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561 karma · joined October 3, 2014

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13··on Hacker Implants NFC Chip in His Hand to Bypass Security Scans and Exploit Android
Would be amusing to program the RFID in someone's dog to open the front door though, necessitating picking up a German Shepard to hold it up to a reader. Better still make the dog a spare key and nobody would ever notice.
13··on Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing
It's another web trend I don't understand. All news websites seem to do it, it's super obnoxious, and I don't know anybody who doesn't just rush to click stop as soon as they click the page.
13··on 'Hush,' anonymous messaging app from developers in Myanmar
Hashcash is broken for any situation like this. The amount of hashcash time needed to thwart spam is higher than any user is willing to wait for, doing proof of work on a phone. Plus, spammers normally have their own Cloud Computing to resort to, and it's cheaper than Amazon AWS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet

13··on Flywheel: Google's Data Compression Proxy for the Mobile Web
I did this for a while, and then realized my use of SSL Everywhere combined with a HTTP only compression proxy was self defeating. The only way to get decent coverage is to have the proxy also bust SSL and then repackage it, which is completely undesirable because you lose fine grained control over certificates.
13··on Android Is Peeing on an Apple in Pakistan - Google Maps
You can spent hours making a very large effigy of your rival depicted as a phallus with gold trim and rubies: being a work of art doesn't make it any less unprofessional.
13··on Wi-Fi hack creates 'no iOS zone' that cripples iPhones and iPads
The Apple store wifi is also on the default trust list.
13··on The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples
People died within minutes.
13··on Hacker News written with Angular 2.0
Hacker News loads in milliseconds, why does this take over 10 seconds to even start showing comments?

It's not so much a showcase as a reason to ever never use this in any product, it's obviously unsuitable for displaying even the most simple, static data without taking forever and making FireFox stutter. It's not an isolated situation with this either, other websites like this perform terribly even thought they are written in the hippest language with the most popular libraries on the market.

13··on Double-clicking on the Web
Ah! Yes I jumped to an assumption there. That's a much better solution.
13··on Double-clicking on the Web
Signing is slow, if anything signing the CSRF tokens just became your bottleneck, if not you just inflated the request size by kilobytes for no good reason.
13··on Double-clicking on the Web
This gets seriously annoying if you have an intermittent connection. I know the first click didn't succeed, so I have the choice of refreshing and losing all my typed content or manually using the web inspector to re-enable the button. It's shitty user experience.
13··on D-Link patch doesn’t address all bugs listed in their own security advisory
I have to run the configuration tool in a windows VM because on 10.10 they removed the frameworks it uses to run. I wish they weren't so complacent as to turn my hardware into bricks.
13··on Using the USB-C port and adapters on your MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015)
The USB C connector carries two logical USB interfaces, to have more ports than that you're going to need a USB hub in there was as well, and all sorts of mess trying to get USB 3 speeds to actually function properly.
13··on US blocks Intel from selling Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputer projects
Both parties affected know that. Lots of things in the world are simply symbolic.
13··on Michigan Micro Mote – World's Smallest Computer
I didn't even consider that this might not be ARM. There's Cortex M0, M1, M3, M4 you'd be silly to call a product M^3 if it wasn't related. If not it would be lawsuit fodder because it certainly sounds too related to be coincidental.
13··on Phone Cameras and Apps Help Speed Calls for Police Reform
I was very amused to realise that it was actually cheaper for me to buy a RFID ticket, run it into the debt limit of $1 and then dispose of it at the end of the trip. Talking to the station staff about it they acknowledged that they didn't like it but that it was perfectly within the law to continue doing so because after all it was still a valid ticket. There's probably room for doing a mix network in places where this loophole isn't possible though, even just a scheme when you see another person adding funds to a zero balance card and it becoming custom to swap your empty one for theirs would do the trick for privacy.
13··on Show HN: Kaiwa, a Modern Open-Source XMPP Web Client
No, nothing I use supports synchronizing scroll buffers beyond ZNC's behavior of dumping the scroll buffer to whichever client is connected (Colloquy on iOS, Textual on OSX). I've not found the dumping behavior to be that terrible, but I don't frequent very popular channels so it's generally not pumping out thousands of lines every time I open the app. For the most part that doesn't inconvenience me, I can respond to any pings or queries as necessary and catch up on conversation. If I need to review anything outside of ZNCs buffers it's a super quick task to just go and read the logs from disk. The main critical feature is not losing private messages and pings when moving between client, which ZNC achieves without fail.

Like for you IRC isn't anything beyond recreational for me, so quirks in the workflow are just fine to work around. If it was my primary method of communication I'd be looking into improving it I suspect.

13··on 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
I think Chaos Theory still tops 64k.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjBq2O0XXk

13··on Google purges bad extensions from Chrome
Is it really possible from an evil standpoint to get SMS rerouted to another number? I was looking into that a while ago (I wanted a prettier number, but didn't want to lose things associated with the old one) and the answer I got was that it's not something anybody can do. I get how the phone call rerouting stuff would go down, but not SMS rerouting.
13··on The Apple Watch
I'm not so sure about that, 60fps means that every single rotation of a second hand has 3600 individual steps; does a mechanical watch with a sweep second hand have that much precision? I'm inclined to think not, even from the perspective of backlash the digital version is going to appear significantly smoother to the eye.
13··on Google purges bad extensions from Chrome
Doesn't even have to be that complicated, the malware can just rewrite the destination to the malware author's silently and wait for people to be sending money there anyway. It's a reasonably dangerous property of Google-style 2FA that they can be transposed without any warning. My bank attempts to get around this by only using SMS based tokens, and the first line of the SMS says exactly what is being sent and where.
13··on Show HN: Kaiwa, a Modern Open-Source XMPP Web Client
I don't have any trouble at all using Colloquy on iOS and connecting back to my bouncer. It's about as seamless as you could expect all things considered.
13··on A few spy tools for your operating system (other than strace)
Have a Unicode bullet point, on the house.

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13··on DHS to Launch Nationwide License Plate Reader Program
With systems like this in place do you really believe anonymity is even an achievable goal?
13··on New South Wales Attacks Researchers Who Found Internet Voting Vulnerabilities
https://i.imgur.com/0pmIted.jpg
13··on New South Wales Attacks Researchers Who Found Internet Voting Vulnerabilities
The "emergency" bulk internet surveillance is chilling too.
13··on Buttercoin is shutting down
> With the dip in bitcoin interest among Silicon Valley investors, we weren't able to generate enough venture capital interest to continue funding Buttercoin.

It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to think that a lot of companies hedged their investors money in Bitcoin and hemorrhaged investment when the bubble burst, leading to colder responses when other companies later went back asking for more. That would seem to fit with stories like this.

13··on What Happens When You Try to Photoshop Money
I'm mostly concerned about experimenting straying into "reverse engineering".
13··on What Happens When You Try to Photoshop Money
Oh sure, you could make a quick imagemagick script to make random variations and get a pass/fail with AppleScript, or even do some exploring with a debugger while opening one. Main barrier is motivation, I have no desire to counterfeit money (and who would use PhotoShop for that anyway), so I decided to let that rest.
13··on What Happens When You Try to Photoshop Money
Doesn't AFL rely on being able to compile the application with it's hooks? It's been a long time since I've messed with Photoshop, but it's a complete mess of random dead code inside (even includes poems about a dead dog believe it or not), chances are you're looking for a completely obfuscated bunch of assembly in the hundred plus megabyte binary. I love Hopper, but not that much.
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