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561 karma · joined October 3, 2014

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13··on The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
Websites offering self hosted, static advertising isn't so much of a problem as random bits of javascript and tracking cookies loaded from god knows where every time you load a page. Harder to block, the advertiser needs to pass their content through the hoster which assures some level of quality and relevance, and some level of privacy for the end viewers.
13··on Show HN: AWS S3 outage test from across the world
You should fix that error message too, it's pretty awful.
13··on Ask HN: Who here would be interested in a free daily updated GeoIP database?
Probably a lot of sources, depends how well connected you are.

The biggest one is just routing information and rDNS hosts which give away a lot of the information required anyway. If you were really thrifty you would make agreements with services (or use services you run yourself) that have users supply their location information and use that to construct a more granular database. I suspect this already happens to a degree, some of the fake information I give out has ended up in at least one IP address database.

I strongly considered doing this at one point but lacked the connections to pull it off properly (not enough sources of data I could get without approaching random people, basically). A secondary concept would just be to crowd source it and have the information freely available, but I was never sure how to deal with people poisoning the database or just honestly supplying conflicting information.

13··on Australian Platypus Conservancy
A fun edge case is that .au domains are not registrable by any entity, except for the ones that exist just because.

http://csiro.au/

13··on Ethereum Cloud Mining for Dummies
That's been fairly clear from the start. Almost anything actually useful needs an oracle, and then you get back to the problem of wait, didn't Bitcoin already solve this problem half a decade ago? Once you get past the marketing you've got a rather faulty and expensive clone of Bitcoin with a fairly sketchy history.
13··on Ethereum Cloud Mining for Dummies
> DEFINITELY NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE: Personally, I think $2.80/0.01 XBT is low and I would not be in a rush to sell at this price. But, I do understand if you're bearish and you wanted to dump in to the bulls ahead of everyone else.

That's so financial advice, coming from the CEO of the Kraken exchange.

13··on Ethereum Cloud Mining for Dummies
Money buys a lot of commits. Give me a few million dollars and we'll get together a group of people that will build an entire computer from discrete transistors. People involved and amount of work doesn't make something worthwhile, reasonable, or viable, it just means that people work for money.
13··on OS X sudoers exploit found in the wild
I think you put far too much trust in one of thousands of clone VPN services. There's no reputation to taint, there's stock standard scripts running on commodity VPS boxes they rented from somewhere else. I would be shocked if at least some of the most commonly used ones weren't run by people looking to sniff credentials. You're paying to pipe all of your sensitive information through some random persons box, which is just ludicrous.
13··on OS X sudoers exploit found in the wild
Just giving the benefit of the doubt here, a lot of the time it's unclear if your disclosure even made it to the right people in a company or not. No response is the norm for security disclosures, as is claims of "we didn't get this", even if you have a receipt for their ticketing system that says they did. I've sometimes spent far longer attempting to contact a company than doing research into something that seems to be a problem.
13··on OS X sudoers exploit found in the wild
Why do you trust Amazon AWS and this company more than your own connection?
13··on The mobile web sucks
Why is their target 8 seconds to load the page? That's a ridiculously long time.
13··on The mobile web sucks
That's rich, coming from The Verge.

245 objects requested, 48 JavaScript files loaded, 9.8MB.

13··on Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Just a Text
Why would it be corrupted? Just because it contains a malicious payload doesn't mean it has to be unviewable normally. Could even just tack onto all outgoing MMS by default and never raise anybodies suspicions.
13··on Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Just a Text
If malware has root access it can alter everything on the phone without you ever seeing it. Any information falsified, all detection tools subverted.
13··on Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Just a Text
Probably has engineering challenges past what you would normally face, which thankfully makes a 1B device botnet a little unrealistic. I can't imagine how you'd even begin to control such a thing, just a sequential numerical list of the clients is 4GB. Scary prospect though.
13··on Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Just a Text
It's likely too late for panic, everyone is probably owned already. It has the best infection vector ever, unauthenticated, unsolicited messaging with an easily discoverable addressing method. What more could a worm want?
13··on Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Just a Text
Why target people specifically? A phone has all the tools necessary to infect every other peer they can reach. Almost instant billion device botnet, each with a new list of targets to infect in the contacts book. It'll be interesting if this does happen, and the same mistakes as early worms are made (global internet pipe denial of service by probes attempting to find new hosts to infect).
13··on “Superfish is currently transitioning our focus”
Slightly exaggerated, but that sort of thing absolutely happens.
13··on “Superfish is currently transitioning our focus”
Web 3.0 is pretty much that. Load 10MB of JavaScript libraries sequentially, then every element on the page needs a new loader, 30 HTTP requests, and a web socket.
13··on Microsoft Surface Hub
You don't remember Microsoft Surface, the coffee table touch computer?
13··on Germans, still outraged by NSA spying, learn their country may have helped
On a statistical side almost anything else is likely to kill you. There's probably more people killed each year by ladders than some perceived external threat, and I don't see a war on ladders happening anywhere.
13··on Germans, still outraged by NSA spying, learn their country may have helped
To me that sounds like no trust at all.
13··on Germans, still outraged by NSA spying, learn their country may have helped
I don't understand anybody using that as justification.

Why is that necessary?

We live in a pretty miserable world if your only answer is "because everyone else is doing it".

13··on Fractal Lab
If Mr Doob is impressed, drop everything and go look at it.
13··on [dead]
.xyz is a utterly ludicrous TLD.
13··on OS X 10.10.3 seems to have done something bad to wifi drivers
I can replicate on a 2014 Retina MacBook and a 2012 MacBook Pro. Lots of people disable the transparency, not just for accessibility. I'm not a fan of burning up my whole battery doing Gaussian blurs.
13··on OS X 10.10.3 seems to have done something bad to wifi drivers
Disable UI transparency, the volume change overlay still has black corners.

http://i.imgur.com/pRNO7Oc.png

It doesn't for iTunes, just for volume and screen brightness changes.

13··on Grooveshark Shuts Down
Why on earth does that need canonical ordering.
13··on Grooveshark Shuts Down
What is this blind obsession with "THIS NEEDS A BLOCKCHAIN!!!!!!!"? There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in a system of storing playlists which needs decentralized canonical ordering. A blockchain is literally one of the most inefficient ways of storing data imaginable, and serves no purpose here other than a buzz word.
13··on Friends: a p2p, decentralized, secure messaging platform
Then why the hell are you advertising it as "secure"? There's utterly nothing secure about it.
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