims to rescue your email inbox from unwanted newsletters and promotional messages with an easy automated unsubscribe service. But they sell you out to advertisers and secures customer emails poorly.
Uber the global ride sharing corporation has devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, by purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me
Bad Firefox
Over Christmas, I upgraded my main box to Slackware64-14.2. I put in a pair of new hard disks (Western Digital Blue 3TB) and noticed quite a speed improvement over the Green 2TB ones they replaced.
Slackware64-14.2 still comes with a broken version of vim (it was broken in 14.1 as well) so I rebuilt the vim-7.3 that comes with 14.0. The breakage is that it doesn't redraw the screen properly when run in a terminal window (xterm).
I've been using Firefox as my main web browser for many years, and I know that for a while it's been sub-optimal in a number of ways, technically and politically, but I've been too busy to try anything else. I did look at PaleMoon a few months back, but never went any further. Slackware64-14.2 comes with Firefox 52.x and it's painfully slow. Recent security updates have made it unusable. It's very sluggish when scrolling, and you can see it repainting. When it renders an image or a video, you can see a bright green box behind it! Forget trying to watch a video.
Perhaps I should upgrade my hardware? I've got an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz, 6 physical cores) on an ASUS M4A 77D motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. It's five years since I bought the CPU.
In the mean time, I thought I'd try rebuilding firefox. Being very short of time nowadays, I decided to use the Slackware build scripts to do the build rather than trying to do it myself from scratch. I figured rebuilding on my own machine might result in slightly faster binaries if the gcc options were more machine-specific.
I set of a build without looking too much at the build script. The SlackBuild script has to run as root (yuck) which makes me nervous, but I went ahead. I made the mistake of firing up a web browser at the same time to do some googling about firefox performance issues at the same time.
Very soon, the machine was using over 2.5GB of swap. No web browser was usable. After taking several minutes for the browser windows to die, I looked at the build script. It was defaulting to doing seven jobs in parallel (-j7). Obviously, there's not much point in filling up your CPUs if you don't have enough RAM to keep them fed. And Firefox is written in C++ (don't get me started - we have 64GB machines at work that aren't big enough).
It turns out that lots of people are frustrated with the speed of newer versions of Firefox, so I decided to try to rebuild version 45.9.0esr that comes with 14.1 on 14.2. I carefully read the SlackBuild script first, and ensured that it only used a maximum of two cores in parallel. That was a success. In a little over 99 minutes I had a nice mozilla-firefox-45.9.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz which installed and is running.
The question is, how much RAM do you need nowadays?
Back to the C++: one of my colleagues is working on a project that runs on 32-bit Linux, and when he was building his C++ which used a lot of template code, it used to run out of memory (address space).
It's amazing how much RAM and CPU cycles (and network bandwidth) you can eat up with C++, Java, Ant and eclipse. There are some particularly perverse ways you can abuse C++ and Ant should be burnt in an incinerator for biological warfare agents.
And who in their right mind designs a build system that depends on an IDE? Eclipse? Argh!
Female Islamic Clerics Issue Fatwa, and more BBC Clickbait
Female Islamic clerics in Indonesia issue rare child marriage fatwa
Female Islamic clerics in Indonesia have issued an unprecedented fatwa against child marriage. The fatwa, which is not legally binding but will be influential, was issued after a three-day congress of female clerics in the country. The clerics urged the government to raise the minimum legal age for women to marry to 18 from the current 16. Indonesia is a majority Muslim country and has among the highest number of child brides in the world. According to the UN's children office Unicef, one in four women in Indonesia marries before the age of 18.
Blue Whale: Should you be worried about online pressure groups?
Reports are circulating in the media of vulnerable people being encouraged to take their own lives by following a series of online challenges. In Russia, the deaths of some teenagers have been linked to the 'Blue Whale' challenge - though these reports have not been confirmed.
The idea is that individuals are invited to complete a number of tasks within a 50-day period. The tasks become increasingly harmful and end with the individual being challenged to take their own life. There is concern that the idea is spreading around the world on social media networks. With questions over whether or not the Blue Whale challenge actually exists, and with no confirmed link between the deaths in Russia and Blue Whale, how concerned should you be?
Tennessee family sues after female janitor charged with raping boy
The family of a teenage boy is seeking $4.5m (£3.4m) in damages after a female janitor allegedly raped him at a Tennessee high school. Jessica Galyon, 29, was arrested in February after she allegedly sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy during school hours. The victim's family filed a lawsuit on Monday against the school district and the contractor who employed her. The boy dropped out of school after the alleged incident. The lawsuit accuses Roane County Schools and Compass One of gross negligence in allowing the alleged rape to occur.
TED 2017: UK 'Iron Man' demonstrates flying suit
Mr Browning said it is easily capable of flying at 200mph (321km/h) and an altitude of a few thousand feet. [...] The suit can currently fly uninterrupted for around 10 minutes. The start-up he founded, Gravity, is working on new technology for the device which Mr Browning said will make the current prototype look "like child's play". Since video of his maiden flight went on YouTube, he has had thousands of views and interest from investors and the UK military.
And finally: 'Overly obese' body sparks Ohio funeral home fire (BBC fat shaming deleted from the sub list)
UC Berkeley Ann Coulter Speech
Soylent's Fiction: Gone Again!
She was gone again, shortly before my elderly cat died. I refer to my muse, of course.
I looked everywhere I could think of, to no avail. Stolen again? I went for a walk, on the lookout for that aged black aged Lincoln with that blonde and that brunette and the kind of weird-looking driver, the ones who stole my muse before. It cost me fifty bucks to get her back!
They had been right about the weather.
But this time, there was no ransom note, or any other sort of clue. Almost every day I would go walking, in search for, if not my muse, an idea for a story.
Maybe she had gotten trapped in a tavern. I went there looking for her, or an inspiration. I had no luck.
Weeks went by with no trace.
I was starting to get worried; had the Grim Reaper taken her, too?
Finally I got a text message: “On vacation, asshole. I’ll be back when you quit crying over that damned cat.”
Marine Le Pen Gaining Ground Against Macron
Drug found to eradicate HIV permanently from infected cells
The anti-fungal drug Ciclopirox causes HIV-infected cells to commit suicide by jamming up the cells’ powerhouse, the mitochondria, according to a new study. And unlike current anti-HIV drugs, Ciclopirox completely eradicates infectious HIV from cell cultures, with no rebound of virus when the drug is stopped.
All blue-eyed humans have a single common ancestor
Research completed in 2008 shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6000 - 10 000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
Can we haz HTML subscript and superscript?
I miss these. They're good for a little better math representation, and '/s' as superscript is worthy, among other similar typographically expressed soupçon of flair.
Rape-adjacent condom removal ("stealthing")
Is there a subreddit for this activity or is it more of Voat territory?
Is Assange rape-adjacent?
'Rape-Adjacent': Imagining Legal Responses to Nonconsensual Condom Removal
"Bruh, I just stealthed a hottie last night!"
*one alimony later*
"..."
