Formatter author here - we do have the ability to protect specific sections with a // formatter-ignore comment before the section you want the formatter to leave as-is.
My school had a classroom of BBC Micros which were connected over a primitive network to a "server" which I guess must have had a hard drive for saving files too. I can't take the credit but a school friend worked out how to view the memory of another machine over the network, from which we made the first remote keystroke capture I had ever seen, which got us the teachers' passwords.
Our first hack was born - with their password we could get onto the server and print out the password file (in plain text of course). The teachers started to realise they'd been hacked but I think thought it more likely we'd observed their typing when sat nearby and so changed their passwords. Of course we could just keep watching their passwords being entered at a distance.
I think we were caught in the end red handed with the password file printing out and unable to stop it printing when they came in the room. Luckily back then it was seen as experimentation not criminal!
There was essentially no security on those Econet networks. If you had a copy of the executable that could read and write the memory of a remote computer, you were good to go.
I remember I had a print-out of a hex dump of the REMOTE command and used it with exactly that key capture attack. I just typed in the executable then told the teacher I'd forgotten my password and needed it reset. I watched remotely as he logged on to his admin account.
The next day, all the BBC micros in the lab played Captain Pugwash when they started: very beep-heavy given the ability of a BBC to create sound.
Eventually I was caught re-entering the hex dump and my printout was confiscated. I didn't have another copy.
With the *REMOTE, *VIEW and *NOTIFY commands you could also have a huge amount of fun in class (much of it invisible to the teacher).
We also found a privilege escalation endpoint, and were only caught when the network server was upgraded to an Archimedes and the special badging on admin accounts in the GUI gave our MRBIG account away.
I vaguely remember editing one of the boot files so it'd start up and display a fake > prompt. This was then used to print out an insult. Also because everyone just hit break you could set it with a *KEY0 command to just run the program and insult them some more. I remember getting in trouble more than exactly what I did - was a long time ago now! :)
Currently getting up to speed with Reason (ReasonML). The latest version (3) brings Javascript-like syntax, and after many years of dynamically typed languages, having a compiler infer and check my types for me (and catch many errors before they reach the browser) is a good feeling. It's built using Bucklescript which brings a great toolkit of its own, and also means I'm pretty much learning OCaml at the same time.
I'm learning Haskell too for home/side projects, but ReasonML means I can do functional programming for work whilst I learn all about FP again.
This is too technical for most unfortunately, but the only way to guard something as valuable as your email address is to own the domain and so control the MX records.
I'm fortunate enough to have a grandfathered free Gmail account so I can own my domain and point it to a Gsuite account without paying.
Otherwise it's worth paying up for Gsuite, Fastmail or similar.
Ours is a commercial service, but we built https://www.bigfilebox.com to solve this problem 10 years ago and we're still going strong. Our main market is architects and engineers who needs to send files like this every day, to specific groups of people, and be sure only those people can see the files sent.
It would be a great destination for cloud backup, where one of the concerns is loss of all your backed up data due to malicious action - look at the trouble the hackers had to go to in Mr Robot to take out their offsite tape backups. I'd be more concerned though with the durability of the company rather than their disk systems over the long term though.
Separate AWS account with write-only permission to backup S3 objects from production pushed out to the backup account. Enable versioning and glacier in backup account. Lock down backup account credentials appropriately. (And add alerting and periodic fire drills of course.)
Dropbox for Business has really changed my view of Dropbox the company. With AzureAD SSO integration, and the new Smart Sync feature, it's now possible to run a small company completely in the cloud, with terabytes of data in the cloud accessible to everyone without them synching it all to their laptop.
I think Google Drive's new features (Team Drives & File Stream) are going to win at least some of this market, too. Drive wasn't compelling for any sort of enterprise data management before, but it's slowly evolving some appealing features. If you add something like AODocs, you can get 80% of what even most large companies need out of an EDM platform.
This. Many people fail to see just how well Dropbox works for business that want a reliable, user friendly cloud storage solution. Sure its "just" a file sharing solution, but they do it really really well.
Used to use Dropbox for Business. Shared tons of files. A glitch happened on syncing and it deleted over 60,000 files. I had to restore them a folder at a time. We stopped using it the next week.
I'm guessing I'm a similar age to the author from the reference to parents shouting at the phone bill from my 1200/75 modem running all night. And just recently I've felt exactly the same way. My job involves both running systems and writing software, and the joy has disappeared from both. I used to work all day, then come home and hack all evening, but now I don't know if I'm burnt out, but I can find no interest in making computers do cool things any more.
There's been one small bright spot - I tried learning Haskell and loved the way functional programming stretched my brain but there's an awful lot to learn to do anything useful. But Elm, wow, do I love Elm. I feel the excitement I felt when I saw Ruby on Rails for the first time ten years ago. It's finding something interesting and useful to build with Elm that I'm struggling with now.
I wonder if it's the message that if you're not building a product that will build a unicorn company, then it's not interesting that's part of the general malaise.
I noticed this when I got my first job, some ten years ago. Back then, I was hacking on Maemo like crazy. I moderated newsgroups, I contributed code to anything I could, in any language that would let me.
I loved my new job. I worked anywhere between 40 and 140 hours, depending on how much work or stress there was. Very quickly, this started eating away at my ability to contribute and participate in the communities I loved and adored.
After some time, I even struggled with becoming a troll against those very communities.
Fast forward some time, and I still haven't found a way to produce software as a hobby. Sometimes I'll get a burst of energy, and manage to architect, document and write a few thousand lines of code over the course of a few weeks, but it's definitely not sustainable.
"I wonder if it's the message that if you're not building a product that will build a unicorn company, then it's not interesting that's part of the general malaise"
This. You realize that like 99% of people just have some boring job being a cog in a wheel, right? I met a janitor once who was really passionate about saving the planet. His impact was limited to purchasing 'green' soap.
