Scores of large firms get caught with their keys down, suffering substantial outages because they forgot to track an expiring certificate.

I noticed that my laptop fan would whir loudly while Firefox was active, even if it was "idle" (which is not saying much for a web browser with tens of open tabs). Chrome and Edge would not do this (with the same tabs open) Inspecting Task Manager did not show that it was using excessive CPU time, but if I closed Firefox, the fan would spin down. In order to get peace from the whirring noise, I finally decided to hibernate my laptop when I'm not using it (what a concept. BTW, sleep is no good because Window will eventually wake the laptop up, even if sleep timers are disabled.) I want my Firefox.

I'm glad that someone finally figured it out, though I had doubts the issue would ever be solved.

Perhaps I was one of the "test" population. I had caught Facebook doing this on one of my devices and placed it among the "naughty" apps, only allowing it to run in the foreground and never in the background.

This is just an excuse to get out of the laser printer business. Inkjet cartridges are much more profitable because you MUST replace them at least monthly (or they clog up). Laser cartridges are more complex and expensive, but they last forever or until they run out in a year or so. There are recycling programs for both, but how much energy does it take to recycle hundreds of inkjet cartridges vs. a few toner cartridges? Today's toner cartridges contain all wearable components, including the fuser.

I have a Brother laser printer that's perfect for my needs. It just goes to sleep until I need it, consuming just as much energy as a sleeping inkjet.

I find it ironic that I am reading this and typing this comment from a desktop interface for my Andoid phone (specifically, Samsung DEX) on a FHD monitor with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. The phone screen is a second (rather tiny) monitor. I see my future owning only a phone as my primary computing device. It's not quite ready to fully replace my Windows desktop yet, but it's getting really, really close. Give it another year or so. Yes, I know Android is a modified Linux.

You can usually tell when a site is using one or more frameworks; it's slow. Those that use native JavaScript are lean and peppy. Frameworks present gobs of extra code to load and compile on the client side, and can encourage sloppy and inefficient code design (especially jQuery). Today's compiled frameworks (like Angular) are a good solution for those who really like the convenience of frameworks, but want to avoid the client-side load. These provide all the extensive functions of frameworks, then compile the code into the minimal cross-browser JavaScript to execute that functionality. Personally, I don't like using frameworks at all.

I was a fan of K9, but it was aging badly, so I had to look for something more up-to-date yet just as powerful and with local offline storage. FairEmail was it! After testing it out, I gladly paid for it. All of the privacy annoyances... er... features... can be fine-tuned or turned off in the settings. I can't stand the dumbed-down interface of GMail or other "modern" e-mail apps, so I'll just keep my orphaned copy of FairEmail (yes, I have a backup), until it ages out as well.

I went ahead and upgraded my Windows 10 laptop to Windows 11, and wish I waited. It is riddled with bugs and functionality gaffes. By releasing it into production before it was really finished, the public has become a large test base for Microsoft as it continues working on the product. I look forward to the next (or so) major release where they address all (or most) of these problems.

Just like Internet Explorer before it, Google Chrome is now developing and driving the standards. Firefox is not keeping up, and websites break on it. This is driving users to Chrome, just to get web sites to work properly. Sure, both browsers are standards-compliant to published standards, but since when did developers stick to standards? As it was with IE, they are developing to the leading edge, standards be damned (even Fortune 500 companies and their kin). Remember where that got us? Old legacy IE pages that had to be upgraded because they weren't standards-compliant. There will be a price to pay.

This is so much an issue that a security standard has been published: CS203. This standard marks certain "special characters" (symbols) as "dangerous" and systems that process input should throw an exception if these are detected in the input. Many high-profile web sites will spit out a generic error if such a symbol is present in an unexpected place. I've seen one web site that requires symbols in the password croak on all symbols except "!"!

There are some absolutely simple and low-cost steps that would go a long way to lower the impact of this.
  * Trim() your inputs. This avoids the issue with copy-and-paste "padding" data with spaces (thank you, Microsoft).
  * RegEx out unexpected data, such as dollar signs and commas in dollar figures, stray characters in numbers, etc.
  * Set a logical maximum length on input fields. If you password can be up to 16 in length, set the max to 16!
  * Ucase() or Lcase() text that does not support mixed case. If someone types their user name all UPPERCASE, don't tell them it's wrong!
  * Validate inputs at the client end before sending the data to the backend. If a date is invalid, flag it and provide a sensible error... before the backend chokes on it and spits out something unexpected.

Bottom line: skipping these steps creates a long-term high cost. Upset customers, lost customers, more IT staff needed to chase generic errors through system logs, and development teams getting pulled into emergency calls instead of actually producing.

There are three possibilities to this "device." The news agencies purposefully don't post a reference to protect themselves from legal action for promoting such devices.

Bluetooth (BT) jammer. This emits 3 GHz microwave radio noise that interferes with Bluetooth transmission (as well as 3GHz WiFi) to the point that the devices lose contact with each other and the music stops playing. Not useful for wired speakers. Borderline illegal. A 3GHz WiFi device that is straining to talk to a weak network will perform this function if near enough to the speaker.

Infrared (IR) remote: the target device would need to be remote-controlled in the first place. It generates the most common "off" signals in infrared light. Once the target device recognizes the signal, it shuts off. Not useful for the majority of powered speakers that don't have IR remotes.

Directed Energy Weapon (DEW). ILLEGAL. Fires a concentrated electromagnetic burst at the speaker. This will blow out the circuitry and permanently kill it. It will also take out any devices in the direction of the beam, and can cause burns to anybody who gets too much of it. Can be easily (?!) constructed from the guts of a microwave oven: DANGEROUS.

Similar to a DEW (but not destructive), a 3G cell phone that is actively connected to a call will inject an annoying buzz if near enough to an amplified sound system.

More and more websites DON'T WORK properly with Firefox. You HAVE to use Chrome to get anywhere with them. Developers are building for Chrome instead of using standards-compliant code. We've been here before. Remember Internet Explorer?

I am forced to switch from my preferred browser (Firefox) to Chrome just to use some sites.

Copy-and-paste a User ID into a login form: "System Unavailable!" The paste function added some extra whitespace.

Enter a dollar figure into a form, with a comma for the thousands separator: "An unexpected error occurred!"

Fill in a credit card of phone number with dashes or other punctuation: you guessed it!

Capitalize (or not) a username: "Username or password is incorrect."

Today's software applications and web applications really suffer from terrible input filtering, spitting out nonsense errors or complaining about invalid input, when it's really a matter of simply filtering out the unwanted data. Heard of RegEx?

That comment is mine. Sorry, forgot to log in! (lame)