Hacker News Reader

13on What Happens When You Try to Photoshop Money

"Encryption" of media like that is always just going to be obfuscation, you get protection form the anti DMCA removal law, the actual encryption isn't worth the bits it flips. In fact, if you make it "stronger" from a cryptographic standpoint you simply make it cost more to decode and add no strength to the actual defense it is trying to provide (getting further under DMCA umbrella). If you want to criticize it was probably foolish to include actual encryption in the first place, why waste cycles when you can XOR with 0x69?

13on What Happens When You Try to Photoshop Money

Interestingly even Adobe doesn't know what it is, the detection software was supplied to them as a binary. I messed around with it in a similar way to the author out of sheer curiosity and ended up completely baffled by the whole thing, even trying to eliminate parts that aren't triggers is impossible by my measure. I should make it clear I have no desire whatsoever to thwart the system (as others point out, simply using different software does that), but the methods it is using seem to completely defy all of the fingerprinting systems I'm aware of and is therefor incredibly interesting as a result.

13on Enough with the Salts: Updates on Secure Password Schemes

You'd be better off with FPGA which are available in significantly smaller process sizes (and therefor lower running costs) than ASICs you roll yourself. There's also a certain level of reusability that you don't get with SHA256 etched into silicon.

13on Amazon Dash Button

I'd like to hack one of them to do something more interesting. I suspect it's probably quite capable under the hood and could be re-purposed. Sort of a double edged sword though, what if you got malware on your Tide button?

13on [dead]

I wouldn't really call this spying, it's pretty necessary for Google to do some human verification of the content they are selling advertising amongst.

I'd be more surprised to find out that they weren't reviewing content, really.

13on Zigbee light link master key

Presumably you can get around the "proximity" limit by just using a more powerful transmitter, I can't imagine they have any actual near field communication or anything.

13on The Ugliest Sign in America

https://cdn.sparkfun.com//assets/parts/8/0/3/7/11821-02.jpg

I'm quite aware. LED normally refers to the packaged die, not the die itself when people are talking about it like this. Having the controller inside makes absolute sense, the alternative is running hundreds of rows of PWM from your driver chips out everywhere.

13on The Ugliest Sign in America

There are a lot of LEDs that have controllers embedded like the WS2812.

13on US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

> Are they trying to pen themselves into a corner where the entire world ends up standing against them? http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/media/50646/us_vs_world.gif

There's not many outcomes to that scenario if you look at the budgets involved.

13on [dead]

Might be a good idea to. Don't want to burn all the excitement on the wrong bug.

13on Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

iTunes unlock is actually done with a pre shared key during sync.

13on Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

Somehow I doubt the nintendo developers were worried about ACID Pokemon transfers :)

13on Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

You need the passcode on reboot of the device anyway. I'd rather have a strong passcode and Touch ID than a weak passcode that's easily broken. A strong password and no Touch ID is almost completely unusable.

13on Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

> iOS already tracks time since power on IIRC,

Records it in photo EXIF data, for some reason.

13on Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

With this particular tool, probably. You're a lot better off using an alphanumeric passcode and Touch ID though.

13on Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

This is not a particularly new attack. It's been used for years against simpler devices, especially where you can access the flash chip and force it's write protect on.

13on Open source USB Type-C to HDMI Adapter

Most Chinese lightning cables tend to get blocked by apple or just generally fail on their own.

13on Open source USB Type-C to HDMI Adapter

Note that they are single direction.

13on Apple App Store STATUS_CODE_ERROR causes service problems

iMessage still suffers from massive consistency failures; due to the incoming messages not being chronologically ordered even small network glitches mean things get confusing fast. iCloud at least in part seems to run on Microsoft Azure, amusingly enough.

13on Apple App Store STATUS_CODE_ERROR causes service problems

It's because the device has tried to get authorization for running the app (a unique, per UDID signature) and has made the assumption that for whatever reason your access has been revoked. That will normally never happen, it's just an odd side effect of whatever this downtime is. People not seeing this just happen to have hit a local cache of some sort and will eventually get it the longer the downtime goes.

13on USB Killer

Possible at a pinch, the flyback I was using right there was about the size of a walnut. You could lay most of it out flat with the voltage multiplier and encase the whole thing in epoxy for (ha) safety.

I really wanted to go much higher with the voltages, but the amount of noise this thing puts out de-focuses the camera.

13on USB Killer

I tried to do one better with a small flyback transformer.

https://gfycat.com/GlaringGrimCondor

Turns out there's not enough clearance in USB ports for tens of thousands of volts.

13on USB Killer

Depends on how lucky you are, there's no specific protection for something like this.

13on The new MacBook

They're not that bad in my experience. I'm at 1476 cycles and still have 87% of my capacity remaining.

13on Canadian Charged for Not Unlocking Smartphone at Canadian Border

I find it particularly hard to keep my head up with this sort of thing too.

What you're saying isn't untrue, but I haven't found a particular solution to any of it.

13on Pebble Reveals Pebble Time Steel and a Smartstrap System

They might have bumped up the capacity for that, and then spun down afterwards not realizing they would get swamped today.

13on Pebble Reveals Pebble Time Steel and a Smartstrap System

It's completely down right now, showing varnish errors.

13on Signal 2.0 released with private messaging support

Google Voice is US only.

13on Signal 2.0 released with private messaging support

I'm just astonished that there's even justification for it not being an option. Bang on about easy discovery all you want, there's lots of people who don't want to give out their phone number for no good reason to some strangers.