Reader Bill on Lloyd Chambers’ blog:
When I ordered my Mac Pro from B&H I also ordered AppleCare. The problem is that Apple started the 3-year AppleCare clock on the day I pre-ordered which was Dec 19, 2013. The unit did not ship until Jan 17, 2014. I actually received it on Jan 22, 2014.
My AppleCare “Welcome Kit” was emailed directly to me from Apple and indicated a Dec 19, 2016 Coverage Period End Date. Basically, I lost an entire month of coverage.
You can’t parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can’t be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML.
It is true that most people underestimate the difficulty of parsing HTML with regular expressions and therefore do so poorly.
But this is not some fundamental flaw related to computational theory. That silliness is parroted a lot around here, but don’t you believe them.
So while it certainly can be done (this posting serves as an existence proof of this incontrovertible fact), that doesn’t mean it should be.
Naoki Hiroshima (via Hacker News):
I tried to log in to my GoDaddy account, but it didn’t work. I called GoDaddy and explained the situation. The representative asked me the last 6 digits of my credit card number as a method of verification. This didn’t work because the credit card information had already been changed by an attacker. In fact, all of my information had been changed. I had no way to prove I was the real owner of the domain name.
He recommends two-factor authentication, not storing credit card information with your accounts (to prevent it from being used for fraudulent verification), and not using a custom domain for your e-mail address of record.
Update (2014-01-30): GoDaddy requires a valid payment method for each domain. So you cannot actually remove your credit card information (unless you replace it with your bank information), and you cannot enter an invalid card number. You can, however, have your card issuer generate a single-use number and enter that, even if the number has already been used elsewhere.
Update (2014-01-31): PayPal (via Emil Protalinski and Hacker News):
PayPal did not divulge any credit card details related to this account.
I read this tonight, and sadly, the story was all to familiar to me. My version also has a few implications that are far worse.
Update (2014-02-26): Josh Ong (via John Gruber):
It remains to be seen what exactly took place behind the scenes at PayPal and GoDaddy, and why it took so long for Twitter to decide to return the account to its original owner, at least we’ve arrived at a happy resolution for this particular saga.
Walter Smith has some interesting articles and papers about the Newton (via Wolf Rentzsch):
