Asking as I figure if anyone has solved this problem with an automatic testing suite or something similar it will be someone who reads HN….

Goal is to test mobile browsers to see which ones work and eliminate avoidable failures. Most of the problems we are flagging to date are javascript-implementation issues or things like auto-transaction “features” on foreign-language browsers that strip events from the page and/or stop them from running very quickly. Anyone have a startup that tackles this sort of problem?

Network Next is working to create a marketplace for speedy Internet connections by identifying the companies that would pay for that kind of service (initially online video game companies) and matching them with the cloud providers, ISPs, CDN companies and others that have built speedy Internet routes. Network Next is continually working to line up the best routes across the Internet by using a real-time auction marketplace much like what Google’s AdWords does for Internet searches. To get around that problem, companies like Google, Amazon and a large number of others have built their own private Internet routes to ensure they can offer real-time services like Stadia.

Michael Schwarz (Graz University of Technology), Florian Lackner (Graz University of Technology), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology)

Today, more and more web browsers and extensions provide anonymity features to hide user details. Furthermore, we present two new side-channel attacks on browser engines to detect the instruction-set architecture and the used memory allocator. We found environment-dependent properties in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and mobile Tor, allowing us to reveal the underlying operating system, CPU architecture, used privacy-enhancing plugins, as well as exact browser version.

On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal. The latter is publicly traded and this deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock getting exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, the company said, and so the $15.7 billion figure is the enterprise value of the transaction, based on the average price of Salesforce’s shares as of June 7, 2019. The company reportedly worked hard to — but ultimately missed out on — buying LinkedIn (which Microsoft picked up instead), and while there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal is also about extending engagement with the customers that Salesforce already has.

In other words, can we create a disk image having exactly the same Linux userland a running container has and then boot from it? The following steps could be done directly on a Linux host machine, but since I use macOS at the moment, I’ll start another Debian container as a builder machine:

We need to create a sufficiently-sized image file first:

Then create a partition on the newly created disk image:

Mount this image, format it using filesystem and copy content of the tar archive to it:

Finally, we need to install the bootloader and unmount the image:

As a result of the steps from above, we will have a disk image in the working directory. For example, one can easily boot a QEMU virtual machine using the image:

Or VirtualBox machine by converting the raw image to VDI disk:

If Debian’s ~400 MB is too much for you, Alpine Linux offers comparable functionality under a total of 100 MB:

I created a project to automate the creation of disk images using Docker.

ProtonMail version 3.16 now offers elliptic curve cryptography, an optional link confirmation warning to guard against phishing attacks, and an “undo move” feature for those moments you accidentally send an email to the trash or the wrong folder. Link confirmation is a new security feature in ProtonMail version 3.16 that can help you identify possible phishing attacks. While link confirmation is enabled, whenever you click on a link in an email, a window first pops up asking whether you’re sure you would like to visit the URL.

Mozilla’s reportedly set to launch a premium version of its revered Firefox browser this fall. In an interview with German media outlet T3N, the company’s CEO, Chris Beard, said that it’s aiming to launch the new version by October, with features like a VPN and secure cloud storage. Now, the company’s thinking of offering some amount of free VPN bandwidth to get you started, and then charge a premium for metered access in the form of a monthly subscription.

On the other hand, “dark-gray” was left alone as it did not exist in HTML or CSS at the time so it was brought in from the X11 definition where it is defined as 66% shade of gray. As a result, the combined CSS color list that prevails on the web today renders “dark-gray” as a significantly lighter shade than “gray” because “dark-gray” came from X11 while “gray” came from HTML. Even today in the latest CSS draft the color “dark-gray” produces a lighter shade than the color “gray”, and just to prove naming things is hard both grey and gray are valid color names.

Matthew Sachs a former undergraduate at Harvard, last year studied individuals who get chills from music to see how this feeling was triggered. The research examined 20 students, 10 of which admitted to experiencing the aforementioned feelings in relation to music and 10 that didn’t and took brain scans of all of them all. Although the study was only small in size Sachs is currently conducting further research which will look at the brains activity when listening to songs that register certain reactions.

Brian Kernighan (Unix legend, the K in K&R and AWK):

my desktop is pretty boring, since it consists of xterm windows to whatever unix system i am using at the moment. On the other desktops I have a couple of konqueror windows open, a kmail and in the system tray a kscd, which currently plays Mozart’s piano Sonata No. 15 in F by Christian Zacharias. So I don’t really feel the need for GUI things like Gnome or KDE

Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD co-founder, later Director of UNIX Technology at Apple):

Oh great, your email arrived early in the morning when I had just logged into my system, so things are a little bleak.