But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/

Woo hoo!

Fascists lie.

As a reminder, Eich was turfed from Mozilla for joining an anti-LGBT hate campaign (and thus alienating a whole lot of developers, sponsors, and users); and his So Brave browser pushed NFTs and stole money via referral fraud.

Congratulations … you’ve trained a generation of junior product managers.

First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.

Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.

You’re currently a Trump supporter. If you don’t want to be one, you can stop.

A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.

Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.

You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

Headphone jacks are not little. They take up a huge amount of board space on a device that people want to be small and light. They’re also fragile and they open up a big hole for crud to get in.

Since 2017 at least; and IIRC years before that; that’s just the earliest NIST publication on the subject I could find with a trivial Web search.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

“Memorized secrets” means classic passwords, i.e. a one-factor authentication through a shared secret presumed to be known to only the right person.