Just to key in on the overlap between FOSS and privacy, because the source code for the software is open, it means that anyone can take a peek at how everything is running under the hood (among other things). It becomes possible to verify that software is storing data locally and properly encrypting when applicable (as opposed to blindly trusting the software’s author and or lawyers).

It may also be a fun fact that best practice in encryption is to open source your algorithms. The helps safeguard against backdoors and mistakes/ errors that could compromise the security of the algorithm. Much for similar reasons as above, as it allows the security community to check your math (in a field where it is incredibly easy to get your math wrong).

Enh, the tech space is very much innovate or die. So yeah, they could probably throw everything in maintenance mode and make a reduced headcount work, but if AWS goes stagnant it’s entirely likely that Amazon goes the way of IBM and Motorol. Especially when someone (likely, Microsoft or Google) comes to take a slice of the AWS market share.

I don’t know about a min length; setting a lenient lower bound means that any passwords in that space are going to be absolutely brute force-able (and because humans are lazy, there are almost certainly be passwords clustered around the minimum).

I very much agree with the rest though, it’s unnerving when sites have a low max length. It almost feels like advertising that passwords aren’t being hashed, and if that’s the case there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that they’re also salted. Really restrictive character sets also tell me that said site / company either has super old infra or doesn’t know how to sanitize strings (or entirely likely both)…

I’m not sure if it counts as underground (it’s been around for ages), but if you’ve never thought about how your shoelaces contribute to the overall fit and comfort of your shoe, I’d recommend giving Ian’s shoelace site a visit.

Absolutely correct! I was mostly trying word it so that it was less “annoying rule follower pontificates the virtues of morality” and more “it doesn’t matter how you justify it, or what you think you’re doing, the university will see it as cheating and will act accordingly”, plus people tend to be more receptive to advice when they don’t feel like they’re being attacked.

On the anecdotal side, my college job was doing desk-side IT support for one of the deans offices at my University. One of our roles was recording Academic Integrity Policy Hearings (basically a so you got caught meeting, where everyone has a chance to tell their side of the story to a panel of faculty members and they’ll decide the punishment, usually ranging from zeroing out the assignment to expulsion) as a CYA for the university in the event someone decided to break out the lawyers. I saw so, so, many students hauled into over Cheg related offenses.

Hell, one of my best friends got burned because another student helped them with some Themo homework and was using Chegg (unbeknownst to my friend).

Uhhhh, Cheg can be… problematic in academic circles, many universities view it as cheating and will enact harsh penalties (in line with their academic integrity policies) if you get caught using it.

I know this reads like a “don’t get caught” statement, but I’d advise that you’d be much better off getting homework help at your university’s tutoring center(s) or professor/ TA’s office hours.

You raise very valid points, and water usage (and over allocation) is a huge issue but it is worth mentioning that Arizona has fairly consistent and predictable weather, decently reliable power grids (with access to cleaner energy sources like solar, hydro, and nuclear), and is pretty seismically stable.

Don’t get me wrong, water consumption is going to be a huge issue once these plants really get going, but I don’t think it’s entirely stupid and nonsensical to park them where they did.

Uhh, I may not be the sharpest software developer in the shed, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking for here. By the sound of it, you’re looking to build and deploy an entire e-commerce website without any JavaScript at all, correct? Which makes me more than a little curious about what you’re expecting to use instead.

Agreed! I had a math professor once say that epiphanies usually happen in one of the three B’s: Bed, Bathroom, and Bus. There really is something magical about stepping away to let your brain chew on a problem.

Olan set out to make something amazing, and boy did he deliver and then some. The theme of wanting to be remembered is just so deeply human and resonant, you can really tell that the team poured their soul into this one. I’d love to see this become a full series!

I don’t think duckduckgo has a cached view (since the results tend to be a mix of the in house crawler and other sources, like bing), but I like cachedview.com for accessing Google’s cache (or the archived instance if Google doesn’t happen to have it).